Kathy Acker: Bodies of Work

Author's note: This was a radio review. It was broadcast in 1999, I think, at Illinois State University, with support of The American Book Review. RIP Acker.



The most fitting caution I’ve heard about reading Kathy Acker is that you must really desire to read, to read actively, to engage with each paragraph or sentence, or even word. Why? Because Acker’s texts communicate dis-ease, disturbing you, breaking the walls between book and reader; comfort and ease are not elements of Acker’s writing. Bodies of Work is Acker’s final work, post-humously published after her tragic death from breast cancer, and here she provides us with a haunting hint about her approach to writing: “The language by which we represent ourselves as judges, as absolute knowers, is not the language of flux, of material of that which must die. Us.” Acker’s is the writing of the living, real body.

Her mind is expansive, to say the least. These essays cover a diversity of topics such as art criticism, politics, women in literature, movies, theater, the function of writing in society, and many others. Not long before her death, Acker watched her texts increasingly enter academic and high art circles. For a radical writer resisting the colonizing methods of academic discourses, such recognition was problematic. How, she seems to ask, can a writer remain radical and survive in a society that demands straight-forward answers and an easy to understand reality, when the only means of survival has become the very institutions you work against? With wonderful passion and intelligence, she explores the complexity of these and related issues, and attempts to validate writing--all writing--in our visually-oriented society.

I heard Acker once describe her novels as responses to questions, responses that were, however, not answers to end inquiry. True to the language of flux, Acker doesn’t present herself as an absolute knower; her writing is of the human body, and as such is continually in dissolution. Her language is a living language: through it she evokes in us the most visceral sensations of being human. Appropriately, at the end of her novels there waits no ending, no closure, no answer or death. Her novels end continually opening our eyes and our I’s: our selves and indenties.

The first thing you’re likely to notice about Acker is her prodigious use of pornography, her blatant sexuality, and the literary faux pas of obvious plagiarism. Some never get past a disgusted, judgmental response on the basis of these qualities, which is unfortunate. You must understand that Kathy Acker isn’t simply talking about sex; she writes, talks and sees through sexuality, because sexuality is a lens through which we see and interpret our world. Thus, Acker, who begins many of her novels with the death of the father, acknowledges her female subjectivity and unabashedly constructs a feminine text wherein the belief in a “neutered” Western canon is mocked and finally subverted.

Acker pulls no punches and demands an attentiveness few possess. She is asking us to look with new eyes and open selves and to rethink our conceptions of what counts as literature, what literature does, and the capabilities of writing. She exposes the artifice and politics of what is granted the status of literature; writing, she asserts,--especially that writing which presents itself as doing so the least--always upholds some power structure.

Bodies of Work is an excellent collection for those who wish to explore issues of art and it’s place in our society; the intelligence exhibited here is far reaching; the wit, daring. Those searching for a contemporary novelist with passion and vigor absolutely must read Kathy Acker.