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All in the Family: Kathy Ackers Blood and Guts in High School

[T]he idea that art has nothing to do with politics is a wonderful construction in order to mask the deep political significance that art has to uphold the empire in terms of its representation as well as its actual structure.
Kathy Acker, A Conversation with Kathy Acker

uring her career, Kathy Acker produced fiction that is aesthetically outrageous, unrepentantly political, and singularly offensive. Larry McCaffery, who interviewed her several times, aptly evaluates her career this way: Kathy Acker . . . produced a major body of experimental, shocking, and highly disturbing . . . work (14). Such descriptors highlight Ackers typical fictional scenarios. Beginning with her first book, Politics (self-published in 1972), and proceeding to her last, Pussy, King of the Pirates (1996), Ackers texts insistently return to scenes of sadistic violence, rape, incest, masochistic pain, and sexual abjection of every sort. Her penchant for plagiarism, parody, pastiche, and other antirealist techniques has marked her work from the beginning as radically postmodern. No other contemporary writer so determinedly eschewed originality by stealing from such an amazing array of both canonical and noncanonical writers: Dickens, Hawthorne, Keats, Faulkner, T. S. Eliot, the Bronts, Sade, Bataille, Rimbaud, and so on. She appropriates portions of journals
This essay is dedicated to the memory of Kathy Acker, 19471997.

Contemporary Literature XLV, 4 0010-7484/04/0004-0637 2004 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System

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and letters by real people; fiction by her contemporaries, for example William Gibsons Neuromancer in Empire of the Senseless (1988); political theory, primarily that of Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari; Harold Robbins; pornography. Any text is fair game. Textual piracy becomes an act, albeit small, of feminist guerrilla warfare, for Ackers method always serves political purposes. Acker very much saw herself as part of the other tradition within American writing, a counterpractice visible in the works of Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac and the Beats, William Burroughs, the Black Mountain poetswriters dismissed as experimental rather than considered in the tradition of political writing as opposed to propaganda (A Few Notes 31). Propaganda denotes for Acker the bourgeois world view which privileges realism in art and celebrates the universal I, whereas political writing means the political truth, the way things work in America (Interview 29). As a woman who wrote from inside her skin and her mind, Ackers contribution to this other tradition involves her acute awareness that the metaphor of the body politic begins as gendered experience, as actual and material. Blood and Guts in High School (1978) occupies a pivotal position structurally and politically in terms of Ackers trajectory as a writer. Formally it marks the beginning of her serious use of plagiarism in actuality a self-conscious appropriation of others textsas a technical device, with the Genet stuff (Devoured 10). The novels after that, Great Expectations (1982) and Don Quixote (1986), obviously signal this textual pre-occupation by rewriting two classics of Western literature. While she forsook such blatant deconstructions of the literary fathers as simplistic thereafter (Devoured 13), Acker continued to us[e] language the way a painter would use paint. I use other textsthats how I write (Kathy Acker 279). Although she frequently dismissed the word shocking when applied to her work, Acker did admit to one interviewer that she was really out to shock with Blood and Guts in High School (Kathy Acker 276). And the novel retains its power due, in part, to the sheer material excess of Ackers rage, her version of a postmodern inferno, out of which no one breaks except spasmodically, through dreams, drugs, incessant fucking, criminality. But these manifested forms of resistance and escape serve as vehicles for the abiding

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tenor of politics throughout Ackers fiction. Her political analysis, always informed by a national and international critique of late capital, utilizes the distortions of family structure as a micromodel for the discursive and actual asymmetries within this larger political frame. Capitals deformative failures and violent disarticulations reveal themselves within the family, just as family structure models the inequities and oppressions of capital. In Ackers fiction, the fathers powerlike the lovers, or the capitalists, or any presidents since Nixonderives from, and reinforces, his place within significant discursive and material regimes: the economic, the psychoanalytic, the literary, the mimetic, and so on. Women, most often those in the default position, are more subject to, and subjects of, this power.

Reading Ackers Readers

In perceiving womens subjectification in terms of multiple economies, Acker rather presciently dramatizes theoretical considerations that have become commonplace but certainly were not in the late seventies. Since 1989, the critical discourse surrounding Ackers fiction has highlighted a number of these considerations by focusing on the radicality of her sexual politics; on her obsessive return to womens sexuality and the disruptive capacity of desire; on her repeated representation of sexualized woman as monster, as abject and criminal. This bodily extremity gets read in two fairly distinct ways, but the consequence is the same. Ackers politics end up largely restricted either to a consideration of the means through which feminine subjectivity struggles for an articulation that resists, at some points, patriarchal control, or to a consideration of the ways in which, through self-conscious and perverse participation in masochism, S/M, fetishism, etcetera, the subject seeks alternative positions in relationship to power. For the most part, feminist critics, and Acker claimed them as her best readers, displace the violence and inherent pain of Ackers desiring protagonists onto a liberatory rhetoric that argues in favor of renegotiating or reformulating or resisting, if only momentarily, patriarchal constructions of feminine subjectivity. In such readings, Ackers textual appropriations allow her to create, in Naomi

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Jacobss terms, a pseudonymous, plagiarized identity (54, 51) as she steals from, but simultaneously dismantles, the tradition and privilege of the textual fathers. This perpetual textual demolition, along with Ackers insistence on bits of her own autobiography, turn her into what Martina Sciolino calls an autoplagiarist as she discursively enacts a feminine identity in constant negotiation; identity is contingentinterrelational and contextual (443). Importantly for Karen Brennan, Ackers fiction of feminine subjectivity does not simply collapse into the pastiche of [masculinist] postmodern writing because her strategy of shuttling between parody and pastiche, vacillating hysterically between the two modes, evades that collapse (252).1 For such critics, Ackers vehicleblatantly desiring sexualityaffirms the possibility of a feminine subject capable of resisting patriarchal power, however temporarily, through various discursive practices. Given Ackers postmodern assumption that any stable identity is illusory, her protagonists typically move among a variety of linguistic and gendered subject positions. For the other group of critics, almost without exception male, Ackers vehicle remains a foregrounded sexuality, and, again, desire is read as potentially liberating. However, in highlighting the issues of sexual violence, sadistic brutality, and self-inflicted pain, such critics vocabulary shifts almost inevitably into a register of erotic pleasure; pain becomes the means to liberation. For David Brande, Ackers cartography of masochistic sexuality constitutes, at some level, an erotic practice that in its assault on subjectivity, identity, and the oppressive hierarchies of gender works to undermine normative individuality in favor of new (or at least newly conceptualized) modes of escape from state power (19293). In such readings, violence to the body and physical pain become the vehicle . . . by which desire is liberated from the familial prison of the Oedipal triangle and loosed onto the streets (194).
1. The word hysteria gets used frequently in discussions of Ackers work. Brennan, in fact, terms hysteria the privileged vacillation of feminine writing (252), while for Terry Brown, Janey, Ackers protagonist in Blood and Guts, is the hysterical subject. It is Janeys hysterical desire, in traditional Freudian-Lacanian terms, that motivates the narrative (169). Kathleen Hulley focuses her analysis on Ackers structural, syntactic, and generic disjunctive practices (172) as a means of negotiating textual subjectivity.

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For Arthur F. Redding, Acker explores the creative potential of masochistic tendencies (283). Her protagonists, through their masochistic pain, engage in a double effort to evade as well as to claim and reformulate the pain that has hitherto been felt merely to be the[ir] insipid destiny (284).2 To speak of the careful and sympathetic application of pain (Brande 208), of the transformation of bodily violation into an object of beauty (Redding 285), of the pornographic as a total embrace of unregulated desire (Walsh 157) displaces, in my view, the consequences of phallic control violence to the female bodyonto the object of that control; in that displacement, suffering transforms into pleasure. The unending sexual desperation of Ackers desiring-machine protagonists becomes the source of their freedom, however short-lived. Such interpretations reveal their own gendered assumptions about the trajectory of oedipal desire, positing yet again the male subjects universalized position vis--vis oedipal conflict, a position Acker critiques at every turn. Further, and far more important, such readings occlude, and thus refuse, the fundamental interconnections

2. The greatest difficulty with Reddings reading is that he reduces masochism into one kind of psychic field, inaugurated by the fetish, which in his interpretation is always about pain (classic Freud). His argument ultimately depends on a clearly Freudian, and thus limited, essentialism. And yet he seeks to deploy a language of Deleuzean psychic free play, multiple libidinal economies, and so forth when he states, The suffering of the masochist . . . belongs to no one (284). Just where the pain goeswhose body, whose suffering are we talking about?points to the problematic confusion at the heart of his argument. Reddings own text reveals a desire both to refuse agency and its consequences and to locate material and real sources for such pain: While pain certainly emerges from political and bodily inequitybe it patriarchal colonization of the unconscious, at one extreme of injustice, or the contractual relationship a masochist establishes with his top at the otherit does not remain there (284). Elsewhere he states, Clearly masochism emerges from the dominant sexual order and represents a colonization of the feminine imagination (300301). Thus when Redding equates a male masochist who, within the confines of consensual and mutual S/M, contractually agrees to be dominated with an apparently unchanging feminine imagination oppressively colonized by the patriarchy, his comparative terms will not hold; they are utterly different in kind. Where is the political and bodily inequity in a mutually agreed upon sexual, and theatrical, display? How is this related to the systemic sexual violence suffered by women within postmodern patriarchy? Certainly Reddings text suggests some fascinating questions, the answers to which could lead to a more convincing argument: how might the male masochist be related to a colonized unconscious? Is he somehow more subject to the feminine imagination than other men, or are all human subjects subject to it?

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between heterosexual violence and its intimate construction within and through patriarchy.3 Blood and Guts in High School dramatizes just this sort of violence in the many sexual episodes involving Janey, the novels protagonist. Conveyed through the narrators overdetermined voiceflat, crudely descriptive, hypersuch violence inevitably erupts, for it cannot be separated from the explicit dialectical relationship between sexuality and the forces of capital: Having any sex in the world is having to have sex with capitalism (135). The sexualization of capital, the imbrication of capital within hetero sex, has profound effects, and yet the effects remain largely hidden, for this dialectic is either denied outright or elided through discourses that seek to rationalize it. Two discourses, two stories in particular, motivate Ackers political critique in Blood and Guts: the oedipal and the imperial. The classic oedipal story, which says nothing about money and everything about male desire, functions as a formative discourse within Western culture. In foregrounding male desire, the oedipal script discursively and materially normalizes patriarchy and the consequent sexual control of women. Janeys subjectification, her construction as a gendered human subject, is largely dictated by, and continually reinscribes, classic Freudian discourse. At a much larger level, the imperial story reveals Ackers most prescient political insighther recognition of Americas Other as specifically Middle Eastern and the ways in which this othering machine rationalizes Americas corporate policies abroad. Ackers inclusion of appropriated and rhetorical figuresthe Capitalists, Presidents, Egyptian rebels, Genet and The Screensarises out of her sympathetic response to particular peoples in their fight against Americas imperial domination. Acker perceives not only that the imperial story is underwritten through the Oriental imaginary, but that it represents a far more global instance of the conflation between sexuality and capital. Fundamentally, both stories enable and rationalize the

3. As one of the few pessimistic, feminist readers of Ackers fiction, Ellen G. Friedman cannot evade the sadomasochistic sexual acts that define heterosexuality everywhere in Ackers work. For Friedman, such representations figure Ackers radically feminist positions (40).

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mechanisms of patriarchal power. You cant get to a place, to a society, that isnt constructed according to the phallus, she commented in 1989 (Conversation 17). In 1978, however, Ackers feminist sympathies produce a reading of Arab womens lives that is at some level ambivalent if not problematic. Nonetheless, Ackers depiction of Americas Other, however fraught with contradiction, remains critical to a political reading of the novel.

High School from Hell, or Americas Playground

Ackers textual demolition in Blood and Guts in High School of classic bildungsroman narrative elements and expectations structurally highlights such a political reading. The novels title, a self-reflexive joke about novels of education signals, in part, a parodic bildungsroman, appropriately underscored by the texts three-part division: Inside high school, Outside high school, and A Journey to the end of the night, an obvious echo of Clines novel Journey to the End of Night. Indeed, this is the high school from hell in which teachers act as top cops who replace living dangerous creatings with dead ideas and teach these ideas as the history and meaning of the world (68). High school, in short, figures as a trope for Americas psyche, its culture as well as its national policy; top cops morph into presidents and imperial capitalists intent on maximizing profits wherever possible. Inside or outside high school, Americas citizens are, as we shall see, screwed from the get-go. Given a generic, grade-school-reader name, Janey Smith, our heroine, suffers a ridiculously short life span, from age ten to fourteen. True in its twisted way to the genre, Janeys story is definitely episodic. Inside begins in Merida, Mexico, with the subtitle Parents stink (7). Rejected by her father, Johnny, because he wants to spend all his time with Sally, a twenty-one-year-old starlet who was still refusing to fuck him, Janey returns to New York sick with pelvic inflammatory disease (7). Alone in nightmare high, Janey fucks all the time, quickly becomes a punk gangbanger and member of the Scorpions, does drugs, steals, has two abortions, drops out. Outside high school, shes kidnapped by a white slave ring and held prisoner by the Persian slave trader Mr. Linker, who teaches her to be a whore (65). While a captive she writes an extensive

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book report on The Scarlet Letter, works on her Persian, breaks down, gets cancer. Of no use and rejected by Linker, she goes to Tangier, where she meets Genet. They trek through the North African desert. Janey gets thrown in jail in Egypt, is rejected by Genet, and dies. She has an after-death experience. So much for the plot. The irreality of Janeys life coincides with increasingly larger segments of textual breakdown, marked by instantaneous shifts in generic, compositional, and narrative points of view; interpolations of various texts, including those of Vallejo, Mallarm, Hawthorne, and Genet; segments of dramatic dialogue; excerpts from Janeys diary; Janeys letters; and so on.4 The textual portions are, in turn, interspersed with graphics, for example line drawings of male and female genitalia; a few pages of childlike treasure maps called A Map of my Dreams; a childishly handwritten section entitled The Persian Poems; and the final section of the novel, which pictorially explores an Ackerian combination of The Egyptian Book of the Dead; Hindu deities, particularly Shiva and Kali; and Catulluss tomb. Textual breakdown, bodily breakdown, characterological breakdown complement one another to some extent. They also amplify Ackers discursive use of Janeys deteriorating physical condition as a trope for resistance against the fathers, even if such resistance occurs through default. These versions of breakdown underscore Janeys inability to escape the family romance, consistently figured in Ackers fiction as the incestuous family, or the fathers desire, which

4. Ackers language, especially in this book, most often fits the description she herself so abhorredexperimentaland exhibits close affinities with the early Julia Kristevas definition of poetic language, revolutionary language. Poetic language disrupts through its very heterogeneityshifting, fragmentary, often elliptical, and disjunctive. Hence nonsense or musical . . . effects . . . destroy not only accepted beliefs and significations, but, in radical experiments, syntax itself (Desire 133). This irruption within discourse Kristeva identifies as the semiotic disposition, a reactivation of the presymbolic phase of psychic development associated with the maternal. The maternal functions as a rhythmic space (Revolution 26); thus poetic writing signifies the pulsive rhythms of the body and the unknowable tracings of the unconscious that characterize the imaginary register. Karen Brennan reads the opening Merida section of the novel as a kind of Imaginary, New York as the Real, Tangier as the Symbolican ingenious reading but one which, despite her attempts to the contrary, suggests a far too linear Lacan. The imaginary breaks out all over this text, not simply in the first section.

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ceaselessly dictates her own. Thus the father/stepfather/lover appears in slightly different guisesas rapist, abuser, bully, sexual predator, object of desirebut these are all avatars of the incestuous father. In Blood and Guts, its Mr. Linker, the Reverend Dimwit, President Carter, and the Capitalists, among others, who replicate and multiply the violent, off-hand fucking and rejection with which Johnny initiates Janey. Her education concerning men and sex (love never enters the picture) works recursively rather than progressively, and rejection compulsively returns as the primary signifier of Janeys experience. Experience, then, functions neither as sequence nor as mirror but as repetition and disjunction. Janeys need for JohnnyI have an unlimited need of him (20)repeats itself in all of her manifestations. As Hester/Janey she begs the Reverend Dimwit, sometimes angrily but often pathetically, Help. Help me. Help me. Love me (95). With Linker she ends up as dependent kidnap victim: I want you. I need you. I want to marry you (116). In Alexandria, blind and in jail, Janey used to fantasize that when she went blind, a wonderful man would come along, take pity on her, and rescue her. Now she knows that nothing like that is going to happen (134). Janeys emotional-rescue scenarios remain fairly constant throughout the text; if anything, their desperate tone intensifies as her physical state deteriorates. Doomed to reproduce her primal desire for Johnny within every heterosexual relationship she encounters, Janey cannot escape this deformed asymmetry. Desire for the father recursively rules her life: How can I be happy if a man doesnt fuck and love me? (93) This is her formative and fundamental lesson, the one she cannot escape and the reason parents stink. Blood and Guts in High School begins this way: Never having known a mother, her mother had died when Janey was a year old, Janey depended on her father for everything and regarded her father as boyfriend, brother, sister, money, amusement, and father (7). Johnny provides Janey with everything. Most importantly, he is her boyfriend and, in paltry last place, her father. As an only child, she exists outside sibling relationships, and her relation to the parental consists of a one-way sexual, and monetary, connection with Johnny. Acker here imbricates the paternal family with money, a conflation between the economies of capital and of the sexual that repeats again and again

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throughout the text: Robot love. Mechanical love. Money cause. Money cause (98). The mechanisms of sexual and economic oppression operate as quotidian entities. By literalizing the incest taboo and inextricably linking it with the power of capital, Acker demystifies one of the most pervasive and influential structures within Western culturethe oedipal formation of desireand reveals the process of subjectification as transparent and literal; there is no classic unconscious here. Janey, as an incest victim, blames herself for her fathers indifference and thus cant handle Johnnys romantic interest in the starlet. Conversely, Johnnys attachment to Janey and his need to free himself of it sound absurdly like the emotional struggles disenchanted spouses experience in their attempts to leave a marriage made unhappy through their own midlife crises. As Johnny whines, Youve completely dominated my life, Janey, for the last nine years and I no longer know whos you and whos me (12). When Janey calls from New York to see if she could return home, if Johnny ever want[s] to live with [her] again, he chides her for nagging: [L]ighten up. Things just got too entangled. Everything between us is still too entangled for me to be with you (25). Again, as a classic incest victim, Janey rationalizes Johnnys outright desertion in the only terms she understands: Daddy no longer loved me. That was it. I was desperate to find the love he had taken away from me (31). Ackers indictment of classic psychoanalytic discourse, its reproduction and reinforcement of phallic power, is complicated by the apparent absence of the maternal space. Classic Freud presumes the cultural position, hence psychic reality, of the maternal, whether or not an actual subject occupies that place. In Ackers version, Janeys desire for Johnny apparently bypasses the usual circuit of originary desire for the mother, oedipal rivalry for the father, and the necessary, final sexual identification with/as woman/subject. For Janey there is no emergence from the classic oedipal phase; she is perpetually trapped within it. One of Janeys many conflicts, never resolved, is that between her pre-oedipal, presymbolic voice the enunciated breakdown of the textand her oedipal, phallusobsessed voice, which repeats desire again and again for the father. Despite her constant attempts at revolt, at life as a criminal and possible terrorist, Janey cannot get beyond this need. As it was with

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Johnny, so it is with minor hoods, rock and roll singers, and presidents. The outcome is always the same. When she recounts her affair with President Carter to Genet, she says, I didnt want to fall in love with him because I didnt want to put something in my life, but he was screwing me so GOOD and beating me up that I knew I was going to fall in love with him (12223). Of course he rejects her. No matter their social position, fathers rule; they desire, they decide, they control. The oedipal storys conflation of capital and sexuality guarantees one level of Western womens oppression. But this same conflation is at the heart of Western capitals rationalization of its global holdings and imperial control. We make the world safe for democracy and freedom through the control of bodies and their labor, most importantly womens bodies. Ackers novel dramatizes the multiple ways in which the Oriental imaginary, in justifying the necessity for imperial domination, disavows the very oppression fundamental to its success. Blood and Guts, in its political emphasis on the Arab world, proves to be uncannily repetitive as well as predictive about the consequences of American ignorance in relationship to this part of the world. In the seventies America discovered the Middle East, yet again, for the first time. The civil war in Lebanon, the Palestine Liberation Movement, the Shahs increasingly authoritarian rule of Iran, but most particularly the oil embargo of 1973 began the process whereby the peoples of Middle Eastern countries became real to Americans. The Iranian occupation of the American embassy brought it all back home in 1979, but already within the American psyche those people had begun to act independently, to take control of their natural resources and their political lives. Suddenly their existence affected Americas existence in a fundamental way.

Imagining the Worst, or Oriental Language Lessons

Blood and Guts in High School presents Ackers critique of Americas relationship with the Middle East, in particular with Iran, Egypt, and North Africa. One of the theoretical effects, then, of the novel is a partial deconstruction, avant la lettre, of Orientalism, that discursive formation which makes possible Americas continued political and

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cultural domination of many Arab peoples. Since the publication of Edward Saids Orientalism, postcolonial theory has established a persuasive framework for understanding the dialectical relationship between cultural production and the politics of empire.5 While such a relationship was not particularly clear in 1978, Ackers text begins to analyze what might be called the Oriental imaginary, that largely unconscious (until quite recently) register within Anglo-American and European culture which motivates, in part, the Wests strategic and historic rationalization for (neo)colonial domination. As we are now aware, this imaginary has constructed wholly contradictory images and desires. At the discursive level, the Orient figures extraordinary libidinal excess as well as raw terror, desires double bind. While Ella Shohat and Anne McClintock work in different terrain, the former in Hollywood cinema and the latter in Victorian culture, both have contributed enormously to our understanding of the key place gender occupies within imperial discourse. The Oriental imaginary classically finds expression through an array of representational tropes focusing on the bodymale and femaleand most often a naked or seminaked body. But as Shohat and McClintock make painfully clear, its womens bodies that prove most desired and most in need of surveillance and/or containment through assimilation, incorporation, or obliteration. This sort of verbal/visual policing appears within and through what Shohat terms Tropes of Empire. Most useful for my purposes are those figures and situations in Blood and Guts that evoke seemingly endless variations on the harem fantasy, including the white slave ring, the brothel, the veiled body. Janey narratively and compulsively reiterates her position as sexualized female body, subject to illness, physical violence, captivity, and early death.
5. This article assumes certain premises, terms, and tropes that would not be possible without the extraordinary intellectual and theoretical work done in the field of postcolonial studies, including Homi K. Bhabhas The Location of Culture, Anne McClintocks Imperial Leather, Edward W. Saids Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism, and Gayatri Spivaks In Other Worlds. Particularly in relationship to feminist, postcolonial film studies, see Ella Shohats Gender and the Culture of Empire: Toward a Feminist Ethnography of the Cinema. For an enlarged and revised version of this article, see Shohat and Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism, particularly chapter 4, Tropes of Empire.

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Janeys Persian Poems appear in the midst of her rewrite of The Scarlet Letter and visually present a childishly handwritten sequence of lists that amounts to beginning Persian language lessons, sort of. The title strikingly suggests a famous French satire of the early Enlightenment, Montesquieus Persian Letters. The epistolary heroes, the foreigners Usbek and Rica, function as the lens through which Montesquieu focuses his ridicule and critique of French culture. Usbek, in constant communication with his harem back home, exchanges much of this news with his traveling companion Rica. And constant trouble brews at home, the letters revealing a seraglio soap opera of wives, eunuchs, and slaves caught up in petty jealousies and continual sexual intrigue, just the sort of fantastic Oriental world Montesquieus audience would find most satisfying: impossibly ignorant, pagan in its beliefs and customs, but utterly desirable. As part of Linkers white slave ring, Janeys Persian poems are written from inside the harem, so to speak, and the writer is not some mysterious, exoticised figure of unimaginable, erotic, and always willing pleasure but as sex slave. Since her sexuality constitutes her means of production as well as product, the Persian she practices, while a real language, contains lists of idiomatic expressions pertaining to genitalia, body parts, dirty words, verb paradigms (sex again), inflectional endings (genitalia again), and so on. Her captor, Mr. Linker, is a product of the Shahs Westernized, police-state regime. Born on the Iranian streets, and having been a beggars child, he saw how society worked (64). Oppression, rather than powering the motor for change, for revolution, produces an economic epidemic which both motivates and rewards Linkers quest for health, his metaphor for capital and culture. Had he remained poor, he might have turned this glimmering of intelligence on himself and become a saint, but he escapes, as the narrator facetiously puts it, Allah be praised, at age seven (64). Having successfully internalized the position of the oppressor, he now teaches his hoodlums the paramount importance of the Athenian state. All of our culture comes from ancient Greece, he informs them as he reiterates the Greek ideal: A healthy body in a healthy mind (61). Historically distorted, this fully Americanized Iranian, having amputated all connections with his actual culture, now rationalizes his own empire-building.

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In the midst of this lecture, Acker places two drawings that shockingly interrupt Linkers tendentious assertions. Placed below the line GIRLS WILL DO ANYTHING FOR LOVE is a briefly sketched beaver shot, spread thighs and wide open labia and clitoris. On the opposite page, Acker places a barely detailed female body, headless, hanging in space, arms raised, wrists and ankles bound. That she is headless places her in a category with colonial populationstoo often pure body, no mouth, no mind. At the same time, such a female prisoner evokes the passive harem inmate whose body represents a tabula rasa upon which Western white men may write their most perverse sexual fantasies. Below this classic porno bondage image are the words ODE TO A GRECIAN URN. In a heartbeat, one of Western literatures great cultural documents gets sliced to pieces. Those famous, frozen figures, the pursued maidens and amorous young men in their moment of pastoral, perpetual beauty, which signify for Keats an ultimate truth about art and time, become, for Acker, one figure. She accomplishes her own alienation effect here. The image of the bound woman, one of empires key tropes, recalls what is missing from classical Greek discourse and Romantic idealism; her body functions metonymically for all those real, material bodies, countless slaves and colonial populations that made possible the culture that Linker fondly tells his audience separates us from the beasts and is our highest form of life (64). Thus Ackers pictorial deconstruction also reasserts the Marxist perception that There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism (Benjamin 256). As the speaker for Western multinational capital, that is, culture, Linker figures as Ackers Baudrillardian version of Matthew Arnold, a real image, a fake (64). Culture equals capital, capital equals culture: their power is equivalent. What produces capital is the sexual use of womens bodies. Thrown out of Linkers harem because of cancershe has neither use nor exchange value as a sex workerJaneys disease marks her, just as criminality does, as materially useless but also resistant to the empires values. Disease also figures her evolving exile; it propels her to Tangier and her appointment with Genet. Acker turns Montesquieu inside out by reversing her travelers trajectory into the heart, so to speak, of the already textualized and highly ironized

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East. Here in the novels penultimate section, Acker freely appropriates sections of Genets play The Screens (completed in 1961 and staged in Paris in 1966). This play represents, in part, Genets attack on French colonial rule in Algeria and its suppression of the Algerian independence movement.6 Aside from the political content, much of the plays appeal for Acker (and she admired Genets work) appears in its styleantimimetic, fragmentary, parodic, outrageousas well as its apparent refusal to romanticize anything, least of all the colonized. Genets radical politics concerning the Arab world and Western imperialism coincide with Ackers. However, her own artistic strategies finally reveal that as a European white male, Genet cannot escape the oedipal and imperial stories that enable phallic power, and for Acker such recognition is critical. Genets protagonist, Said, is a loser thief and the poorest man in his village. According to the abysmal logic of the play, he marries the ugliest woman in the village, Leila, who appears throughout wearing a black hood with three holes. Simultaneously pursued by the colonial authorities and the local rebels, which he refuses to join and ultimately betrays, Said depicts that ultimate denial of stable identity, including political affiliation, and bourgeois morality which Genet proposes as the truly revolutionary spirit. Episodic, surreal, scatological, and disconnected, the play consistently deconstructs any number of binaries: colonizer/colonized; European/Arab; sense/nonsense. In Ackers terrible plagiarism (137), Janey morphs into Leila and, as she does in the original, wears a black hood with two holes for her eyes because her ugliness is so great that no one, least of all Genet, who takes the part of Said, can bear to look at her. Instead of Said as the figure of revolt, Ackers Janey becomes the suspect one, thrown into jail and then out, a possible terrorist. Acker recasts the revolutionary setting as Egyptian, and the rulers become, instead of Genets shifting catalogue of Europeans, American capitalists. The CapitalistsMr. Fuckface, Mr. Blowjob, and Mr. Knockwurst dismiss the rebels: Theyre all Janeys. Theyre all perverts,
6. For a sample of interpretive readings, see Said, On Jean Genets Late Works; Sohlich; and Watts.

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transsexuals, criminals, and women (136). Janeys criminality, sexualized and trivialized, blinds the Capitalists. While they obsess over her, Egyptians are setting fire to the trees. Americas imperial position in Egypta forest that the Capitalists cant seeexists because We own all the weapons in the world and all the scientists who design the weapons, and we own the language (135, 136). If only momentarily, Acker suggests that selective, covert action may unsettle capitals blind monumentality. Despised, cursed, beaten, Genets Leila speaks out of her ugliness, earned hour by hour . . . minute by minute . . . second by second (108). How she has earned ugliness remains unclear, but her black hood functions as an overdetermined sign of that ugliness. And while all of the characters wear such exaggerated costumes, Leila is the only veiled female. This singularity also marks her disappearance from the action, for while Said tells the assembled crowd in the final scene that Leila died raging (190), she never reappears, as do the other significant characters. Genets insistence on Leilas ugliness seemingly counters the classic Orientalist harem fantasy, the veiled woman; far from mysterious and exotic, Leila has nothing to interest anyone. Genets assumption, however, that beauty equals desirability, wrenches the reader back to the classic image. In positing the obverse, it constructs a kind of exploded Orientalism.7 By inserting Janey into Leilas role, Acker reveals such assumptions as well as Genets uncritical scripting of gender within an ostensibly revolutionary politics. Although Acker

7. I take this phrase from Edward Said (On Jean Genets Late Works 235). The veil continues to function within Orientalist discourse as a dominant figure for the Arab world in general and Islamic fundamentalism in particular. The American victory in Afghanistan was repeatedly represented as a liberation for Afghani women from the burka. The modern history of the veil as a discursive and political trope within Arab cultures is extremely complicated and inextricably linked to (neo)colonial domination. Leila Ahmed, in Women and Gender in Islam, analyzes the ways in which the veil, in early twentieth-century Egyptian politics, served as an organizing signifier for both progressive and nationalist narratives. In the former, Western-style modernity demands rejection of the veil because it represents all that is backward and inferior about Islamic society; in the latter, anticolonial nationalism demands retention of the veil because it represents the validity and dignity of Islamic, non-Western tradition. As Ahmed notes, the resistance narrative thus reversedbut thereby also acceptedthe terms set in the first place by the colonizers (164). See, in particular, chapter 4.

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calls Genets sexual politics into question in a number of ways, one of the first and most effective examples occurs through her realistic description of an Arab womans actual dress, the dress Genet makes Janey put on: A dress about twelve feet in length thrown over the head, belted around the waist, then pulled upward at the belt, so three skirts fall from the belt to the ground. Two eyeholes permit the woman to see (129). The careful description, the complexity and totality of the dress speak to, yet again, a material reality. Such clothing is worn in public, depending on the country, and is thus a daily, practical matter, not one of beauty or ugliness.8 Genet uses Leilas hood metaphorically, but Ackers text reminds us that such metaphors cannot be separated from a material source. Acker makes this point most dramatically when, in Egypt, Janey and Genet visit an Alexandrian brothel. Of the shifting screen settings in the play, the most repeated is the whorehouse, and the dialogue among the whores, as well as the exchanges between them and their customers, fills a good deal of stage time. Sexual jokes, insults, commentary on their customers prowess or lack thereof provide numerous comic interludes. For Acker, the brothel constitutes a space utterly emblematic of the conflation between sexuality and capital. Mr. Linker taught Janey to be a whore, and what she sees here are the lowest, sex workers: For them there is no class struggle, no movements of the left, and no right-wing terror because all the men are fascists. All the men own all the money. A man is a walking mass of gold (129). In The Screens Genet fails to consider the link between Leila, purchased for a bargain price by Said, the whores, purchased constantly, and the local population, purchased by European rulers. For Acker, this connection is fundamental. Ackers response to the brothel metaphor also critiques a romanticized version of Genet, whose work glorifies criminality and
8. For Fatima Mernissi, Moroccan feminist and sociologist, the daily reality of the veil entails, in part, its function within a system of sexual, spatial boundaries. Her nowclassic study Beyond the Veil constitutes an attempt to grasp sex as it materializes, as it melts into and with space and freezes it in an architecture (xv). For Mernissi, the Islamic tradition is characterized through its use of space as a means of sexual control. Thus the veil represents one of the most obvious material and symbolic markers of this control of social, sexual spaces, male and female: The veil is an expression of the invisibility of women on the street, a male space par excellence (97).

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makes use of settings such as the whorehouse and the prison as sites of resistance to bourgeois ideology. As canonized by Jean-Paul Sartre, Genetorphan, thief, prisoner, artistrepresents the privileged outlaw hero, his sexual and physical abjection the means through which he achieved a transformation, an existential purity. If Janey thought she was going to find greater sympathy or kinder treatment from Genet because he too has suffered, she discovers otherwise. When Genet commands her to get down . . . in the shit (131) because she still has pretensions, she literally does so: lying in the dirt outside his apartment, following him everywhere, washing his dirty underpants, sharing gaol together. As she did with Johnny, Linker, the Reverend Dimwit, President Carter, and others, she abjects herself. Her admiration for Genet only intensifies her self-loathing and her need, as ever, for validation from the father. Locked as she is within the oedipal script, shes incapable of generating that value for herself. Certainly her abject state does nothing to impress Genet. No matter how much he may have suffered because of his criminal status, his homosexuality, his social and political marginalization, Genet cannot recognize his own position within patriarchy: He thinks all he has to do to be a woman is slobber. He has to do more. He has to . . . crawl mentally every minute of the day. . . . [H]e has to perfectly read his lovers mind, silently, unobtrusively, like a corpse. . . . Women arent just slaves. They are whatever their men want them to be (130). As an artist, Genet may speak for a number of constituencies, but he can never speak for women, no matter their race or class. That Acker should perceive phallic power as monolithic and all pervasive, everywhere and always already the same, places her historically and culturally within a late seventies, radical feminism. Such a position has of course been critiqued for its essentialism and for its failure to distinguish the many cultural and racial differences between Western white women and women in the developing world. One could argue that Janeys view of Alexandrian women indicates Ackers historically limited perception of certain Arab women as more oppressed than Western women. Certainly Acker came to see this early, deconstructive approach as simplistic precisely because the narrative logic depends on opposition. She believed that she could resist power directly and thereby change

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the status quo. In Blood and Guts that means discursively fighting senseinstrumental reason, phallic logic, the fatherswith its opposite, with textual demolition. Thus Ackers creation of Janey/Leila, despite the characters twice-removed fictional identity, cannot help but obscure the issue of Arab womens agency. Ackers historical limitation, however, did not dilute the novels most powerful point in 1978: women must function within a phallic economy that may be codified through different discursive systems, but the consequence is the same, female oppression. Obviously Acker arrived at a quite different view of Muslim culture later. In 1989 she wrote, as more and more of the known world goes Coca-Cola and McDonalds, only the Muslim world resists (A Few Notes 35). As phallic logic, speaking through the incestuous father, abandoned her at the beginning, so too, at the end of her earthly life, she is abandoned by the authorial father. Genet pays her, leaves her in Luxor, and hurries away to see a production of one of his plays (140), after which Janey dies.9 Her final lesson is a version and repetition of the many failed relationships that have constituted her discursive life. Even in death her experience does not escape the power of the father; only this time its a search for the most important book on human transformation (147), hidden in Catulluss tomb, a book which provides no help. The novel ends with a dream, just whose we dont know, and the doves cooing over Janeys grave in Luxor: Soon many other Janeys were born and these Janeys covered the earth (165). The vision here suggests a weird dream of resurrection, of many Janeys spontaneously generating. While this wild replication of obnoxious, mouthy, teenage rebels might suggest a momentary escape, multiple Janeys can exist only as Janey has, as both a construction and consequence of the oedipal plot. Just as Janeys physical deterioration, bodily illness, and death mark her resistance, as well as her subjection, to the law of the fathers, so too are the metastasizing Janeys so doomed. Implicated within scripts over which they have little control, Ackers Janeys will endlessly desire the abusive father, and the fathers will endlessly desire their victim daughters, ad infinitum.

9. For Ackers use of ancient sources in the final section of the novel, see Hume.

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Acker offers no solutions or alternatives in Blood and Guts. What she does do with this novel is voice one long, outrageous scream at America, its obsessive economic motor and capital-driven social values, its naive, shallow, destructive politics. As this kind of political writer, she is merciless and unrelenting, and although her tactics mellowed over the years, she remained committed to a view of art as politically significant and necessary work. A few years before her death, Acker reaffirmed this position by asserting that the artist has an obligation to make clear the reasons she writes as she does and must make those reasons which are also and always political positions, present (Speech 4). If anything, Ackers critique of American culture and her political insights resonate even more eerily in the post-9/11 era; the consequences of corporate colonialism haunt us every day. And in a dj vu all over again, the American Capitalists are now divvying up postwar Iraq. As readers of her work have pointed out, Ackers fiction arises from, and structurally manifests, a fundamentally anarchic impulse. In this she speaks as a radical individualist who is also a citizen, a kind of perverse, postmodern, very cranky Thoreau. Oakland University

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