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Kathy Acker, a Conversation

With six earrings in each ear, tattoos from shoulder to shoulder and down her back (she dedicated her 1988 Empire of Senseless to her tattooist), and narrow blonde ridges of hair striping an almost shaved scalp, Kathy Acker's very appearance suggests artifice. The briefest reflection tells us that's exactly as it should be; for her work, as mush as that of any major contemporary, is a logical extension of the meta-fictional interests of past decades, reminding us that fiction is, above all, artifice-a human construction entirely different from ordinary business we know-while asking at the same time just how well we think we know anything.Talking to her, though, is another story.

Diminutive, distinctly New York, down-to-earth, intelligent, Acker is casually forthcoming. She laughs easily, considers the questions, answers directly. You could be talking to almost any middle class urban American-except for the experiences themselves, which brush the exotic as much as her fiction (she did work in Manhattan sex shows when she was younger, rides a motorcycle, and hangs out with rock and rollers as she approaches fifty, for instance). And of course, the novels themselves-she's at work on her twelfth. This conversation with the "bad girl" of the literary intellectuals took place over dinner in Chicago, after an address by Carlos Fuentes opened an October 1994 conference about "The Artist in Society" in which she participated.

:Paul Ashly and Barry Silesky:

ACM: First I wanted to ask about Kathy Goes to Haiti-You said earlier that you wrote that book as a joke.

KA: Well, I did kind of. That was one of my earliest books. I did an edition with Bob Kushner. It was beautiful, it was just all design. I think we only made a hundred copies. bob gave them to some bookstore in New York and they sold out in a month. It was a beautiful book. Bob had done these erotic drawings, and it was just stunning. And that's how the book really should be. But Grove Press wouldn't publish it that way because they said the drawings would take away from my literary reputation. I said, I don't have a literary reputation [laughs]. But they wouldn't do it.

ACM: Someday someone may see it that way again, though, and publish it the way it was originally.

KA: I would love if someone would reprint it the way it was. It was exquisite, the book was just the way it should be. What I wanted was a Nancy Drew Book, with a perverted girl. And it looks like that. It's very easy, with big type, and very beautiful. Bob Kushner's work is usually very decorative, and he made this beautiful erotic stuff to go with it, so the book as an object is just glorious. But Grove wouldn't do it. They made this ugly book with this horrible cover. So, already the book wasn't what I wanted. At that time I wanted to write a porn book to earn money because at that point there were porn publishers who were giving eight hundred dollars, which was a lot of money in those days.

ACM: This about the late seventies?

KA: No, this is before, this is '73-'74, and I got very bored writing a porn book, plus laws changed and they no longer had these little porn publishers. So I made up all these rules-that's what I mean by saying I wrote it as a joke-I was very intrigued at the time by Raymond Queneau, by Cortazar, and that group of writers where they make up all these little writing games. So I made up my own writing game-that every other chapter had to be a porn chapter, everything had to be so many pages, every chapter in the middle faced each other. I did a grid and everything was a mirror of each other. The center of the book has the only psychological thing in it, and everything had to be as dumb as possible; but the only thing that could be of interest was this mathematics. So the characters had to be dumb or their reactions had to be dumb, so that's why I meant it as a joke, right? And I wrote it, but I knew what I was going to write. So even though I made! up all these dumb rules, it wasn't as amusing to write as I thought, because I knew what I was going to write. So in my memory I'm not that fond of that book. Though I like the last chapter because that was the one thing that wasn't written according to this grid. That was written while I was in Haiti, and it was journalism.

ACM: I was interested in your sense that the novel is submerged underneath a system that you wrote it in, because when I read it I'm aware that there's this mirroring going on and that every other chapter is a certain kind of thing and my sense of the middle is the chapter where they're driving round and round in that car.

KA: Well, all I know is she starts thinking kind of personally in a way she doesn't anywhere else.

ACM: Does writing according to a kind of system, or does having a kind of technical interest, like in text or in using text in various theoretical systematic kinds of ways, does that free you up, does that liberate you imaginatively?

KA: Absolutely.

ACM: So, this question of how you use a system to make it work and how that liberates you.

KA: It helps me out a great deal. I went to Brandeis for the first two years of my education, and I was in classics, and my teacher was studying under Roman Yakusin at MIT, so I was trained as a structuralist, so all my papers were sent to Roman Yakusin, and I really like working in that way. I don't like thinking about content. Maybe a little more now, for narrative I think about content, but not a helluva lot. I really like working with structure, noticing what I'm doing, and that really frees me up. because Otherwise I'll get very programmatic...(continued)

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