Kathy Acker: The Last Interview

KUIPERS: I’m going to try to stay off biography; I really want to get commentary on the works themselves. I’ve read everything, and I’m on the last twenty pages of Empire of the Senseless.

ACKER: Good. Oh, really? How did you get hold of that?

KUIPERS: Ira [Silverberg, of Grove Press] gave it to me for the Splash review. It’s going to come out in August, which is just the right time…

ACKER: The book is coming out in August?

KUIPERS: No, the book comes out in September or October, but the magazine comes out again in August, so it’s good timing. Is it a reasonable assumption that the books are largely autobiographical?

ACKER: No, it’s not a reasonable assumption. I use autobiographical material, but then I use other material too. It differs from book to book. I’ll say two things: I don’t know what percentage—maybe a fourth of the material is autobiographical. I think that for every fiction writer, to say that something’s not autobiographical is false. I mean, you obviously use your own life when you’re writing and the emotions come up from somewhere and they have to do, obviously, with what’s happening to you as you’re living. But that’s not autobiography. That’s simply what happens in the process of writing.

Direct autobiography? My first work was concerned with fake and actual, fake and real autobiography, and since then I’ve always played around with this kind of autobiographical mode. But the actual material is not very autobiographical.

KUIPERS: Some of the books—especially Blood and Guts in High School and My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini—seem to be whole in the way that a long poem is a whole: the completion seems to be your completion rather than ours. What is the novel format, to you?

ACKER: I think that what I’d call a novel is different. What I call a novel is so many pages put together. So it’s not a poem, because it’s two hundred pages of text. The novel is obviously narrative—I mean, there are various temporal structures; it’s a temporal structure in words. That’s what a novel is. And there are various temporal structures that are going on. One that you can’t avoid is that the reader starts with the first page and ends with the last page. There’s that structure—Cortázar played around a bit with that in Hopscotch. But, you know, in whatever order you read the pages, you were still going from whatever you started with as page one to whatever you ended up with as page final. The other temporal structure that there is no way of avoiding is that you start writing at one point and you end at another; so there are two temporal structures always counterpointing each other. There’s a third, if you’re using narrative. So on most novels you have three temporal structures. I’d have to talk about each novel—and it’s different for each novel—but I don’t think I ever was using what you’d call traditional narrative, which would be more sort of postindustrial narrative—you know, from Richardson on upwards. Until Empire of the Senseless, which, still, is more epic narrative—which still goes back to earlier narrative structures. If anything, that sort of journeying thing is very early novel structure. The structure of the bourgeois novel—you know, as Barthes talks about in Writing Degree Zero—is something I’ve never used. I’ve never written a Balzacian novel—except, a little bit, Kathy Goes to Haiti, but that was a joke. That I did for a reason: to say, “Hey look; I’ve done it.” Now I never want to do it again.

KUIPERS: All of your work seems to involve a journey of some sort, other than My Death My Life.

ACKER: My Death My Life is probably the most far-out of all the novels I’ve done. I’m glad I did it—I think it failed—I don’t know, maybe fail and succeed aren’t the right words; I took something to a certain point to see what would happen. I’m glad I did it and I saw what that point was, so I never have to do that again. But that was it; I got to that extreme and I see no reason to do it again. I wanted to structure a novel—rather than vertically, that is, based on causality, which is your usual narrative structure—I wanted to structure it horizontally, based on themes, so it was all based on pun structures and things like that. No need to go into detail. I did it, I saw what would happen, and that was that.

KUIPERS: That movement, especially in Empire of the Senseless, is it one of flight or is it movement toward something—for example an actualization of personal power? Is it a completion of sorts or a flight?

ACKER: I think Blood and Guts was flight. Or a scream. I don’t know if it was even flight; everyone, or Janey, was fleeing all the time. Everybody was fleeing all the time, but there was nowhere to go. Pier Pasolini was something else; I don’t think it had anything to do with flight. As I say, it was my—I hate the word postmodernism—it was when I was most influenced by notions of decentralization. So that was something else. Don Quixote was a flight somewhere, but I didn’t know where. It was when I moved—here, autobiography comes in—from the United States to England, and I think that—not directly, but very much, when I reread the book—[that] comes into it. It’s a book about exile. About being lost because you’re exiled. And about looking for something. And I think I found something at the end that, at the beginning, I didn’t know that that’s what I was looking for. At the end, I got very disinterested in avant-gardism, you know, in this lack of narrative. And I started looking toward primitive narratives as a way to go.

KUIPERS: As in?

ACKER: I don’t know what other word to use. I guess anything out of the First World…I mean, away from the First World…I mean, I was looking to African novels…So I was looking to—I don’t know how to put it—non-White structures? It’s not quite that, but you get the point. If all these words don’t smack of racism. Empire of the Senseless is obviously about flight somewhere; Abhor and Thivai are both looking. It’s probably the first book where there is some kind of resolution at the end, or to me there is, definitely.

KUIPERS: Absolutely. They seem to move toward solutions.

ACKER: Yeah. It’d be hard to say, I mean, it’s not an easy solution, what that solution is. But I felt that there were definitely solutions.

KUIPERS: One of those that I’m most interested in is the movement from powerlessness to power.

ACKER: Well, that’s what Empire of the Senseless is about. It’s the first time I think I’ve ever gotten to any sense of power, ’cause most of my books are about powerlessness.