Kathy Acker

1. Kathy Acker • Don Quixote, 1986

2. 1947-1997

3. Kathy Acker • If narrative is as steeped in patriarchy as feminists argue it is, there seems then to be little hope of constructing an agenic female subject in narrative. • Many contemporary novels by women fix their focus upon this issue, attempting both thematically and structurally deconstruct patriarchal linguistic and narrative constructs. • Her novel Don Quixote which has a dream explores the issue of what is a novel. Acker’s novel takes on the seemingly impossible: it confronts and attempts to manipulate the constitutive power that language wields in the construction of the subject.

4. Kathy Acker • Paradoxically, it is by submitting to the violence and death traditional narrative forms inflict upon the feminine that the protagonist of Don Quixote is able to stage that manipulation. • For this reason, issues of feminine agency and subjectivity are often of vital concern in contemporary experimental women’s fiction. • Such fiction addresses both the thematic and structural practise of traditional narrative in order both to demonstrate the inherent heterosexism of those practices, and to shift those practices in an attempt to make room for female subjectivity.

5. Kathy Acker • Chapter I • Kathy Acker’s Don Quixote is a quest: she sets out to perform the now almost impossible act of loving another person; however, she realizes that this can occur only by changing the nature of our society. • If we are to escape, we must be schizoid –we must become what the French theorists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari term “nomads,” for only then do we initiate the movements necessary to escape from those parts of ourselves determined by this society.

6. Kathy Acker • In a society where materialistic, hyper-rational, capitalist instrumentation reigns, love is nearly impossible, affect is nearly impossible: consequently, love is subversive. • The intense subjectivity of Acker’s prose is itself a weapon of becoming: rather than allowing herself to be identified on the molar level as a member of a group, she subverts this segmentation through her intense emotion, the intense suffering that she expresses as a result of the pain the various social/political assemblages are causing her.

7. Kathy Acker • Although the First Part of the book ends with the “death” of Don Quixote, another line of flight emerges, a line centered on the particular kind of writing – a writing of deconstruction. • But let us analyse love in this context. Women are objects of love and men are the subjects or the lovers. • Medusa, who makes a brief appearance in the novel, explains her (and all women’s) plight to a man (represented by a dog): “I’m your desire’s object, dog, because I can’t be a subject…. When you love us, your hate us, because we have to deny you. Why? Objects can’t love back” (28).

8. Kathy Acker • Thus, according to Medusa, heterosexual love, as it is currently imagined, cannot exist, love always becomes hatred because the loved object cannot simultaneously be the loving subject. • Or, as Medusa puts it: “As long as you men cling to your identity of power-monger or of Jesus Christ, as long as you cling to a dualistic reality which is a reality moulded by power, women will not exist with you”. (28)   • In such terms, women do not exist because they cannot be subjects; the cannot act, but can only be acted upon.

9. Kathy Acker • In order to achieve this last goal, she needs to find another soul equally able to be both subject an object. • She recognizes that she cannot “just love” abstractly, without and object of love: • […] “because every verb to be realized need its object. Otherwise, having nothing to see, it can’t see itself or be. Since love is sympathy or communication, I need an object which is both subject and object” (10) • In other words, the protagonist knows that if she can change her position in language, she will also be able to change her material position from objectified Other to active, agenic self or subject.

10. Kathy Acker • She recognizes that his act would have enormous power. It is for this reason that the protagonist takes the name of Don Quixote, the originary novelistic quester. • Whereas the original Don Quixote’s foes were imaginary, this Don Quixote’sfoes are symbolic, as they represent the grammatical rules of patriarchal language. • In order to become a subject, the, Don Quixote must become less a woman and take on some of the characteristics of a hero, which are, of course, masculine.

11. Kathy Acker • Thus the novel begins with an abortion, which Ellen G. Friedman terms as “a precondition for surrendering the constructed self”. • Friedman argues that “the woman in position on the abortion table over whom a team of a doctor and nurses presides represents, in an ultimate sense, woman as constructed object”.

12. Kathy Acker • The only recourse against such objectification, Friedman posits, is for Don Quixote to attempt to take control of the abortion situation, which she does by naming herself: • “She decided that since she was setting out on the greatest adventure any person can take, that of the Holy Grail, she ought to have a name (identity). She had to name herself” (9)

13. Kathy Acker • Don Quixote’s abortion functions not only as a kind of victimization or objectification, but also and at the same time to provide her a means of denying that position as a constructed female object. • By choosing to have an abortion, Don Quixote consciously chooses against the feminine roles of motherhood, marriage and reproductivity that have been prescribed for her. • It is this rejection of constructed femininity that allows her to become a hero: “to Don Quixote, having an abortion is a method of becoming a knight and saving the world. This is a vision”. (11).

14. Kathy Acker • Thus, an abortion is a means of gaining power by taking it through what those in power would call “unnatural means”. • The abortion simultaneously symbolizes, then, a rejection of objectified femininity, a putting on and a discarding of masculine subjective agency. • By partially rejecting and embracing the masculine and the feminine, Don Quixote hopes to achieve a balance between genders.

15. Kathy Acker • She realises that“she was both a woman therefore she couldn’t feel love and a knight in search of Love. She had had to become a knight, for she could solve this problem only by becoming partly male” (29). • As I mentioned earlier, she achieves this “partly maleness” by adopting the name of a hero: “by taking on such a name which, being long, is male, she would be able to become a female male or a night-knight” (10). • Thus her quest becomes to negotiate between male/female, love/hate and subject/object; she will attempt to walk the line between the binaries.

16. Kathy Acker • This balancing at between genders becomes indeed a quixotic endeavor in the sense that it makes Don Quixote insane; loving or being able to love makes her mad and in order to remain able to love she must remain mad (32)

17. Kathy Acker • For, in order for a woman to be “normal” she must be dead, while in order to love actively, a woman must die: “If a woman insists she can and does love and her living isn’t loveless or dead, she dies. So either a woman is dead or she dies. This’s what the handsome man told Don Quixote”. (33) • In order words, Don Quixote can choose to continue her quest to love, in which case the handsome man will kill her, or she can agree to be a “normal” woman and not love or have visions in which case she would become passive or dead. • As a woman, her only options are confined to one of two forms of death.  

18. Kathy Acker • Her lover, who is a dog, offers to whip himself to death, to die for her in order that she may continue to love. • Don Quixote agrees, but is ultimately unable to allow the dog to complete the task, saying: “I love you too much for you to hurt yourself. If I have to, I’ll be normal and dead.’ It was in this way that Don Quixote’s quest failed” (35) • Because she agrees to become normal, to stop loving or searching for a way to love, Don Quixote’s quest fails.

19. Kathy Acker • However, because her love takes the form of sacrifice, she is reverted back to being a woman. • So, while her quest to love is momentarily successful, her quest to establish herself as a subject necessarily fails as she must give in to the demands of socialized femininity, to get married, which means to become dead.

20. Kathy Acker • Her attempt to appropriate the masculine literary tradition of the quest and to rewrite it in her own terms has ended in her death.

21. Kathy Acker • In a sense, however, Don Quixote realized from the outset that her quest to write a self was doomed to failure. • “I was wrong to be right, to write, to be a knight, to try to do anything…. I have to love: I have to be wrong to write” (36-37)

22. Kathy Acker • Chapter II • The second part begins with the death of Don Quixote (39) • This chapter is a massive fragmented intertext, marked by nomadic writing, and rhizomaticity in the structure. • Different texts, sometimes altered slightly, sometimes reprinted exactly word for word. • Theses texts represent the limits of language and culture within which the female quested attempts to acquire identity.  

23. Kathy Acker • Some have suggested that the goal of this plagiarism is to subvert the notion of the “master text” by breaking the laws that govern textual legitimacy through plagiarism. • The quester in this chapter, sometimes called “Lulu” but whose identity is diffused and unclear, is attempting to forge a kind of subjectivity in negotiation with the only materials she has available: the male texts by which she is surrounded.

24. Kathy Acker • Luce Irigaray says: “a woman’s (re)discovery of herself can only signify the possibility of not sacrificing any of her pleasures to another, of not identifying with anyone in particular, of never being simply one”. • At the same time, by inhabiting and reframing literary characters, she addresses the issues involved in the portrayal of women in both text and language. • In other words, the quester in the Second Part attempts a kind of negotiation with master texts similar to that which Don Quixote had been attempting in the First Part by making herself into an epic hero.

25. Kathy Acker • Thus, while the first part portrayed Don Quixote’s failed attempt at taking on the role of epic hero, the second part represents her attempt to cope, while dead, with the male texts that surround her. • Instead of attempting to write herself, the protagonist now must navigate through the textual material she has at her disposal: the male texts that have been written for, around and even upon her.

26. Kathy Acker • These texts include, among others, works by Catullus, Giuseppe di Lampedusa, Andrei Bely, Milton, George Berbard Shaw, etc. • By the end of this section of the novel, the protagonist who emerges has played and struggled with the many different textual roles available to her: daughter, lover, wife, mother, killer. • Having escaped from being executed for the murder of the father/lover who has fashion her identity, she resolves to become a pirate.

27. Kathy Acker • Once again threatened with death, she says, “Now I must find others who are like me, pirates journeying from place to place, who knowing only change and the true responsibilities that come from such knowing sing to and with each other”. (97) • The second part of Don Quixote exhibits this writing of destruction, displaying its mechanism immediately in the subtitle of the chapter: Being dead…. (39). • There are several writing ‘techniques’ in order to accomplish her pirate work:

28. Kathy Acker • The first technique is to take texts from the canon of Western literature and to deconstruct them so that she is able to extenuate parodically their political salient characteristics, simultaneously opening up the host text to the outside of her own social field, and opening up her own text to the outside of the aesthetic/historical fields. • She has chosen texts, as I indicated above, that already have a capacity to serve as war machine: Andrei Biely’s Petersburg and poems of Catullus, Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s, the Leopard, Godzilla movies, Milton’s Paradise Lost, The Odyssey, Virgil, Frank Wedekind’s Lulu plays, to name a few of the more obvious ones.

29. Kathy Acker • Andrei Biely’s Petersburg (1916) 1880- 1934 • poems of Catullus, 84-54 BC • Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s, The Leopard (1958) 1896- 1957) • Godzilla movies • Milton’s Paradise Lost, (1664) 1608 -1674 • Homer’s The Odyssey, 8th Century BC

30. Kathy Acker • Frank Wedekind’s Lulu plays, (1895-1905) 1864- 1918

31. Kathy Acker • Acker’s second technique is to place on the same sheet with these deconstructed texts her own intensely subjective experiences. • The function of these subjectivities is not the representation of feeling, but the utilization of affect as a weapon of the war machine.

32. Kathy Acker • This is why Acker’s emotional representations have such an intensity: her affects – expressions of anger, rage, grief, suffering, and pleasure – are nomadic weapons that search beyond her own introceptive feelings; • they explode out of her interior onto the plane of exteriority that is this text in a rhizomatic manner, representing becomings and velocities as she traverses the various social, political, historical, and aesthetic fields of out society. .

33. Kathy Acker • Her writing destroys(refuses to acknowledge), by deconstructing the binary distinction between interior and exterior, self and society, subjective and objective, the personal and the political.

34. Kathy Acker • Chapter III • In this way the Third Part begins assearches for an artistic community who will understand her writing and her language. • The only means available to her to find such a community is to run from the patriarchal law that would put her to death.

35. Kathy Acker • Thus, because she cannot live as she wants within the law- cannot write or be a subject – she must become an outlaw figure, pirating the “male texts” that she cannot write herself. • In this way, she attempts to construct an identity by stealing what she must from the only sources available to her.

36. Kathy Acker • To live outside the law, after all, is not to exist, or to become dead. • Once again, the protagonist faces a threat of death as she embarks upon a new quest to defy the law. • From this position, she attempts to locate “others like her”, in order to form a community of pirates (women writing).

37. Kathy Acker • However, she realizes that in order to be a community one must have a language in which to communicate. • Don Quixote’s quest becomes to devise the language that will allow community to exist and she tells the dogs: • I write words…. (p. 191)

38. Kathy Acker • At the end […] I wanted to find …. Control me (194). But she finds that all language must and do necessarily fail and end in death; while “all story-telling is rebellion,” (146-147) it is rebellion doomed from the outset.

39. Kathy Acker • The telling (or singing) of the story of her own masochistic submission is for Don Quixote, a kind of rebellion through insanity. Don Quixote herself presents the paradox this way: • It is necessary…. Of this world. (p. 193) • However, one must be mad in order to attempt to perform this resistance because such resistance is ultimately not possible.

40. Kathy Acker • The novel ends with that kind of indeterminacy, as God appears to Don Quixote and informs her that God is a fraud and “there are no more new stories, no more tacks, no more memories; there is you, knight” (207) • Resistance is only possible through the effort, not the result, so Don Quixote must continue to attempt to write the narrative of self-empowerment that she knows must ultimately fail.

41. Kathy Acker •  Her madness will then be concluded, at least “until this book will begin again”. • What she comes to realize is the possibility of affirmation, even if revolution is impossible.

42. Kathy Acker • She can deploy the war machine that is this text, with its multiple becomings, … her becomings will automatically work as a form of social transformation, for the text that contains these becomings will be a powerful war machine.

43. Kathy Acker • Acker and Cervantes • Cervantes work can be regarded as the first great battle of interiority waged against the resulting prosaic vulgarity of outward life. • Don Quixote is a work of disenchantment in a double sense. • On the one hand, the novel reacts to the unveiling of the prosaic, mundane character of the world with a sense of disillusion and a desire for re-enchantment by way of the literary imagination.

44. Kathy Acker • On the other hand, the novel itself unveils the illusion of the efficacy of the written word to fully bring about this re-enchantment. • Acker’s Don Quixote is likewise a work of disenchantment in this double sense, albeit in a radically altered historical, political, philosophical, and literary context. • Where Cervantes’s novel stands at the end of Christianityand the beginning of the colonial era of early capitalism, Acker’s stands at the end of modernity, the post-war end of-colonization of late capitalism (103)

45. Kathy Acker • Cervantes’s novel represents an effort to revitalize the system of Christian beliefs and values that underline chivalric romance; • Acker’s representan effort to undermine the androcentric conventions of romance and the masculinist system of beliefs and values.

46. Kathy Acker • Where Cervantes, in its nostalgia for a passing era, aims at re-enchantment, Acherin its yearning for a new era aims at revolution.

47. Kathy Acker • Acker’s work of disenchantment represents the efforts of a politically engaged, feminist writer to free herself from the enchantments, seductions, or illusions of particular ways of thinking about language, writing and culture in contemporary discourse. • These ways of thinking, relate specifically to the practice of feminist deconstruction in the novel.

48. Kathy Acker • On the one handAcker pushes Cervantes’s fusion of world and word to a postmodern extreme by way of reading and writing. • Acker’snovel is the story of a woman who sets out to do nothing less than rewrite the world, its history and its literature, by way of a feminist deconstructive reading.

49. Kathy Acker • On the other hand, her failures to achieve this worthy goal give rise to disillusion and in turn raise the question of the efficacy of feminist deconstructive writing strategies to bring about genuine social and political transformations in the world. • But Don Quixote cannot be the subject of enunciation or of narrative so she is dead.

50. Kathy Acker • The implication is that the female is that which is repressed, silenced, shadowed, unseen, unrepresented and unrepresentable. • To be divided in this way is to undergo a regression or diminution of the self, and to feel oneself powerless, insubstantial, and dependent on others.