Blood and Guts in High School by Kathy Acker #READWOMEN

This is a retro review, in a way, because I’ve read Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School (1984) before now. So, this book is must re-read.

Blood and Guts in High School was unlike anything I had ever read before. I won’t spend too long on my first reading, since my priority is to write about my re-reading, but it’s important to contextualize that I fell in love with Kathy* as an author because of how utterly she confounded and challenged me with this novel. Reading her, I knew immediately, then thoroughly, that I hadn’t read enough, would probably never read enough, and that I had to get busy if I ever wanted to catch up with her. She has a lot to teach me still.

I re-read Blood and Guts in High School this year because I assigned it for an independent study in surrealist literature and media. My argument in assigning Kathy is that she is part of the post-surrealist school of postmodernism*. There’s probably a paper in there somewhere, but I’ve never been good at capitalizing on research/publishing opportunities. If you’re in lit. & theory studies and want to run with this idea yourself, you have my blessing. My student loved the book and he also taught me a lot that I hadn’t understood the first time I read it, so I resolved to re-read it proper and not be satisfied with my teaching notes and outline.

I had taught Kathy once before in a class two years earlier on postmodern literature. I taught four novels and a dozen short stories in a summer course, which is a challenging reading load on its own, but the third novel I taught was Kathy’s Pussy, King of the Pirates*. I was nervous about teaching this book because all of her writing is difficult to make sense of and it also transgresses our societal and cultural norms at just about every level and to the full degree. To say she’s deliberately offensive is a fucking understatement. To my students’ credit, they read the book and discussed it directly, giving her writing serious consideration and asking excellent questions, many of which I couldn’t answer, or my answers were unsatisfactory. In truth, I thought my students were fucking amazing based on the maturity and insight they brought to that novel, and I now regret that next semester I am teaching David Fucking Wallace and not Kathy for my Major Authors class. How different the world might have been with 35 Georgia Tech students reading from her oeuvre!

If you noticed (and unpleasantly at that) the sudden use of f-bombs in this post, I can only warn you that it gets worse from here on out. Kathy uses the full range of language and media to tell her stories, she doesn’t leave anything out that might be useful, and so graphic language and visuals are prevalent throughout her work. A recurring theme in the novel is that LOVE=Cock In Cunt, and there are instructional pictures that accompany to that effect. In other words, she doesn’t fuck around.

Blood and Guts in High School is probably the novel of hers that is most accessible, with “accessible” being relative and up for serious debate. After reading it twice, the book feels impossible to summarize. Basically, it’s easier to talk about the how of her work rather than the what. She uses collage, pastiche, fabulism, auto-biography, and meta-fiction, to name a few, to tell the story of Janey. The following things “happen” to Janey in the book: she is involved in an incestuous relationship with her father (she also desperately loves him, to make all of this as unpleasant as possible) in Mexico that involves being pimped out by him and gang raped before he dumps her; she works at a bakery in New York City and joins a gang called THE SCORPIONS, she also fucks everyone and has a couple of abortions; she is kidnapped by two burglars and sold into sex slavery, during which time she learns Persian, writes poetry, becomes trained as a whore, is broken up with by her slave trader and meets Genet in Morocco; after she travels to Egypt with Genet she raids the tomb of Catullus to find a book that will turn her into a bird, which she does and flies away; Janey is ten years old at the start of the novel and fourteen years old by the end. Like my students, you may find this summary unsatisfactory. It also does not even come close to explaining major sections of the book. There’s a broken domestic fairy tale about a monster and a beaver and a bear. There are dream maps illustrated in Kathy’s own hand that I confess I didn’t read closely because it would have taken hours to parse through just one double-page spread (and there are a few such spreads), and I was on deadline for this blog. Intricate and detailed, they are beautiful, yet contain many terrible surprises such as a tiny paragraph above a drawing of an erect, ejaculating phallus that reads, “Baba takes me to the edge of the metal factory and sticks his cock in me. I’m his wife.” This can be found alongside other lines and passages that would easily be considered crowning moments of heartwarming if they appeared in any other story by any other author.

There are also the “Persian Poems,” a section again written in Kathy’s own handwriting that represents Janey’s grammar guide to Persian while also filling in as poetry, diary, and translation primer. The final section of the book, in which Janey raids Catullus’s tomb looking for the book that turns humans into birds, is rendered as a kind of grade school picture tutorial of a foreign culture, with lots of iconography and bold typeface to make everything look official and aesthetically pleasing. I’m old enough to remember seeing books like this as a little kid. Kathy was writing Blood and Guts in High School in the late seventies and I was born in 1978, so I don’t think I’m imagining things.

I haven’t even mentioned the “book report” section that functions as a retelling/reimagining of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter as revolutionary, anti-patriarchal, punk feminist screed that doubles as a love story! Just trying to explain any one of these sections would take longer than the average blog reader probably has time for. If you seriously want some insight and understanding into what Kathy is doing and how she does it, I recommend checking out some contemporary criticism on Kathy. She’s experiencing something of a critical and academic revival right now, and a great place to start is with Dr. Shannon Finck’s (@shannonbgoode) “Bodies at Liberty in Kathy Acker’s Don Quixote,” which explains a lot about Kathy while exploring the text specified in the title.

So what did I learn this time? Just before the “book report” section, a character named Mr. Linker says, “literature is the most abstract of the arts. It is the only art which is not sensual” which is some pretty pompous, effete bullshit. It is also something that probably some people and institutions believe to this day, though it was probably more prevalently accepted back in the seventies when Kathy was writing this. Whether you believe this or not, this idea is out there and fucks people up. So what does Kathy do? Well, Linker’s assertion is paradoxically confirmed/exploded in the book report that immediately follows. The prose of the book report is highly theoretical and abstract, but also describes Hester as a wanton women, completely at odds with the cultural dominant of commercial materialism represented in Puritan society. Hester accomplishes her rejection of society by being lovesick for cock. At the same time that the prose follows the conventions of theoretical and analytical discourse, it is transgressing every normative function of those conventions in terms of content, application, outcome, you name it. This is real next level shit, and also only just scratching the surface of Kathy’s genius, and I’m probably making many colleagues cringe with my ham-fisted attempt at trying to explain this.

So why re-read this? Kathy’s prose savages me. I have a sensual, physical reaction to her writing, and there is pathos as well. After the book report comes a line that Janey expresses in response to her situation as a sex slave undergoing whore training, “I don’t want to be lonely and without love for the rest of my long life. I’ve got to find out how I got so fucked up.” I’ve experienced profound loneliness, and in this line it felt like Kathy’s loneliness captures that desolation we all feel at some point in our lives. Other lines moved me to profound despair. Janey describes in shameful detail the horrific realities of what happened to women getting an abortion in 1970s New York and then this line suddenly ends a paragraph: “I wanted a permanent abortion.” With Kathy there is no safe space, no quarter from the assault of life, of the world, of pain, of other people, of desperate need. As difficult and abstract as her writing is, it evokes powerful reactions in me as a reader. She breaks my heart and she makes me blush. Whenever I get close and feel like I’m beginning to understand her, she pushes me away, tells me to fuck off, and reminds me I don’t know shit about her or girls. Yet the next day she’s written a new poem that makes me fall in love with her all over again. It’s just like high school, really.

I leave you with the end of one of Janey’s (Kathy’s) poems:

"You who’re safe ‘cause God or Luck lets you

Thirst desire and in always love may you remain safe.

Against me MY LOVE nights bears down sour

never ceases agony wanting Love.

I’m telling you: shun evil: Love fucks up

everyone and never becomes safe.

If any of you to these words don’t listen

Too bad you’ll return knowing suffering to my yourself poems."

*I hope you will forgive me for the bullshit practice of referring to a female author by her first name. It’s a common practice among male reviewers to show unearned familiarity with women while simultaneously maintaining professionalism among male authors by using their last names. In this special case, her authorial and meta-textual identity always appears as Kathy (Acker is a married name she never gave up even though she ultimately divorced her husband), an identity she was always trying to claim and construct out every aspect of her life. So, in a paradoxical sort of way, I’m using her first name to professionally honor her. I’m hoping she agrees with my conception here.

*She references Francis Ponge in this book, for fuck’s sake, and does so by explaining that she cannot find stability in the external world as he does. Surrealism. Post. Hyphen.

*And I always referred to the book title by its full name the whole semester I taught the class, regardless of context. This was to avoid any embarrassing, out-of-context utterances such as, “My students discussed Pussy today.” “Did y’all like Pussy?” “We’re not through with Pussy yet.” “I know you want to talk more about Pussy, but time’s up.” etc. etc. etc.