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.

The Sellout by Paul Beatty

I believe writing that comes with a trigger warning is being conscientious of its audience and self-reflexive about the controversial, offensive, or traumatic nature of its content. In that same mindset, I think more writing should come with a privilege warning. Specifically, an acknowledgment of the author’s own privilege as to how it will affect his perspective on, and interaction with, the given topic of his writing. With that in mind, this review of Paul Beatty’s The Sellout has a privilege warning as I am a white, upper class, cis, heterosexual, quasi-Christian male with a PhD in English who does not regularly or professionally write about race or about literature in which race is a predominant theme or topic. The warning is for me as much as it is for you. I must tread carefully.

The Sellout is one of those remarkable books that comes to public attention early in its life because it wins multiple prestigious book awards in the same year. I’m a big fan of book awards for this reason. I have been exposed to authors and works I might not otherwise have come across because during a given year a group of people came together and decided it was good enough to honor. I treat award lists (including finalists and long lists) as a kind of formal recommendation. Never impartial (because what, ever, is impartial?), but more removed from a friend or favorite author’s plug. Recommendation by committee has its merits, though I think it gets talked about less than its drawbacks.

I had never heard of Beatty before, and in fact his years of writing and publishing in relative obscurity is part of the Cinderella story that was attached to his nomination and eventual two-time win for this big and complex book about racism in America. I had no idea what I was in for, but I had spoken with a couple of friends and colleagues whose reading taste I respect and admire and they confirmed that The Sellout had earned every accolade received and then some. I am grateful to those who recommended it to me for revealing nothing about it except that I needed to read it. The novel surprised me, disarmed me, and challenged me as much as any book I’ve read in the last five years, maybe longer. It also defeated me, which I think more books should do this. Defeat privileged white guys like me, I mean. If you haven’t read it and want to go into it unknowing as I did, now is the time to close this tab (but please come back!) and check out your copy from the local library to read it.

I congratulated myself early on in The Sellout because I figured out quickly that it’s a satire. A quick note of explanation: I’m pretty dense when it comes to comedy. I’m the living embodiment of the “straight man” from classic comedic duos, who never realizes what he says is funny, nor that anything funny is going on around him. I couldn’t finish The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy the first time I read it because I didn’t know it was supposed to be funny. That sentence is a true story, and also a sad one. So, understanding a mere five to ten pages into The Sellout that I was dealing with a sprawling satire that will include all manner of postmodern word play and intertextuality was a moment of pride for me. It would be my last.

Beatty has been writing for a long time, as both a poet and fiction writer, and those years of experience are on full display here. His writing style resonates with the best of postmodernist authors I enjoy, including Pynchon for his word play and Barth for his exhaustive cataloging of subjects and topics that often make his texts as dense as a neutron star. Beatty’s topic is race and racism, particularly the history and culture of African Americans in the United States, and The Sellout catalogs just about every last trope, symbol, stereotype, reference, and theme of its subject. Beyond that, there are exceptional references to racism of all types across all ethnic backgrounds, and even mockingly and brilliantly includes reverse racism. The word play is near constant and also equally brilliant and ostentatious. One character who has elected to become a slave to his self-appointed master, the narrator, longs for a return to antebellum times, saying at one point, “Forget White Flight, what we need is the Ku Klux Influx.” I would say this prose is as funny as it is terrible, but the fact that it’s funny makes it additionally terrible.

The book is narrated by a black man living in the former murder capital of the world inside Los Angeles County, operating his father’s farm, living a small, quiet life, until a former black child star who once understudied Buckwheat on the Little Rascals seems to lose his mind and demands to live and be treated as a slave after a failed suicide attempt. The narrator is an odd duck, existing outside just about every possible community and group he could be, and through a series of surreal yet intricately related events agrees to take on this man as his slave. This event drives the whole of the plot as it gives the narrator ideas about improving the lives of residents in his hometown by bringing back segregation. Eventually all of his actions and projects gain national attention and he is arrested and brought before the Supreme Court on the charge of violating the 13^th and 14^th Amendments to the US Constitution. I present it here as a linear narrative, but reading the novel isn’t like that at all. The narrator shifts among time periods and characters at will, guided more by thematics than any adherence to plot or timeline. We learn the history of Dickens, California, the aforementioned murder capital of the world and now not even an incorporated principality. We are told about the narrator’s father who was a brilliant but marginalized sociologist, whose home-schooling of his son constitutes the most bizarre rendition of child abuse ever put to print. We meet a diverse cast of characters, including intellectuals, celebrities, gang bangers, blue collar workers, historical figures, and even real-life people who have been satirically rendered unidentifiably identifiable. The narrator’s father was obsessed with race, particularly racism represented culturally and psychologically, and through his tyrannical instruction, the narrator cannot help but focus intently on race in all aspects of his narrative. The narrator is not his father, though, and so without agenda or goal in mind he instead observes and interrogates and even counter argues now-dominant progressive viewpoints about race and racism as its understood today.

Because of the novel’s satiric and ostentatious approach to its subject matter, I found it to be humorous and engrossing. Because the book also exhaustively and unapologetically examines race and racism in America (which exists because of the founding and continued systemic oppression of an entire people for the benefit of a ruling class of which I am a part), it made me extremely uncomfortable throughout my reading. Every time I laughed or grinned, I was immediately put to the question, both by myself and the novel, why am I laughing? What does my laughter say about me? I don’t think the question that needs to be answered is ‘Can racism be funny?’ because the answer is that anything can be funny. Dead baby jokes are funny. AIDS jokes are funny. The real question is, who laughs at these jokes and why? Late in the novel, the narrator is reminiscing about black standup comedy and the club he used to go to with an MC who told bluntly offensive racist humor to a black audience. Everyone laughs and all is good fun until one day a white couple comes into the club and when they laugh at these racist jokes the MC confronts them with verbal hostility and asks them what’s so funny. They have no answer for him and he harangues them out of the club. The jokes didn’t change when the white couple came in, they were still just as offensive and racist as before, but the rhetorical situation had changed. Different audience means the reason for laughter was different. I was in awe of this reflexive, meta-fictional moment in The Sellout, because it put the question to me of who I am as a reader of this book, and what are my reasons for my reaction, my response to it. Like the racist jokes, the actual content stays the same no matter how many times its told or who its told to. It’s the relationship between the audience and the content that is mutable and where the meaning comes from. Taking it a step further, I laugh because what I’m reading (I tell myself) is satire, it’s a conventional genre rendered in a way to artificially provoke a response from an engaged reader. That’s my reaction because I’m a literate white guy. But that’s also terrible. Beatty doesn’t identify as a satirist nor does he consider The Sellout to be satire. What is satire to me or to the Man Booker committee or the National Book Critics Circle, is real fucking life to many of the people who read it that find themselves and their lives depicted therein. If they laugh, their reasons for laughing are very different from my own. The white couple in the club, like me with satire, tell themselves that it’s a joke, they should laugh. But what thought is given to the expense at which the joke comes, particularly with us (white people) as audience? This question can and should be rephrased, devastatingly, about all art made about the expense paid by human beings.

So back to my privilege warning at the beginning. I am a particular kind of audience for The Sellout. I found myself laughing and thinking and surrendering to this text, but I also have to acknowledge that many other people will feel differently about the book, informed by who they are and what they’ve experienced. I surrendered to the text, because there were just some points and passages I didn’t understand. Of course there were cultural and historical references I didn’t get just because I haven’t read the right thing yet or listened to the right music, but I’m talking about more than that. I’m talking about ideas and experiences and questions that the novel presents that I just didn’t get. And I realize that my lack of comprehension is directly linked to my privilege. I don’t understand because I haven’t learned. And I haven’t learned yet because I haven’t had to. This novel reflected for me the gaps in my own education and experience of what America is to all Americans and how I am a part of that America of which I haven’t needed to be entirely cognizant. So for me, this book reflected in me what I didn’t know about a subject that affects all of us every day, though not equally. I wasn’t ready to read this book, but then I have often found I’m not ready for the education I always need to be a better person in this life.