Blood Guts and Cancer

Not since reading Georges Batallie's Story of the Eye have I encountered a work of literature that so masterfully combines sexually (deviant) explicit content and a psychological/sociological commentary on youth, culture, sexuality, gender, economics, art etc. Acker's "novel" (I put novel in quotes here because although I think novel is a useful descriptor for Blood and Guts in High School I think it could easily be called many other things: poem, collage, drawing, cut-up, remix) has been called post-punk feminist writing, but is undeniable surrealist heavy (like Bataille) and therefore can be placed in modernism but was written in 1978 and therefore may be classified in the postmodern. So maybe Acker's work is a surrealist post-punk postmodern modernist "novel" that isn't even really a novel. Maybe (most likely) it doesn't really matter. I wanted to play that out so I could see for myself how Acker's (Burroughs's) cut-up method, collage and the melting together of genres and literary movements work terribly hard to resist classification. Why is that counter intuitive? Maybe because we are encountering material we have experienced before, we have certain predisposed expectations about what they are so we assume we know what we're dealing with. But the reality is that the works that are made new (Hawthorne, Mallarme etc) cannot be themselves anymore instead they get stuck happily in an infinite circle of definition and classification. By accumulating more and more influences/playgarisms, Acker's writing is more and more difficult to pin down and talk about as a whole; yet, the unifying element, the narrative, serves also as the map for readers to navigate her collage (literally and figuratively).

Acker seems to jump head first into the sewers of the psyche, bringing back with her a collage dripping with moral dilapidation, extreme violence and cancers of every variety. I know from reading a brief biography on Acker that she herself died of cancer and the anxiety surrounding cancer was a common theme in many of her works. I started thinking about how much cancer, collage and cut-ups all have in common (in addition to their consonant sounds.) They are all new entities grown and derived from the changing and/or destruction of an original entity and they are usually unexpected. Although Acker's cut-ups and collages are controlled, they feel and take on airs of being uncontrolled, which is of course a cancerous characteristic. If her technique is cancer-like, then perhaps the book itself should be thought of as a body- one that has been sliced, manipulated, penetrated, marked, mutilated and appropriated.

Before he is mentioned by name and by title of his work, Mallarme entered this book. As soon as I saw varying font sizes, he appeared and Acker was at the very least in dialogue with him. Her decision to remix One Toss of the Dice seems appropriate even if only thinking about the Janey's narrative. Both works are violent in form and content and it seems impossible for a reader to not wonder whether Janey could have been them if the dice had been thrown differently. My apologies for simplifying Mallarme and Acker for that matter, in this way. More on this in class...I feel as though I am taking on too much in just one post.

Before I end this post, I wanted to include the following relevant links:

Remix/Reenactment of Blood and Guts in High School by video artist Laura Parnes

Mallarme's One Toss of the Dice Never will Abolish Chance on Ubu