Kathy Acker sifts through multitudinous identities and tries on different voices as she recycles Charles Dickens and avoids the shadow of William Burroughs

Kathy Acker’s Great Expectations cannibalises Charles Dickens’s classic novel with experimental abandon. It’s a bold act of literary reappropriation that does away with most of the markers from the original text while nevertheless extracting levels of fresh meaning from what went before. Acker recycles in the purest sense.

First published in 1982, Great Expectations is one of the key works by the late experimental writer. Acker has been too long out of print in the UK, so the Penguin Modern Classics editions of this, Blood and Guts in High School and the New York City in 1979 mini Penguin Modern, are long overdue and more than welcome. They’re a thrilling addition to the literary landscape of today, for Acker was both of and beyond her time. It would seem as if she is having a moment again, surely assisted by Chris Kraus’s non-traditional biography, After Kathy Acker. I suspect it’s a moment that is going to last, with the notion of Acker as one of the great literary avant-garde writers of the late twentieth century sticking around. And rightfully so.

Post-Punk Multitudes

Kathy Acker with William Burroughs

A dedicated follower of William Burroughs, Acker was nevertheless able to get out from under his shadow. She may employ some of the tricks learned from predecessors, but makes them her own with a worldview and approach that is spellbindingly unique. Acker’s search for love and sex, identity and self is particularly slanted, but resonates universally. If the New York post-punk scene looked to Burroughs for inspiration, Acker was able to translate post-punk music into the written word. She captured the exploratory spirit of that time, the uncertainty.

Acker delves into her inner lives with Great Expectations, sometimes manifesting quite closely to ‘Kathy Acker’ on the page, at other times her self is refracted through characters either wholly created or stolen and reconstructed from literature or history. She presents a multitude of I’s.

“I want to be one of these vanguard people, so I disguise myself:”

The colon points towards stories within stories that follow, other lives lived on the page. Great Expectations indeed sees Acker adopt many disguises, but paradoxically the more she disguises herself, the more the reader learns about her. Or at least that might be what the author intended us to believe. Citing art as autobiographical is of course a slippery business. However, take a look at the auto-fiction tendencies of Rachel Cusk (her astonishing Outline trilogy is proof that modernism isn’t dead) or Acker’s biographer Chris Kraus (I Love Dick may be more of a useful critical tool than enjoyable page turner, but then that’s its appeal) and it seems obvious that the novel can take it. Neither is Acker dealing in mundane biographical facts; she is instead sifting through multitudinous identities and trying on different voices – across genders and outside constrictions, searching the cosmos through sex, desire and the written word.

Auto Fiction

Aspiring novelists are often told to write what they know, although not sufficiently fictionalising – a refusal to hide the self – brings with it the implied criticism of a lack of creativity. Of course it is dangerous to assume that an author has necessarily placed their direct experiences within a novel. But when a practitioner as fearless, instinctive and skilled as Kathy Acker comes along, then all bets are off as to a simplistic, understandable-by-all reading. Consider Naked Lunch by William Burroughs for a moment. It’s a novel of immense cosmic reach, yet feels deeply personal at the same time, however masked those personal elements may be. Acker achieves a similarly thrilling balance in Great Expectations.

“I am only an obsession”, one of her narrators declares. “Don’t talk to me otherwise. Don’t know me. Do you think I exist?” Acker is unknowable even to herself. She needs others to know her, even if it’s on a superficial level, as a vanguard person known within particular cultural spheres. She continues with a warning: “Watch out. Madness is a reality, not a perversion.” With this beautifully perverted, slightly mad novel, Acker explored shifting identities and attempted to locate her place within the literary canon.

Great Expectations by Kathy Acker is published by Penguin Modern Classics.

Stewart Gardiner
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