In this posting, I am going to write a book report. Its topic is the novel “Blood and Guts in High School” by Kathy Acker and its method will be vertical, in the sense that I am going to try to clarify some of the novel’s deeper concerns. Vertical criticism is the sort I am most comfortable with because it was the sort I wrote as a student.
The protagonist of “Blood and Guts in High School”, first published in 1978, is a girl named Janey who we find at the beginning of the story (age 10) involved in a seriously claustrophobic relationship with her father, who is also her lover, and who wants to leave Janey for another woman. ‘To find herself’ Janey flees the Mexican village of Merida for the East Village of New York City where she falls in with a bunch of delinquents called the Mosquitos, works at a delicatessan, and fucks around a lot, requiring her to have a number of abortions. Part way through the book, Janey is abducted by a couple “of teenage hoods” who sell her to a Persian slave trader, one Mr Linker, who locks Janey in a room and comes in twice a day to teach her how to be a whore. In her spare time, Janey amuses herself by writing a book report on Nathaniel Hawthorrn’s The Scarlet Letter and by translating poetry by Sextus Propertius. Succumbing perhaps to Stockholm Syndrome, Janey falls in love with the slave-trader.
Graduated at last from her locked room, Janey hits the streets, only to discover that she has developed cancer. Rather than kill herself, she buys a one-way ticket to Tangiers where she falls in with (famous French writer) Jean Genet, describing to him the times she fucked around with (former US president) Gerald Carter. She and Genet hang out, visit brothels, get arrested and then, when a revolution occurs, escape from gaol. Janey parts company from Genet and quite suddenly dies.
If this were a high-school book report, I would now say “Something I find interesting about this novel is…”
Something I find interesting about this novel are the relationships between Janey and the other characters. The sequence of men that begins with her father is comprised entirely of substitute father figures, authority figures whom Janey loves or at least needs, but who fail to love her back – Genet, the most admirable of them, being homosexual. Because these father-figures are generally unsympathetic, Janey’s love for them must be seen as pathological. To be sure, Janey has Daddy Issues: Freud would observe Janey’s low self-esteem and diagnose her with an unresolved Electra Complex. In Janey’s World, men are all-powerful and construct the reality in which she lives. To pick a quote more at least at random from the book:
“Genet doesn’t know how to be a woman. He thinks all he has to do to be a woman is slobber. He has to do more… Women aren’t just slaves. They are whatever their men want them to be. They are made, created by men. They are nothing without men.”
Male domination, in Acker’s novel, is a priori fact. Not social conditions, nor some kind of historical situation, engender this domination. It is woven right into the fabric of the reality– insofar at least as this reality is revealed through Janey’s consciousness. There is no way for Janey to oppose this power structure and so it does not surprise that at the end of the novel she simply slips quietly out death’s door.
It is instructive to compare Acker’s pessimistic diagnosis with other feminist writings. The simplest solution to the problem of male-domination is to reject men entirely –thus, perhaps, the purest form of feminist writing is lesbian. Alternatively, the feminist writer can choose to disempower the male love-interest so that there is parity between him and the protagonist. This is the strategy adopted by Helen Garner in “Monkey Grip”, a novel that describes the relationship between Nora and Javo, an unemployed drug addict some years younger than her. Similarly, in “Jane Eyre”, Jane and Mr Rochester are only able to achieve their happy ending after Rochester is blinded in a fire. “Blood and Guts in High School” can adopt neither tactic. The intensity of Janey’s self-loathing precludes such a resolution. Janey defines herself as a victim and any to ameliorate this status would undermine her sense of self.
Another thing I found interesting about the novel is its treatment of love and sex. Janey’s need for love stems from a feeling of Lack; in the symbolic economy of the book, her deficiency is symbolised by her vagina. Janey uses sex in order to compensate for the lack of love in her life. Sex, however, is a poor substitute for ‘true love’ and so, although the book contains many sex scenes, its dominant mood is one of sexual frustration. Perhaps the world in which Janey lives is too thoroughly permeated by gender inequality to allow her to enjoy the recognition and affirmation of ‘true love’. Or perhaps her self-image is so poor that she cannot even conceptualise such a love.
“Blood and Guts in High School” is a confronting book. It contains a number of sketches of cocks and cunts. These are not included to titillate but to shock. Its representation of female sexual desire is also ‘shocking’: Acker’s intends to attack a male ideology that marginalizes female sexual desire so as to treat women as objects. Her project is political:
“EVERY POSITION OF DESIRE, NO MATTER HOW SMALL, IS CAPABLE OF PUTTING TO QUESTION THE ESTABLISHED ORDER OF A SOCIETY
However, at its heart, the book is ambiguous. Acker ascribes emancipatory power to female sexual desire but the objects of this desire –men- are the agents of oppression. Sex is simultaneously an expression of freedom and a placebo that diverts attention from the real ills of society. Desire contradicts itself at its origin. Acker does not show how to escape from this dilemma.
By way of conclusion, I would like to say a few words about this book-report. Its method is mainly vertical in that it presumes to clarify the underlying thematics of the novel. However , it contains a number of observations that do not strictly bear on the novel, such as the observation that ‘true love’ involves ‘recognition and affirmation’, ideas that do not I think feature in the Acker’s text. These ideas were stimulated in my mind by my reading, and constitute a horizontal movement. This is the difference between vertical and horizontal criticism. The former is captive to the originating text; the latter uses the originating text as a springboard to talk about other subjects. I shall say more about this in later postings.