Chapter Three

Kathy Acker: Plagiarism and Adaptation – From Cut- Up to Cut-and-Paste

Many writers have cited Burroughs as an influence, but few have followed his lead to the extent that Kathy Acker did. During her career, she frequently acknowledged her indebtedness to his writing and his ideas. Acker drew extensively on the techniques detailed within The Third Mind, which provided her earliest literary inspiration. This is noted by Peter Wollen, who observes, “it was not one of the master’s more straightforwardly literary works, such as The Naked Lunch, for example, which intrigued her the most, but a much more formally extreme and experimental text” (Scholder et al 2006: 5). Acker herself was open about this fact, and also described how she “used The Third Mind as experiments to teach myself how to write” (Acker 1991: 4). In this chapter, I will consider just how closely she followed the directions contained in The Third Mind in her early writing, using the cut-up method as a way of bridging the gap between prose and poetry, and of exploring issues concerning her personal identity and authorial voice. I will then move on to explore how, as her career progressed, she developed ways of writing that departed from the cut-ups and moved toward a more cut-and-paste collage approach while continuing to expand the principles of the technique to explore notions of intellectual ownership, plagiarism and postmodern culture, with particular focus on Blood and Guts in High School (1984). In the final section, I will examine her writing’s continued evolution, and consider the significance of pirates and piracy, and the question of “myth” in her final novel, Pussy, King of the Pirates (1996). I will also be addressing the way in which the developments in Acker’s later works reflect the ways in which she adapted and evolved her own modes of cutting up narrative. Born in 1948 –although various sources give a range of dates – 152 Shift Linguals

Acker grew up in New York City.1 This uncertainty regarding her age can be seen as representative of Acker’s sustained focus on creating ambiguity and challenging notions of fixed identity. Although she would later return to an academic environment in a teaching capacity, while at college she studied a number of writing courses, all of which she “hated:”

I took a lot of writing courses when I was in college… They were just torture… I reacted in this kind of this radical anti-authority stance, anti-right rules of writing. I started off by saying ‘no’ to everything. My whole identity as a writer was in saying ‘no’, in reacting. So in my first books I refused to rewrite. I wrote as fast as possible. I refused to have any consideration for proper grammar or proper syntax. In a way, [those books] were very easy and what they were was experiments. (Schmieder 1991)

Her description of those early works as experiments is noteworthy, because much of this experimentation was based on the practices detailed in The Third Mind in order to create a discontinuous, cut-up prose style. Having studied classics as an undergraduate at Brandeis University, Acker possessed a knowledge of a range of canonical literary texts, and was therefore “qualified” in academic terms to rebel and experiment. Moreover, her formal education left her disaffected: Avital Ronell suggests that “as far as Acker was concerned... universities have peculiar transmission problems: they transmit stupidity” (Scholder et al 2006: 15), and this led her to write against all she had learned. This involved her endeavouring to relinquish authorial control, “a commitment to the avant-garde tradition” (Scholder et al 2006: 5) and the distribution of her writing in serial form as part of a Mail Art network. Leaving home at 18, she worked in a sex show and became involved in the New York art scene, and in time began writing. Discounting Politics, her self-published collection of “little prose poems” (Acker 1991: 5) and the unpublished Rip-Off Red, both of which she subsequently dismissed, saying of the latter “very luckily it has never been published” (Acker 1991: 2) her first “novel”, The

1 Some sources state that Acker was born in 1944, although the majority give her year of birth as 1948, the date given in the publication details of her books. However, the Mark/Space biography online at http://www.euro.net/mark- space/bioKathyAcker.html (consulted 30 January 2004) gives a third alternative of 1945.