| Title | : | Empire of the Senseless |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0802131794 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780802131799 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 240 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1988 |
Empire of the Senseless Reviews
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SUMMARY OF AUTHOR, BOOK NOW
kathy acker is the vicious successor to william s. burroughs: twisted master of the cut-up technique, postmodern doyenne, a romantic and nihilistic and clear-eyed uber-feminist, punk dyke (kinda), giddy regurgitator of scifi/horror/erotica tropes, transgressive misanthrope, a sophisticated and shamelessly political word-terrorist disguised as a reductive, barbaric, apolitical anarchist. Empire of the Senseless is, in my opinion, her uneasy and imperfect masterwork. if you are no fan of hyper-aggressive language, atrocity, crudely violent and savagely sexual scenarios, and the complete breakdown of sentence structure and characterization... turn, turn away. but if the deconstruction of narrative and meaning is your thing, if crossing and warping boundaries and genres and 'normal' emotional states of mind are fun things for you, then this is your book, my unstable friend.
some postmodernism can be read and enjoyed almost as a quaint joke (i'm thinking of much of the po-mo of the 80s and 90s) while other examples of the style are seen as nearly unscalable mountains of challenging language, challenges most folks are disinterested in even attempting. acker's work falls squarely in the latter category. it is almost nonsensical to describe the narrative: two horrible but at times sympathetic, at times victimized protagonists murder and rape a bloody trail across a futuristic, william gibson-style europe, towards and away from each other, and beyond. this is a world where algerians finally rule france, a world where wars are fought with sound, a world where lovers long for each other's deaths as the most clear way to get in touch with their own yearning but empty cores. the book is not about the narrative itself: this is postmodernism after all. the book is about illustrating the Personal Made Political, it is about dismantling known systems and regenerating them, to form a structure that describes states of mind rather than actual states of being. it is the kind of novel that will detail violent subjugation and mutilation, and then will turn around and blithely include entire passages from Huckleberry Finn and Neuromancer, verbatim (and to much official controversy). it perverts both the signifier and the signified, the semio and the text(e). plus it has an almost-sweet and almost-hopeful ending. read at your own risk!
SOLIPSISTIC PERSONAL NARRATIVE AHEAD
i went to college at uc san diego, a sunny and unremarkable place known at the time for its nice weather, easy-going atmosphere, marine biology programs, and free beer & live music during the weekly Friday Hump Day. when i heard that acker was going to be a visiting professor for a semester, i practically became unstable in my excitement - how was it possible that such a writer could suddenly be so accessible, in my placid and pleasant environment? i needed to be a part of that class! but i knew my chances were practically nil - i wouldn't even get on the waitlist, being only in my 3rd year. still, i showed up, and the class was jam-packed to bursting, as expected. acker did something unusual: she gave everyone a writing exercise on the spot, one where we detailed a recent dream, then gave us a half-hour to write it and turn it in. she said she would personally choose who would be in the class based on that writing sample. she told us that if chosen, we should also be prepared to read our tale aloud and be open to the responses of our peers.
so i did what i had to do: i lied. i quickly imagined the most fucked-up dream that i could think of: a sexy tale of me and my brother, sadist and masochist, lovers, serial killers in training, with a central scene in which my loving bro tied me up, covered me in glue, and then left me for dead... and thus opened my eyes to an exciting new world. needless to say, my dream-story was not a hit with the class after i read it to them a week later. they thought it was weird and disgusting; it was. but i could care less: it got me into the class! how could it not? i jerry-built it to her unspoken specifications, those that dominated her own writings: perverse sexuality, brutal violence, the destruction of various paradigms and the transforming of those paradigms into a new, more sinister and visceral kind of structure.
later, after kathy and i became more deeply acquainted, i admitted that i had made that first dream up, just to gain access to her class. and i didn't even have a brother! i remember her looking at me as if i had only now noticed that the sky was up and the earth was down. i forget exactly what she said, but it was something along the lines of No Shit, That Was Obvious - And Why Would I Care? that's when i truly understood what her writing was about, and it was not about reality nor even what we construed as our personal place in that reality. it is about what we then make of that reality! and how we can destroy and recreate it anew, over and over again - endeavors that are actually not in opposition, but should and do exist side-by-side.
COMMEMORATION MEME
kathy acker, rest in peace. you were an awesome lady, a thrilling although brief companion, an amazing and challenging writer, and a profound influence on my world-view. you taught me so much! -
AN HOMAGE:
The Dreams of Children
[A Paro-mage, (Sort of) in the Style of Kathy Acker]
As long as I can remember, I have wanted to be a pirate.
My parents never supported me in my ambition. My mother was even less supportive than my father. When I told her, she asked me what I thought I would do if I was a pirate.
I said that I wanted to murder, rape and pillage townsfolk in seaside towns, all the way from Tweed Heads to Hervey Bay.
“Where did you get that idea?” She asked me. “In books,” I replied. Before that, I had wanted to be a writer.
My mother thought of herself as a feminist, but she never supported me in my dreams. “Girls can't be pirates. They can't rape people.” She declared, thereby refuting all of her slogans about equal rights. She always had an argument that would defeat my right to be equal. How could women achieve equality, if girls couldn't be pirates? How could I be equal if I couldn't even get a tattoo?
My mother always stood in my way. That's why I hated her. Mothers are the reason feminism has never worked. They are always trying to preserve harmony rather than rock the boat and achieve equality. Harmony above equality.
Deep down, I know she wanted equality, at least for herself. Every Friday night, she would argue with my father, until he told her to shut up, and he hit her. Every Saturday morning, she would arrive in the kitchen with a bloody nose, a bruised cheek and bloodshot eyes.
As much as I hated my mother, I hated my father more. I resolved that, if he hit my mother once again, I would kill him. I even bought a dagger, just like one pirates would have if they thought a sword or a cutlass was overkill. As it turned out, my brother killed our father before I got to. We were both angry when our father murdered our mother, but she had it coming to her. Neither of us did anything when we found her dead on the floor of the lounge room. We knew it had to be dad who was responsible. Mum would never commit suicide, even though she talked about it all the time, as if she was threatening my father, “If you hit me again, I'll kill myself and you (though not necessarily in that order).”
My brother didn't kill my father, until one day my father fucked me in the bed where he used to fuck my mother. My brother stood at the door, watching silently. My father didn't even realise he was there. He probably didn't hear the whoosh of the baseball bat that split his head open like a watermelon. His jaw dropped onto my chest, where his blood pooled between my juvenile breasts.
My brother went into the bathroom and returned with the shower curtain. He put it on the carpet in the bedroom, like it was an episode of “Dexter". Then he pulled dad off the bed, and tried to position him in the middle of the curtain. He rolled our dead dad up in the curtain, even though blood was still leaking out of one end (the dead head end).
My brother didn't mind that there was so much evidence of his crime. It wasn't as if he had an alibi, and could get off the charge when the police arrived. He might as well confess straight away, for all the chance he had of being exonerated. As it turned out, some lawyer got my brother off the murder charge, though I had to stand up in court and give evidence that my father had fucked me right before my brother killed him. Anybody in court would have thought that we were a dysfunctional family or something.
Anyway, now that my parents were both dead, there was nothing to prevent me (their construct become my own construct, finally) from becoming a pirate. It's been equal rights all the way, ever since they died. There was nothing left to obey, except my own desire. Nobody. Not even my parents. The I who was acting was no longer theirs. I(t) was mine. The eye that perceived and the I who desired lived in the same body, separated from my mother at birth and again at death. And my father.
Parents just get in the way of their children’s dreams. And their desires. No matter how much they try to fuck you. Or fuck you up, your mum and dad.
I can't distinguish between my memories of dreams, waking actions, and what I've read and been told. For they're all memories...
Annabella Lwin and Matthew Ashman from Bow Wow Wow in Worlds End Pirate clothing designed by Vivienne Westwood & Malcolm McLaren, 1981
A CRITIQUE:
Psychotic Whirlwind
I wish I had read “Empire of the Senseless" before
“Pussy, King of the Pirates", the latter of which was published last.
“Empire" delineates many of the themes and obsessions, that Kathy Acker subsequently fleshed out in “Pussy". Because it is so preliminary, it struck me as inferior to the later novel. However, this might not be fair, because it is like comparing a sketch with a finished work.
I wrote the above homage when I had only read about a quarter of “Empire". After that, I couldn't wait for the novel to finish, or somehow materialise into something more substantial. Kathy seemed to have thrown a whole lot of ideas onto the page, in no particular sequence and in pursuit of no special outcome.
We get Paris, London, down and out bums and hobos, pirates, cops, sailors, prostitutes, tattooists, bikers, Algerian revolutionaries and incestuous family members, all deposited onto the page as if by some psychotic whirlwind.
Abhorrent Relationships
There are two main narrators: Abhor (who, we are told, is female, part robot and part black, apparently from outer space, though her robotic and alien qualities aren't explored) and Thivai (Abhor’s narcissistic male partner, who repeatedly leaves her and returns unexpectedly). Neither of these names is explained, although the former clearly suggests “abhorrent". Half-way through the novel, Abhor confesses to her own alienation:
“I felt like a mutant in such a social, socialised city [as Paris], but I've always felt as if I don't belong. In this city, I didn't belong absolutely because I'd never tricked, for sexuality was too devastating for me, and because I'm used to having Thivai around so that I can hate his guts.”
For her, a sexual relationship is no mere romance. It's an opportunity to discover and critique the flaws of the other sex:
“He might have or might not have been my boyfriend. He cared about me and he didn't care about me. Since I gave and he took, everything was about him. Since everything was about him, everything he thought about me was true of him. Since I remember I was nothing, my memory is nothing.”
Male Narcissism
The two narratives don't really coalesce in any fashion. Chapters just begin and end. Abhor does give us a brief summary of her own life, almost incidentally. She describes her life as:
“Stealing from a government, an evil one, as governments go, killing a boss, as bosses go, a revolution, blood upon blood on every level of human existence, as blood flows...”
And that's without mentioning the limitless number of rapes that she has endured, both inside and outside her family.
Needless to say, if Thivai wants to be either a pirate or a mercenary, they both have to pursue the same goals, as if they are shared goals of their partnership:
“The particulars of this partnership, a partnership of life and death, were that at every possible moment we undermined, subverted, and feared one another...Our partnership was adversarial...There was no escape for either of us from the reality of each of our attacks...Perhaps I was remembering heterosexuality...No wonder heterosexuality a bit resembles rape.”
Abhor writes a letter in which she says, "[Men] are always fucking deciding what reality is and collaborating about these decisions...I don't know what reality is. I'm so unsure, tentative, tenuous, lonely, uncertain from loneliness, anguished, sad that I'm not certain enough to fight the decisions I should.”
The Language of Love (and Disgust)
Language is inadequate to repair this type of relationship:
“The demand for an adequate mode of expression is senseless. Then why is there this searching for an adequate mode of expression? Was I searching for a social and political paradise?”
Here, this paradise is supposed to be “a world which is beautiful, a society which wasn't just disgust". In “Pussy", paradise was the pirate life. In both novels, it could also be/have been a relationship with another woman:
“Was it possible that someday – someday – I would hold naked in my arms, and continue to hold and continue to hold, pressed close to my body, a woman on whose femininity and masculine strength I could lean, trusting, whose mettle and daring would place her so high in my esteem that I would long to throw myself at her feet and do as she wished?”
Alternatively, paradise might only be found in language or literature. Perhaps, paradise can never be more than a fiction?
Discipline or Anarchy (Amidst the Paris Ashes)
In pre-revolutionary Paris, conventional society had “descended into nihilism,...descended deeper than nihilism into the grey of yuppy life (the worship of commodities, the belief that there is nothing left but commodities,... [and turned] to the surfaces of class race money for reality...).”
It's no wonder that a social and political revolution had to occur, even if the sexual revolution had failed. Still, there's no sense that post-revolutionary Paris in Kathy's novel is much of an improvement on the old. Certainly, it's not the social and political paradise Abhor had hoped for!
PER VERSE:
Paris (After the Revolution)
[In the Words of Kathy Acker]
Outside, next to
The purple steps,
Roses stood in
The witch-like winds.
Car lights flashed blue
Along the bay.
There was nowhere,
For me, to go.
In Memory of Dr. No
[Apologies to Luna]
Ursula Andress emerged from the sea
In a pearl white bikini
Holding a seashell in each hand
In some old James Bond movie
Made by Saltzman and Broccoli.
Hand in hand on the edge of the sand
She walked with Sean Connery,
Singing underneath the mango tree.
That bikini was extraordinary.
SOUNDTRACK:
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Some thoughts on revolutionary language:
The part of our being (mentality, feeling, physicality) which is free of all control let's call our 'unconscious'. Since it's free of control, it's our only defense against institutionalized meaning, institutionalized language, control, fixation, judgement, prison.
Ten years ago, it seemed possible to destroy language through language: to destroy language that normalizes and controls by cutting that language. Nonsense would attack the empire-making (empirical) empire of language, the prisons of meaning.
But this nonsense, since it depended on sense, simply pointed back to the normalizing institutions.
What is the language of the 'unconcious'? (If this ideal unconscious or freedom doesn't exist: simply pretend that it does, use fiction, for the sake of survival, for all of our survival.) Its primary language must be taboo, all that is forbidden. Thus an attack on the institutions of prison via language would demand the use of language or languages that are which aren't acceptable, which are forbidden. Language, on one level, constitutes a series of codes and social and historical agreements. Nonsense doesn't per se break down the codes; speaking precisely that which the codes forbid breaks the codes.
I've been reading Acker somewhat chronologically but here I jumped ahead to a point where her source material informs, but is much more submerged in, her revolutionary and fragmented narrative, much moreso than in her early "plagiarism" works. ANd we get moments of seeming direct address like the above, glimpses, amid the textual devastation and horrific parenting, of a very earnest struggle to tear down the broken institutions of literation.
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I taught this and managed to traumatize a few students, light up the minds of a few more, and mildly intrigue the rest.
Acker is one of the brainiest writers of graphic violence that there is. Are there others this violent and this brainy?
A more internally metafictional novel than her earlier novels. Fascinating. The violence of it gave way by the end to an attempt at resolution. As my friend Allison and I used to joke about the work of another radical feminist author (my beloved Angela Carter), it's not a subtle book. Men teaching the woman to write in her own blood, then telling her what version of their histories she should write. But as my husband likes to remind me that I have said, subtlety is overrated. Especially when it comes to radical feminist politics.
I really liked it. -
GET RID OF MEANING. YOUR MIND IS A NIGHTMARE THAT HAS BEEN EATING YOU: NOW EAT YOUR MIND.
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Continuing in my project of reading all of Kathy Acker's work in reverse chronological order...
I seem to recall reading an interview with Kathy soon after Empire of the Senseless was published in which the interviewer noted that the novel had much more of a narrative thread than her previous works and Acker admitting that, yeah, it was the first time she'd really thought much about narrative when composing a novel. Interesting--since I'm going in reverse order--to note that the strategy stands out even when reading in the other direction. I have to say that I think she was smart to go back to a more abstract, section-by-section style for her last three novels, as here the strategy seems to weaken rather than help what I find most fascinating and unique about her work. I missed some of the more obvious appropriations in this one. I guess William Gibson is in there somewhere but apparently I didn't find Necromancer memorable enough to pick up on it. I noted a splash of Huck Finn toward the end but not enough to really care about, so this novel stands on its own, much more than her other works, as pure Acker invention and social commentary.
All I want to say about that is that the novel was written in 1988--as was Running Wild the J. G. Ballard novel I just finished the other day--and that, after eight years of Reaganomic horror, the obvious beginning of the dissolution of the American Middle Class, and the invention of homelessness that those things created, this novel really hits the zeitgeist of the ruinous state of the measured socialist capitalism that seemed to offer that brave new world of greater wealth equality and prosperity for the masses that flourished from the end of WWII until the mid-'70s. The world, being squeezed by wealth, privilege, and racism suddenly called out for resistance or revolution, but revolution is dirty, violent, and pointless--as this novel so vividly makes us aware--and it didn't happen and we're today even more mired in a cold class war (I write in 2018--just in case the world survives Trump and global warming long enough for my context to matter). Just in case you're not old enough to have seen the day-to-day horrors of the dissolution of utopian dreams in the 1980s, you might consider that when reading this novel. It's really spot on what we needed to hear then, even if it included the above-mentioned double-bind, paralyzing the world into the inaction and acquiescence that we've yet to shake off. (It's gonna take a lot more than a few teenagers standing up for stricter gun laws to fix this shit, I fear.)
Still, necessity of message aside, this is Acker at her literary weakest, right on the cusp between the brilliance of her early experiments and the polish of her last three more personal and gut-wrenching novels, in which she returns to more obvious appropriations to explore her own psyche's rebellion against the classist and racist world of the fathers that she observes, isolates, and destroys through revolution here--replaced, in the end, with a microcosm of the very same toxic masculinity that destroyed the mother state and a more caring capitalism in the first place, in the revolutionaries themselves. The critique is spot on, but doesn't make for a great, or particularly optimistic--despite the novel's last line--tale.
The thread of which I speak is the classic romance narrative of two lovers, together at first then split up to have episodic adventures as they try to re-unite. I kind of like that Kathy returned to the Ancient Greek romance's form. It is, in some ways, our Anglo-European heritage and the underpinning of many a great tale in the Western cannon since the second or third century. And the indifference of the sexes to one another in a toxic relationship in which every gesture is a performance of power undercuts the form beautifully. But, well, it's just not quite as interesting as Acker's writing through other texts to find new truths in them. Well, to me anyway.
And what review would be complete without the great Mekons song inspired by the novel, and which lead to a great collaboration between them and Acker subsequently?
https://youtu.be/MbeHPXX-qrI -
Unconventional in the extreme. The force of anarchy is strong in this one. Acker's attitude never vacates the page. Politeness is not part of her vocab. Taking cues from Will Burroughs, she burrows into the heart of the American post-apocalyptic scene - part real, part extrapolated. What this book gains in experimental panache it loses in its stilted anti-lyricism. That may or may not make sense. Her style is difficult to describe. Above all, it is uniquely discomfiting. And that by design. Everything oozes. In a world where people and things melt together in one squamous mélange of sputum-textured rainbow juice, each sentence serves to fling up a finger at someone or something. Seemingly motivated by unquenchable anger, Acker simply fails to engage me in her protests. Isolating each sentence reveals a lack of clarity. This to a fault. As a whole, the chapters gel into protoplasmic dreamy sequences of x-rated, sadness-inducing episodes of baggage-wielding, history-haunted characters, all bearing passing resemblance to Modern Man. She proceeds by rhythm, much like her literary precursor cut up perfectly intelligible narration to construct books which became harrowing monsters.
While I may read more Acker, I will never again pick up this book. I did not get past 160 pages, yet I feel I got the gist. It could all be boiled down to a repetitive, lucid-gibberish scream. Searing, unpleasant, but effective at conveying the senseless empire, an interpretation of an inner universe devoid of happiness. -
Transgressive fiction classic. I read it for the amazing style. She breaks every conceivable rule of grammar, barely builds the characters, chooses words to shock with lots of hard profanity, includes graphic violence and twisted sex, plays on words in truly cool ways, uses alliteration like a blunt instrument, punctuates the writing with word-art that plays with the typesetting in a way that would make e.e. cummings jealous, creates a jarring cityscape of a future Paris in ruins, taken over by Algerian revolutionaries, with most of those left the wretched, the prostitutes and the rats. In-your-face treatment of decadent, truly sick, sex and violence. All to create a feeling reminiscent of the music of the day (scream-laced punk--this was the 80s) that rails against the day's outrages (AIDS, Reagan and the CIA being favorite targets).
She has captured the lyricism and issues of her day in the way that Ginsberg and Kerouac wrote in the spirit of jazz against a conformist 1950s America.
It left me with an anger at the senselessness it railed against, but also an appreciation of how she transfigured it into art.
Not like anything I've ever read--a must-read for anyone who enjoys writers who, to use a phrase from the day, attempt to shatter the glass of the panopticon under which we are imprisoned.
If you expect traditional character and plot development, don't bother. She spits on those bourgeois expectations.
And somehow still gives you a love story that ends with hope for the characters and for humanity: "...one day, maybe, there'ld be a human society in a world which is beautiful, a society that wasn't just disgust." Yeah, I'm still hoping for that. -
The Back Story
At a bookshop in Hood River, OR, I found the following blurb attributed to David Foster Wallace on the reverse cover of the paperback of Mark Leyner's My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist:
"My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist will blow away your expectation of what late-model literature has to be. Unified by obsessions too eerie not to be real, this gorgeous rearrangement of our century's mental furniture is testimony to a new talent of Burroughs/Coover/Acker scale."
I converted to Team Leyner. Then I walked over to the A's and carried Empire of the Senseless to the desk.
The Reader Response Review
Excellent. Dense. Tough. Violent. Where did you go, Kathy? We need more women writing this kind of literature. -
Quite different from her other works in that it shows a future world and is more reminiscent of William Burroughs and provides a kind of surrealistic sensory overload. Definitely worth a shot if you're an Acker fan, though it does feel a lot less personal than her other books.
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Conflicted about this book but ultimately gave it four stars. I love the setting and the character Abhor, as well as an Acker novel with a bit of a conventional plot, but was a bit put off by the way Acker has some sort of ridiculous contempt towards Abhor, the best character in the book. Like classic Acker, it inevitably leaves you divided—which I believe is always her goal.
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CW: everything
Closer to the beginning of my read of this, if initial impressions had continued, I would have no doubt started this review with one of my trite superlatives, like calling this "punk as fuck" or some such, and I'm very glad this book put me in my place before my dumb ass could go through with that, because such a careless shorthand would do a huge disservice to what this damn thing is to the point it'd be borderline insulting. "Empire of the Senseless" is at no point a piece that can be squared down into any one-size-fits-all peg, and no review of it should reflect it in such a misleading way. Because, holy shit, this is like nothing else I've ever read, and I'd like to think at this point I'm pretty accustomed to fiction that challenges me and propels my understanding of the medium [and storytelling as a whole] forward. "Empire of the Senseless" throws out any binaries I could reduce it to, and with it, my ability to talk about it without sounding like an asshat, because as a literary critic I suck, and Kathy Acker is vastly more adept at conveying this through its own existence as art that anything I could say would only be dim extrapolations from a text much superior to my ramblings. But this is the albatross that hangs over the neck of every reviewer of any work of media, so I will just have to swallow my pride and accept my infinite mediocrity in this regard.
So what is it [at least at my baseline acceptable level of describing it?] The closest thing I can think of that the general public would have at least some frame of reference for is Burroughs' "Naked Lunch", and indeed the cut-up fragmentary method of writing is there as well as a high abundance of page-by-page brutality and apocalyptic surrealism, but while literary threads undeniably link the two, Acker's approach is much different, and dare I say more successfully subversive. Her act of lifting text from other works entirely and incorporating it into the structure of her own has been long documented for its controversy, and is still pertinent in our world of increasingly suffocating IP laws and the devastating effects on art through as occurs when "stealing" is defined only with respect to its market value, but it's far from the only thing that makes this book such a radical text.
This novel is informed so boldly and inescapably from the political apparatus surrounding it that Kathy Acker's audacity in the places she goes here to paint this dystopic nightmare-adventure is remarkable by itself. People will tell you that unignorably political writing is a sign of poor writing, that political subjects should be left to the realm of news cycles and not the world of storytelling. Kathy Acker not only rejects this notion entirely, she spits on the very idea in a way bolder than any contemporary author I've read. Because for Acker, the personal, and thus the whole of human identity - in all its non-binary, ever-shifting, ever-expanding-and-contracting scope - is politics at its core. We cannot escape from "politics" anywhere, because the material world surrounding us and the ramifications of the societies we inhabit and consciously/unconsciously enable, structures that fuck with us down to a level that might as well be molecular, are everywhere, at all times, and we have to inhabit them no matter how hard we fight to make something better, while we die and bleed and suffer under the boots of an elite class who doesn't give a shit about us, especially the less white, able bodied and cishet you are. The oppressed fight boldly just to make it to the next day in the real world, so why the fuck should bold engagement with these "political" subjects be any different in fiction, in art? As exemplified through aforementioned IP laws whose manifestations under capitalism betray the thieving police state at its heart, art is among our cultural substructures most evidently wounded by this ouroboros of the profit incentive, so what else could there be but political art [even to creative cowards who try to claim their work as "apolitical", smugly thinking themselves above the very systems that inform their identities]? In the middle of the narrative, Acker stops to make the direct meta statement that language which shocks and offends the primary institutions of power is not only one of the most powerful tools that can be used within the framework of art and story, but a necessity for art as a whole if it is to be at all effective in combating the "normalizing institutions", as she says.
"What is the language of the 'unconscious'? (If this ideal unconscious or freedom doesn't exist: simply pretend that it does, use fiction, for the sake of survival, for all of our survival.) Its primary language must be taboo, all that is forbidden. Thus an attack on the institutions of prison via language would demand the use of language or languages that aren't acceptable, which are forbidden. Language, on one level, constitutes a series of codes and social and historical agreements. Nonsense doesn't per se break down the codes; speaking precisely that which the codes forbid breaks the codes".
"Empire" is as clear a case for the necessity of subversion of the political apparatus through art as anything, it is a total triumph of successfully taking the world to task [of the Reagan era, and all of these deep-rooted institutions before and beyond] because of this precise way that Acker uses the medium of literature, whose substance is language. For me this book reaffirms that those who shame artists into avoiding engaging directly and bloodily with these topics are directly upholding a deeply fascist rhetoric of control, by telling those who exist inevitably under their traumatic systems that they are not allowed to strike back in a way that is among their most effective defenses against the daily insults and wounds they must contend with. I do not think that art can be Revolutionary in the sense that it can by itself enable radical change [nor do I think Acker believed this] on a collective scale, but I think the point being made is that art is a sword and shield, that it can push us through the fight and onward to something better - not the weaponry itself that cuts away the roots but the actual effort of the laborer, though the weaponry is by no means useless. We see this manifested in the novel itself - because this is shocking and truly countercultural art, it is alive and has weight, it effects and teaches and imparts meaning and raw feeling in a way only art is capable of. That's why art and fiction endures, and why works like this are timeless, because there is no other tool we can use to survive in this world that has remotely the same properties as art does, even if it might not effect direct change the most materially.
And so Acker is not afraid to plumb depths most writers would fear to tread, not only in subject matter and story but in the novel's very composition itself. It is postmodern, in the extreme in fact, if you think of something, especially the more fucked up it is, it's probably here somewhere. While there is a central plot framework to be found here, it's thrown into a whirling torrent of digressions, horrifyingly offensive language and hallucinatory flights of fancy and fucking [almost exclusively of the sort that would give the Marquis de Sade a run for his money], of words copied from other novels, of mutilated syntax and tortured typing errors, of heartbreaking forays into stories of broken homes and violent parents and examinations of the people at the margins; of philosophy and political theory, prose that reads like poetry, poetry that reads like prose; explorations of colonialism and religions destroyed by imperialism can be followed immediately by twisted indulgences of ostensibly genre-oriented fiction such as in the novel's approaches toward sci-fi, dystopian lit and adventure stories, before becoming hardcore pornography or just total schlock. And then some. Nothing is binary, nothing is fixed including gender or identity, characters in this novel seem to glide from body to body and mind to mind, they are man and woman at once and also neither, Abhor and Thivai and also everyone and no one. Because to fit anything in this book into a box would defeat the purpose, it is unbound and wild and free, no matter how dark it gets [and it goes blacker than pitch].
But the beating heart of Acker's novel is appropriately humanity, it is the burning drive for sheer, raw survival exemplified in Abhor and Thivai, that makes this book so engaging. If it were simply nightmarish nonsense, then its systemic approach wouldn't work nearly as well [as Acker is keen to point out], the impact would be diminished. People, and these characters, suffer, often for no reason, often because suffering is the order of the day in the world we live in, because the world is set up to destroy those who don't fit into the precise mold of the empowered orders. There is revolution and war, waste and senseless violence and disease and disability and addiction and the seemingly insurmountable gaps between men and women, the ill and the well, the poor and the privileged. But none of the struggling is ever worth nothing, no matter how entrenched these characters feel in the wasteful "nothing" surrounding them. The struggling, at this level, should not exist, but unfortunately for us, it does. But the characters here never back down or die, no matter how horrible things get, no matter the awful things people do to them and each other. Through the fluidity of identity, time and structure, and through the specifics of this time period it was written [the book very much feels primarily a statement on the evils of the Reagan era], this is a book that feels like a requiem for the disease of the world we live in and the lives of what could have been, but it also feels like a cry for life in the midst of all of that - there's this idea that humanity is disposed toward continuing and burning on and on no matter how bad things get. The world Acker paints is bleak, full of endless brutality and polluted, industrial waste, but as the ending statement shows us it's never one in which the fight, or not even the fight but just the sheer survival, is ever a hopeless task.
Can I recommend this? Not off the cuff, you really have to be in tune to what Acker is going for here to click with this, and some, maybe even most, people are just not going to be able to meet it on its level at all. And that's fine - no art has to be for everyone, which Acker no doubt understood given the extreme audacity of this work. But this is an extraordinary book, one remarkable both on its own merits and as an unbelievably valuable metatext that shows bare the near limitless potential of the power of art and language to give voice to the wounded; which, if there is such a thing as a primary function of art, it is not something nebulous like "beauty" but instead its capability of reaching out and establishing real connections between people who will never know one another directly, through nothing but the medium of fiction. I won't be forgetting this any time soon, and I'm very happy to know I live in a world where, for as horrible as so much of everything around us is, works like this can exist within it, unlimited and free and answering only to itself and those who will resonate with it. -
I mean I guess it's... poetic? But also like being trapped in someone else's really, really fucked up nightmare. Nigh unreadable!
Sample paragraph:
"Let's fuck on top of this fountain. Splashing the waters of hydro-chloric acid into my nostrils. Daddy. Pull off my fingernails. My back has been carved into roses. You scream that it's not only by you. As if you're alive or as if I'm not dreaming. As if I really possessed you and you really possessed me, we tore off each other's head and ate out the contents, then pecked out the remaining eyes, pulled out the sharks' teeth and sucked opium out of the gums, my vagina was bleeding. And I said to my father, the sailor, 'Let's not be possessed.'"
It's all like that. -
It's taken me over a year to get through this relatively small, difficult book.
As a reader, reading Kathy Acker is infuriating. Especially this text--Blood and Guts in High School benefits from a faster pace, so it reads better. Empire is a mess of words on the page. At times, you feel insulted that you're reading un-words and inconsistent plotlines. As a reader, this is not a good book, no no go away.
As a writer though, and as a thinker, and a lover of the human heart and its godly capacity to create in this world what's born in another, one that's supposedly and otherwise closed off from this one--this novel, Empire of the Senseless, is a bloody fucking geyser of subversion. Maybe Brion Gysin would say of this work, "here is confessional delirium." Maybe not.
I hated reading this spectacular book. Take your time with Kathy. What's your hurry? It's just a stupid book, right? Am I right? -
I was reading this book my senior year of college, along with William Burroughs and Henry Miller. I wound up basing much of my senior thesis art work on parts of this book. I got to meet Kathy at a book signing once and she was an engaging and modest woman. It's a shame she died so young.
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In this post-apocalyptic near-futuristic novel, the Algerians have taken over the Parisians, hearts are empty and violent sex of all kinds (heterosexual, homosexual, no ages disqualified) are frequent and the norm. The story is told from two perspectives: Thivai, a pirate, and Abhor, only part human. They carry on a sometimes-relationship as they attempt to take on the world in their terroristic/punk behaviors.
While Acker clearly had a handle on vision (which she put forth on paper in often horrifying detail), the story purposely had no plot and very little direction, a style of writing I clearly was not in the mindset to read. I never have been much of a fan of William Burroughs and felt that what this was was an updated (published in the late 80s) version of the same thing Burroughs did. The difference being the story was written by a woman, so all the power was in her hands as opposed to just another white male writing basically the same things - if a man says it it is offensive, but if a woman says it it is feminism.
Stream-of-consciousness writing is not as easy to successfully produce as one thinks, and often it is confused to be great writing merely because it is different. I believe that was what Acker was trying to do and might have accomplished if she could only tell an actual story. -
Empire of the Senseless is the 2nd Acker I've read after Blood and Guts in High School, and this comparative heavyweight tome reads like the epic she'd been working up towards. Two terrorists, polysexual Parisian pirate Thivai and anarchist female cyborg Abhor act out a "holocaust of the erotic" on the high seas. Yes it's messy and very much of its Reaganite culture wars time but it's got plenty humour and exuberance going for it. Dive in, the water's lovely.
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A heavy fog of a dream, punctuated by acts of violence, raw language, and humor - Kathy Acker's dystopia is an unflinching look at humanity from its lowest cesspool. Difficult to read at times, and the worst kind of book to read during a depression - Empire of the Senseless is still a brilliant book
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This is my favorite Kathy Acker novel. I just re-read it and what once seemed like a funhouse mirror image of the World we live in just seems like a mirror image of the World we live in. Full of disgust and crumbling under a stinging mist of hatred and misunderstanding.
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I suppose I could call myself a masochist, but I don't think that adequately conveys why I read books by authors I don't like. I think I expect them to get better. Or maybe I miss something. And think I'll find it. And when reading my second Kathy Acker book I did realize I was missing something and I never found it. A sense of direction. A sense of understanding. Kathy Acker lacks much in her writing. I find myself following for a while, but with absence of plot or direction I don't know what I'm reading. Something tangential will come up and she'll discuss how prostitutes are destroying late stage neo liberal capitalism (okay I'm reaching here but bear with me). I stuck it out though because I don't like to give up.
I was though, going to give this book one star, but found that in the last 30 pages Acker made some honest points about the dynamics between men and women. That a woman can never really create because unlike a man she fails to adequately suffer, and not just suffer, but the suffering seems to be pointless violence. While the writing is something I'm not a fan of maybe Acker does have thought provoking ideas. -
This book is horrible. I picked it up because of the story's interesting post-apocalyptic description and the comparisons to Burroughs but NOPE.
Here's a quick excerpt (I'm ruining nothing for you):
"When I got home, which was like every other home, my love was waiting for me. She wasn't dead, yet. She looked like a piece of red and dead meat. It was St Valentine' Day.
She wasn't dead. 'I'm on your meat line now,' I told her.
'You're what I make you,' Abhor said."
This isn't out of context - there is no context. Just god awful. -
GET RID OF MEANING. YOUR MIND IS A NIGHTMARE THAT HAS BEEN EATING YOU: NOW EAT YOUR MIND.
Feels very of a piece with Acker's Don Quixote, not just in her obvious stylistic trademarks of vulgarity and postmodern flourish, characters wondering the world fucking and fighting and hurting and loving with little narrative sense to their actions, no real arcs to be had, just hurt and demented characters lashing out at each other, loving and hating at the same time. The endings even mirror each other; Acker giving the final sentence to wish for a better world, one where the characters would not be abused and hurt, living on the fringes of society, made to be the outcasts they are.
Don Quixote is zeroed in on the Catholic church for a decent part of the narrative (at least in my years on recollection), where this one is broader, aiming at capitalism, the nuclear family, and of course the patriarchy. But yet even as she critiques the status quo, she prophetically (see: Arab Spring, Occupy, CHAZ, etc.) sees the failings of utopian politics in her Algerian revolution taking France- anger without clear defined purpose, a desire for power with no ideas on how to properly wield, a lack of organization and structure leading to violence and disorder, and, in the end, an inability to shrug off the logic of the present world even presented the chance to build a better world. 20 years before Mark Fisher coined "capitalist realism," Acker here has a text that embodies it. She presents no clear solutions, has no answers for what that better future she hopes for is- one almost reads the final chapter as a shrug of the shoulders, her character (as in Don Quixote) finding some semblance of peace but the society around them still the same, nothing but an undying hope in a possible better future to leave the text with. Her idea is to disregard the idea of meaning until one comes out on the other side with something different, but she cannot reach that other side alone, this text itself an experiment on trying to reach for it.
Stylistically, this retains a lot of Acker's punk energy, grotesque sex and violence, character motivations scattered across the board. Still the best instance of this brand of postmodernism I know of (sorry Burroughs, and with hope towards Dennis Cooper's The Sluts at some point in the future) -
I tried Acker, but I couldn't get past this on page 4:
"There was a young boy...This boy, almost as beautiful as a strand of my grandmother's cunt hair, from a distance and in fantasy loved my grandmother. He watched her go from John to John."
I mean filth is one thing, or even aggressive detail, especially when it's pragmatic, say: it amplifies a visual texture, but when shock terms are waxed and thrown into a pile for the sake of being edgy, I don't know, I'd rather watch a bullfight on tv or something. -
I am not sure why I keep torturing myself and picking up Acker's "literature," but I would not use "revolutionary" to describe what looks like the outline of a basic story created by someone who cannot write given to someone who is in the sophomore year of college to add some random philosophies, and then passed on to a 13-year-old kid to add as many swear words and sexual phrasings as possible. Better things are found in my cats' litterbox.
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Republished in a thirtieth anniversary edition, Acker's novel is marked by her transgressive style, raw, unflinching, full of graphic language, sex, and violence. The story follows Thivai, a pirate, and his half-robot lover Abhor as they navigate the perilous near-future world of France after an Algerian revolution. It's definitely not for everyone, but it is a challenging, smart novel that confronts reality, identity, and politics head-on that rewards the careful reader.
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I finished
Blood and Guts in High School but found this completely unreadable. Recommended only for masochists. -
Dull. Experimentalism for its own sake justified by a lot of politico-academic blather.
