| Title | : | Pussy, King of the Pirates |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 080213484X |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780802134844 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 288 |
| Publication | : | First published December 5, 1996 |
| Awards | : | James Tiptree Jr. Award Longlist (1996) |
Pussy, King of the Pirates Reviews
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CRITIQUE:
Pussy Riot Pirate Shock
A lot of commentary about this book focuses on its shock value or its pirate theme (and hence its post-modern appropriation of Robert Louis Stevenson's “Treasure Island”).
However, in truth, these aspects are relatively superficial and of secondary importance.
When it comes to appropriation, it’s far more helpful to acknowledge Kathy Acker’s use of Sophocles’ “Antigone”. (1), (2)
Multiple Narrators
Even though there are multiple narrators of “Pussy, King of the Pirates”, it’s arguable that they represent facets of the one person. The narrator’s identity is multi-faceted. Each facet is a choice or an alternative. Thus, this strategy gives the author, the character(s) and the reader the opportunity to investigate multiple possibilities. What matters to Acker (and therefore to us) is that:“There is a young girl. Her name's not important. She's been called King Pussy, Pussycat, Ostracism, O, Ange. Once she was called Antigone… ”
This girl has suffered sexual abuse (rape and incest) in a patriarchal society, as well as abuse and neglect by her mother (potentially a symptom of her mother’s treatment by her husband). Either way, she has never really experienced reciprocal love (the real "buried treasure"):“My mother didn't love me and I loved her.”
As a result, this young girl experiences both emotional and physical pain:“I'm someone who finds that any pain is always physical pain and that physical pain isn't bearable.”
The girl is determined, not just to escape the pain, but to create a new alternative to the patriarchal society she has come from:“This city was patriarchal, that which allows the existence of none but itself, for it had arisen and was arising only out of the rational, moralistic bends of minds.”
Narrative Continuum
What follows is a roller coaster ride, that for all of the different narrators and physical locations, sustains a narrative continuum.
This girl, like Antigone, rebels against male order and finds female pleasure and satisfaction.
As soon as the girl leaves home (after her mother’s suicide - “My mother's inside me. She wants me to suicide because she suicided”), she starts work in a brothel in Alexandria, where she meets other women with similar backgrounds and experiences. Her first respite is the comfort of women:“These women, no longer children, according to the society were no longer sexually desirable to men, except perhaps as prostitutes; more importantly, according to her society they no longer possessed sexuality.”
Here there is both heterosexual and lesbian sex, of varying degrees of satisfaction. Inevitably, this girl decides to escape again, this time in pursuit of a different kind of treasure, her own sexuality, her “rising sexual energies” and her own bodily pleasure, which she believes she can only find on Treasure Island (which is located off Brighton in England).
Against Hegemony
Some of the other women accompany her on her quest, becoming pirates who join the other female pirates on the island. These women share a (sometimes drunken) reaction to patriarchal society. Silver, the captain of the pirate ship, says:“It's from living in a society that disrespects its women and hates their bodies. Especially when they masturbate. This makes us turn to drink, though I know that's not the way to deal with certain types of hegemony.”
Tougher than Pirates
At first, it seems like Pirate Island is some separatist utopia, but it soon proves otherwise. Something in the girl’s makeup is still heterosexual, if not ultimately bisexual, which causes an estrangement from the other more resolutely lesbian pirates.
Ange declares, “We're tougher than pirates.” The girl explains:“Ange and I followed the cock...cocks weren't treasure but pointed to treasure.”
A woman’s cunt becomes both a source of pleasure and a weapon in the feminist struggle:“When I saw O, I wanted to protect her because she worships her cunt.”
“Our cunts are knives in our fists and the insides of our thighs are becoming darker.”
Antigone’s Rebellion
The women’s rebellion is a revolutionary act against capitalist society (which is intrinsically patriarchal). It’s “a revolution of whores, a revolution defined by all methods that exist as distant, as far as possible, from profit.”
Silver exclaims in almost comic pirate fashion:“Now, me hearties, girls should get along with each other and not have fights, 'cause girls aren't violent...and piracy's survived for a long time in this world...But dooty is dooty, 'n' girls' dooty is to love other girls. So why do you keep prolonging this internecine turbulence?”
The Realm of Continual Ecstasy
Although the narrator removes herself from the collective effort of the pirates, it’s arguable that she does so in pursuit of a more personal or individualistic sexual goal, free from any hegemony, whatever its source or motivation. This might have been attained through a relationship with Ange, or by her own sense of authenticity.
All power must be removed from the realm of sexuality.
Perhaps idealistically, the narrator was searching for what Acker calls “the realm of continual ecstasy.”
Perhaps, on the other hand, this realm can only be achieved in or by poetry or fiction.
FOOTNOTES:
1. Without taking anything away from the originality of Acker's novel, while reading it, I found myself thinking of Angela Carter (especially
"Love") and Rikki Ducornet. Her writing about whores is far more (socio-)political and insightful (and far less voyeuristic and indulgent) than William T. Vollmann (who seems to use his own fictive creations as aids for masturbation), while she does more with post-modern appropriation of and reference to earlier works or myths than John Barth (who comes across as a shallow name-dropper in comparison). Acker weaves her appropriations into the very warp and weft of her yarn.
2. I hope to read and write about Sophocles' "Antigone" in the next couple of weeks.
VERSE:
The Mirror and Air
[Mostly in the Words of Kathy Acker]
Lilac and grey,
The water
Mirrored the air.
And they were
Boundless.
Pirate Riot
[Apologies to The Clash and the
Stone Roses]
I wanna riot,
A riot
Of my own.
I wanna pirate,
A pirate
Of my own.
I wanna try it,
Don't wanna buy it.
I wanna come on board,
I wanna be adored.
I wanna pirate,
A pirate
Of my own.
I wanna riot,
A riot
Of my own.
SOUNDTRACK
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This is like going to church, without the boring hymns or the itchy Sunday dress. So actually it's not like church at all.
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This book should be read for expiremental purposes only. It is like tripping balls on acid and letting Gloria Steinam drive the golf cart. It is very bizzare, but interesting
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Some works make an occasional stab at presenting something dreamlike, and others maintain an oneiric tone throughout, but this book really gives the feeling of a prolonged dreaming session, with all of its abstraction, blurred identities, shifting scenes, perversity, horror, absurdity, guilty and interrupted pleasure, desire, confusion, mystery, intensity of experience, dullness of sense, emotional agelessness/immaturity, embarrassment, shame, disgust--and yet it's also very personal--it's Kathy Acker's dream and we're in it.
But never mind all that.
Pussy is entertaining, quirky, funny, and moving. It knows what it's up to, even if the reader doesn't.
There is no master narrative nor realist perspective to provide a background of social and historical facts.
There is a lot of anti-logical intuition in this book, which makes sense psychologically even if it makes no sense materially.
To know is to cause.
...since to understand is to learn, I understood that consciousness isn't the mind and that it's consciousness, not the mind, which dies.
Pirate sex began on the date when the liquids began to gush forward. As if when equals because.
Acker is innovative and poetic, and she doesn't mind bending or breaking all language rules
'It is permissible,' and this is important, 'to invent one's language, and it is further permissible to make language with extragrammatical meanings...' [Attributed to "Our Toad"/Artaud in speaking of Poe, but perhaps it's all Acker]
You see, Pussycat by me was seen to lean over bed, though near the roar of just buried freeway. When I could no longer fall asleep realizing love just dead, my bed and new reigns of chill and pain.
--crucified from within by all that's intolerable in the world and proud of it--that's my kind of writing
But there is room, too, for some "realism," relatively speaking, in that some of the "games" that Acker describes in the girls' school seem like an almost-too-literal description of the social rites and rituals of teens abusing and ostracizing one another. In another way, I would say she doesn't only look at alien things in this book, but rather she often looks at real things through alien eyes. But I'll omit any quote to back this up now, as I have tons of more quotes to come...
To Acker, at least in her dreamworld of this novel, at least in one fictive persona, cities are ruination and death, and so is nature. Nothing isn't. This voice is loud here.
...we might as well crawl through this skanky-skunk-wood-tangled-garbage-whatever-it-was called nature 'cause there maybe we could find that which could help us, though all of this so-called nature looked more desolate to me than a city that had burnt down and was remnants of human civilization.
We were inching and grumbling through used beehives and rose petals. I sneezed 'cause I'm allergic to anything natural like the world.
I think there's a significant possibility that Kathy Acker read everything and learned everything, and was smarter than all of us, and it took all of that to learn how to speak and write like a child.
Humanity's gone away again . . .
Bye-bye . . .
This book is part of a tradition--I don't know what to call it--and Acker is the mistress of this tradition. I was tempted to define the tradition, by naming some other writers and movements, but I no... maybe this tradition should just be called unbounded literature, and I'll leave it at that.
Happy reading, to anyone who opts to give this one a try! -
Kathy Acker's where it's at.
If where it's at is not
Where Kathy Acker is,
Then where it's at is wrong.
And that's not where I wanna be.
Cuz I'm gunna be where Kathy Acker's at
Because she's where it's at.
Kathy Acker's where it's at.
Kathy Acker's where it's at.
Kathy Acker's where it's at.
Kathy Acker's where it's at.
If where it's at is not
Where Kathy Acker is,
Then where it's at is wrong.
And that's not where I wanna be.
Cuz I'm gunna be where Kathy Acker's at
Because she's where it's at.
Kathy Acker's where it's at.
Kathy Acker's where it's at.
Kathy Acker's where it's at.
Kathy Acker's where it's at.
Kathy Acker's where it's at.
Kathy Acker's where it's at. -
A bit crazy and wild and mad, but I love the sex scenes with witches beating people with vegetables...hot!
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making no sense: 10/10. experimental-, no wait, honest as fuck/not pretentious about it ----smelly. like, street-smelly.
enlightening, by the way. constant dreams.
don't understand a thing that happened, makes you question constantly, and offers no resolutions >:(!!.
punk as fuck. weird. angry. fucking radical.
i love rats!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! -
The problem with nonlinear narratives is that they're often boring. It pains me to say that about a book called Pussy, King of the Pirates.
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The creation myth of O. (Slyly framed as Sheridan LeFanu's Carmilla. All women are forced to vampirism by patriarchy's incestuous totality. True story!)
Not much more to say than that.
Other than that got a tad tedious along the pirating way--which is indeed long and often necessarily repetitious. (As has been patriarchy.)
Did enjoy the ending--which I didn't expect to be permitted to do.
It goes backward through creation until it gets to Pandora--treasure found! (Spoilers!)
My father read Treasure Island to me when I was a wee bairn--now my real mother has read me the real story. Real stories are real. -
I first read Pussy, King of the Pirates in a college English class eight or nine years ago, and the only thing I remember about it was thinking that this must be what it's like to be on an acid trip.
The book called to me like a siren, though, and recently I was drawn back to it for a second reading. It's as trippy as I remembered, but (dare I say it?) I feel like I'm on the verge of having it make sense. Either the intervening years have made me wiser or I'm on the verge of going crazy. I suppose, though, it could be a little of both. (Don't tell me which is true--ignorance is bliss.) -
Probably my fave of the Acker novels that I've read so far. Yeah, it's sick, rude and crude and obsessed with bodily fluids and likes to repeat itself, but it was fantastical fun and I liked the dream state of mind giving it a surreal feel, and found it less uncomfortable than the others. To say a wild X-rated adventure is something of an understatement. There are reinterpretations and there are reinterpretations, and knowing Acker she was always going to take this to the extremes!
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WORST BOOK OF ALL TIME! I literally read this somewhere around twelve years ago, I don't ever remember, and it was SO BAD that I didn't read again for five years because I was afraid of books. Literally, this book made me stupid for five years.
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If you can’t tell by how long it took me to read this book it was like torture. To anyone whose life changed reading this book (it’s written as if it’s supposed to be revolutionary) I pray you get therapy or better taste.
Nothing in this book spoke to me in any way shape or form. It was written in a way that made you feel disgusting. Also gave off the vibe of someone’s first time having a private computer where they can type any words they wanted and their parents wouldn’t see. Half the words were pussy, cunt, cock, and fuck without them coloring any of the text in a way that made sense.
Everything about being a woman and to be honest a gay woman was written in a way to make you feel slimey and gross. Does every book about women need to be positive and floral? No, but I would prefer my books devoid of the continuous incest story that plagued every 20 pages. If I had to read about the damn punk rat boy who lived in the graveyard who killed his father for what he did to his sister I would’ve eaten the book a page at a time.
This book repeated the same bullshit over and over and you never got anywhere. The whole thing is written in a circle till about the last 70 pages which still are plagued by the idea that “woman can be gross too!!!” We get it!!!!!
I hated this book so much and whoever wrote the back summary needs a new job. This book was picked out because it gave the idea of a fun lesbian pirate adventure and it just was not that till the end and it wasn’t fun and barely an adventure. I blame Neil Gaiman’s introduction for the false sense of a good story too. I’m sorry you lost your friend sir but I’m glad she’ll never plague bookstores again.
Don’t buy this book.
End of rant. -
It's hard to write cogently on fiction that is this transgressive. Basic narrative forms do not allow for easy judgement; we get however a reselection of different agental qualities inherent to individuals. Instead of understanding that this or good or bad in this situation, we get instead the inner suffering of a character or their inner desire to guide us. Our moral and ethical standards may be reduced to very simple lines so that these basic qualities, while familiar to us all, are also foreign to us. We may accept or reject them as we please, and that's part of what makes a work like this "experimental"
The struggle then, is always for recognition. The treasure is really only valuable as an unattainable point, so that the fight becomes who we are. This may be an insipid rejection of feminists who make the struggle only what they are, although "girls must accept girls who are not like them". The ending suggests that the real pirates are the ones who are then able to go off and forgo being pirates once having attained their goal. Although there is must to be admired in those who will struggle on against impossible odds. -
Kathy Acker - an incredible talent, died too young of cancer - a disease created through intensely focused self-anger. You can see the disease forming within the images Acker conjures in "Pussy, King of Pirates." Brutal socio-sexual plagiarized adventure story, or deep, genotype-coin flip, psychological excavation? Acker's fever-dream of grrrl-pirates, Chinese bordellos and masturbating bears is violent, sacrilegious, sexy, disturbing and revealing all the ugliness of the human condition in so many dimensions, it's no wonder her body was decimated by cancer. But I bet she had a lot of fun writing it. If there was ever such a thing as Punk Lit... this is it. Oh, and there's an insanely genius musical version by Acker and the Mekons (!) that is other-worldy!
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vertiginous, dizzying account of the familial/oedipal/classical/mythologic origins of sexuality, where sexuality is a metaphor for abjection at the end of the beginning of the world which is itself an account of the state of violent thanatosis that animates punk boys and pirate girls and all who are socially dispossessed and drives them towards real death which is the womb which must be rejected. or something like that
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Poemat krocza
Jedną z najbardziej umiłowanych przez Kathy Acker figur literackich był pirat, wyimaginowany awatar światowej wolności, nie uznający ani reguł rządzących cywilizowanymi społecznościami ani zasad prawa własności innych niż pisane przez niego samego. Jak literatura długa i szeroka wydawać mogło się, że aby móc zostać piratem, należy być mężczyzną. Acker, punkówa nie znosząca reguł ani zasad postanowiła miast żeglować po morzach stać się kimś na kształt „pirata literatury”. Piractwo było alegorią jej własnych metod i jednym z mitów, na których ufundowała swoją legendę. Acker spodobał się sposób, z którego mity brały swój początek - jako otwarty potencjał. Jej praktyka pisarska była mityczna w tym sensie, że gdy zaczęła zdanie, mogło ono powędrować gdziekolwiek. W tekstach Acker początki nigdy się nie kończą i to jest główny problem tej powieści. Ona po prostu peregrynuje donikąd.
Ta książka to jeden wielki (nieudany) eksperyment z fikcją. Wypełniają ją narracje snów o luźnej strukturze i zmieniających się zaimkach, naszpikowane zmęczonymi spostrzeżeniami na temat seksu, klasy i polityki. Historia przedstawia się mniej więcej tak: „O.” szuka „kim mogłaby być” i odkrywa przyjemność obserwując, jak inni uprawiają seks. Antonin Artaud (szalony poeta, z którego Acker czyni „protopunka”) rozmawia z O. o samobójstwie, będącym „protestem przeciwko kontroli”. O., marokańsko-żydowskiego pochodzenia, dołącza do burdelu w Aleksandrii, gdzie Lulu i Ange zapoznają ją z wibratorami i technikami masturbacji. Następnie bohaterka zapada w długi sen o menstruacji w miejscach publicznych, po czym ona i Ange rozpoczynają poszukiwania zakopanego skarbu. W pubie w Brighton dołączają do Pirate Girls i ich przywódczyni, Pussy, za którą O. tęskni. Odkryty skarb posiada swe ideologiczne konotacje w micie o Pandorze i jej puszce, co w tym przypadku dobrze wpisuje się w obsesję Acker na punkcie zapachów z pochwy – sporo uwag w powieści poświęconych jest cipkowym odorom. Sceny pirackie Acker bardziej przypominają obrzydliwe karykatury undergroundowego rysownika S. Claya Wilsona niż cokolwiek z Roberta Louisa Stevensona. Zainteresowania pisarki koncentrują się wokół: płynów ustrojowych, wydzielin ciała, kazirodztwa, rozpusty, korekty płci i śmierci. W męczącym świecie Acker masturbacja, piercing i S&M są dobre; patriarchat, racjonalność i moralność są złe. W ten sposób poszerzeniu ulegają subtelności jej wyobraźni. Jak na kogoś tak zajętego eksperymentowaniem z językiem, Acker dysponuje monotonnym słownictwem i ograniczonym zakresem dyskursu. Kilka świętokradzkich obrazów zadowoli fotelowych buntowników wśród jej czytelników.
Na pierwszy rzut oka ta powieść posiada wiele elementów, które powinny być gwarantem murowanego sukcesu. To klasyczna postmoderna, swobodnie poczynająca sobie z materiałem źródłowym. Retelling Wyspy skarbów Stevensona zderza z feministycznymi kategoriami. Główna bohaterka to czytelna aluzja względem Pauline Réage i jej
Histoire d’O. Symbolizm francuskich poètes maudits (Baudelaire’a, Verlaine'a czy Nervala) przeciwstawia wizualnemu naturalizmowi Pasoliniego. W prozie Acker mnóstwo jest odniesień do innych tekstów kultury jako rezerwuaru „dobra wspólnego”, wytworów pracy zbiorowej, poniekąd niczyich, które można było bezkarnie piracić. Niestety - nagłe przeskoki z jednego przerobionego tekstu do drugiego, czasem w środku zdania, rozrywają łącznik między czytelnikiem a dziełem, zaprzeczając założeniu o subiektywnej spójności.
Kathy Acker, której proza wydaje się trudna do zdecydowania, czy ma być pretensjonalna, czy zwyczajna, oddaje się w tej powieści: dekodowaniu języka, obalaniu kultury oraz dekonstrukcji (jeśli to właściwe słowo) płci (to nie jest właściwe słowo). Jednym z jej ulubionych tematów – sądząc po ilości ustępów temu poświęconych - jest znaczenie autostymulacji. Zainteresowanie to jest nader trafne, ponieważ w tej książce podniosła literacką masturbację do rangi antysztuki.
W powieści Stevensona jeden z głównych bohaterów, Długi John Silver zwykł mawiać „Ci, którzy umrą, będą szczęściarzami”. Nieco go parafrazując, pozycję tę można podsumować: Ci, którzy tego nie przeczytają, będą szczęściarzami. -
This was exactly like Treasure Island, in the sense that I couldn't really get into the writing style and there wasn't enough actual piracy. This wasn't like Treasure Island at all.
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not dreamlike, not feverish, but definitely fever dreamy
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Context: So, my boyfriend put me onto Kathy Acker as a punk (feminist? definitely female, definitely concerned with issues around sexuality (queer, deviant, etc), relationships, power) post-structural poet-ish kind of experimental, kind of baldly confessional writer. She's brilliant, she's obscene, she feels a bit like the kind of philosopher one wants in this current climactic return to "what about the children." I really liked the documentary on her - I think her work has a lot of repetitions and interaction with personal issues, although her form is more-or-less a reclamation/reworking/collage of "Classic Male Works of Literature."
"Pussy, King of the Pirates" is, sort-of, a retelling of "Treasure Island."
What I liked:
-look I'm leaning hard into the pirate thing and the Treasure Island thing through spiraling over Black Sails, so a retelling that rips everyone out and puts in ladies in place of everyone else is uuuuh fucking awesome. There's Silver, naturally, but there's also Pussy, King of the Girl Pirates. O, as in "The Story of O," is playing the part of Jim Hawkins, and her lover, Ange, is sort-of playing the part of Jim's mother. (it's not a direct retelling.) It's also only the last 70 or so pages - the rest is a rather meandering set up.
-The queerness. There's a lot of girls falling in love and out of love and hating each other and fucking and loving and being bad at sex and going on quests to become better and being feral. some REALLY good descriptions of like.. baby queer resentment and idolization and love and desire to murder. it's so messy. and that's fair!
-The reading style takes a while to get used to - Acker isn't particularly straightforward with anything that is going on, and characters and situations have an alarming tendency to morph like dreams (probably wet dreams) - but once you tap into the humor, there's some pretty funny segments. At least, I think I'm getting the joke. And it all does come back around in the end, all these characters and their adventures.
-And the Reign of Girl Pirates will never end -
I don't know how you could write a book like that without a lot of drugs--or how you could write it with drugs. For the first 20 pages or so I was constantly trying to figure out what was literal and what was symbolic. Then I realized that all of it is both, and that I'm not stupid, it's just that the book makes no narrative sense, but it does a brilliant job of capturing dream-logic, and makes a lot of intuitive sense. It's a very political book even as it constantly undermines its arguments with the not-sense-making; it's like reading the jumble of amorphous thoughts someone has before they convert them into a nice, coherent, linear essay. It may not make sense, but the emotional content feels purer than in rhetoric.
Plus, the book is full of sentence candy: "All the men were gone, so there were dead fish everywhere." "We can't stay here. We can't only masturbate and be whores." But any book this intensely poetic starts to feel laborious before it ends. Maybe it's my failure as a reader, but after 150 pages or so I found it hard to maintain the focus necessary to continuously appreciate the micro-level brilliance of this book, when on the larger scale it doesn't seem to be going anywhere. -
Kathy Acker was an author that took classic tales and rewrote them from a transgressive and feminist perspective. Now, I will put it out there that transgressive fiction is not for everyone. It sometimes settles into a metaphoric vibe that can be difficult to follow. Now, I love this kind of writing.
Pussy, King of the Pirates is a retelling of Treasure Island. It is not a direct telling of the story we all know. Here the world turns on the energy of female sexuality and self possession of pleasure. Both of which were still fairly radical ideas in the mid-90's. The story loops and changes perspectives frequently. It's certainly not an easy read, but it's a read well worth the effort.
(Review to be expanded on and improved upon more sleep.) -
Kathy Acker makes me want to be a pirate, re-read "Antigone," meet the Mekons, shave my head, and ride off into the sunset on a motorcycle with this book tucked into my bag. Like all of Acker's prose, it is radiantly filthy, plagiarized yet raw and new like a freshly skinned knee. It is the great tragedy of my life that I never got to stalk her before she died; instead I am forced to spend more time than I'd like to admit finding unpublished material on the internet. Read it if you dare, then buy the CD version she did with the Mekons and tell your boyfriend to f*ck off just because it feels good.
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Mostly, I love telling people about this book. I like that more than actually reading it. Which probably says something about my character, or lack thereof.
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This book really is a masterpiece. It is so fucking good its kind of just fucking mindblowing how good Kathy Acker really is.
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this was like a dream inside a dream inside another dream and it made no sense and it was awesome and it was so confusing and i lost interest and then there was a swamp and some cool looking maps and rats being birthed from eggs. i liked all the graveyards and i have a theory that all the characters were the same. every sentence was whiplash but then it almost put me to sleep like i was dozing off near the end but maybe thats dreaming praxis or something
"I refuse.
I will be ____ instead.
___ is something impossible.
I'll be a girl pirate"
(manifesto) -
If the Mona Lisa could masturbate she would imagine Acker's prose. For all I know that's "what the novel is about." Discordant, recalcitrant, salacious, fun.
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Acker’s final novel doesn’t disappoint. Like a dream within a dream within a dream. Nothing makes sense but it all makes the most sense. This was therapy for Acker and the same themes of found family are explored over and over again. I just love her.
