"Plagarism, Paraody, and Pastiche": Acker's Schizophrenic America

The revolutionary nature of the schizophrenic process is substantiated by Kathy Acker in Blood and Guts in High School, whereby her presentation of an anti-narrative, informed by the Oedipal family model and bolstered by her use of pastiche, asserts the novel as “radically postmodern” (Hawkins 637). Inspired by the likes of the post-structuralist, postmodernist Deleuze, Guttari and Focault, Acker seeks to critique capitalist phallic society and dismantle its inherency, seeking to elucidate its destructive, imperial, and masochistic tendencies. Thus, Acker’s engagement with the schizophrenic process, explored specifically in its relation to sex, rejection, and desire, within a capitalist, patriarchal world, positions the novel as sporadically schizophrenic and radically postmodern.

Acker conveys her critique of American capitalist society most aptly through the character of Janey Smith, the novel’s protagonist, who serves as a vessel through which an engagement with the schizophrenic process is enacted. From the very outset Janey’s status as a schizophrenic entity is established, evidenced by the mundanity of her name which serves to dispel any sense of personal or meaningful identity she may lay claim to. This lack of identity is reinforced throughout the novel and reconciled through Janey’s death, after which it is stated that “Soon many other Janeys were born and these Janeys covered the earth” (Acker 165), suggesting that “multiple Janeys” (Hawkins 655) are able to “exist” (655), furthering the notion that modern society under capitalist rule facilitates the reproduction of these same experiences in an inescapable Oedipal loop. The politically radical nature of the novel then, too, is conveyed through the Oedipal narrative set-up by Acker, whereby the shocking and disturbing nature of the incestuous relationship between “abusive father” (655) and “victim daughter” (655) informs the extent of the fallout that is Janey’s short and fractured life, serving to critique the capitalist functioning of 1970s American society. Janey’s identity, then, is informed entirely by her unrequited sexual and romantic “need” (20) for her father, and in this way Acker conveys identity to be illusory, positioning Janey as egoless, “psychotic” (40), and yet still capable of enacting and experiencing desire. The constant rejection Janey experiences - which becomes a “compulsively…primary signifier of Janey’s experience” (Hawkins 645) - functions as “repetition and disjunction” (645), reinforcing the schizophrenic process as explored throughout Acker’s anti-narrative, whereby Janey is doomed to be in constant desire, in a perpetual state of need: “I don’t think I care about anything. All my emotions, no matter how passionate, are based on my needs.” (Acker 111). In this way, the engagement of the Oedipal narrative with poststructuralist discourse serves as a majorly constricting force through which Janey is oppressed - as exhibited by her unfulfilled needs and constant rejection, - and yet liberated too, through an unlimited masochistic capacity for desire. This unyielding desire has been interpreted by critics in various ways, both as a form of liberation in its associations with feminine subjectivity, and yet also as a “disruptive capacity” (Hawkins 639) symbolic of mass commercialism and capitalist greed. Jameson claims that “contemporary capitalism has extended the symptoms of schizophrenia to the masses in the form of postmodern culture” (Peretti 1), following his diagnosis of Western culture as schizophrenic. Delueze and Guttari disagree in their declarations of “the schizophrenic as capitalism’s exterminating angel” (1), asserting that “schizophrenic sensibilities can replace ideological and dogmatic political goals with a radical form of productive desire.” (1). Ostensibly, Acker succeeds, to an extent, in encompassing these two opposing positions within her protagonist, whereby, under the guise of either argument, Janey is inescapably schizophrenic. For Jameson, Janey’s lack of personal identity, alongside her incapacity to experience “continuity through time” (1) is what renders her schizophrenic, and thus a victim of capitalist, postmodern culture; while for Delueze and Guttari, Janey exhibits the “radical, revolutionary nomadic wanderer” (1) through which her unrelenting desire becomes symbolically anti-capitalist in its reflections of the “radical politics of desire freed from all beliefs” (1). Hence, the radical anti-narrative of Acker’s Blood and Guts, and the schizophrenic protagonist at its centre, signals simultaneously the detrimentality of capitalism, in addition to the positioning of female desire as both liberating and yet self-destructive.

Moreover, in acknowledging the anti-narrative of Blood and Guts to be schizophrenic, and thus revolutionary in its political commentary, this schizophrenic process extends itself to Acker’s use of pastiche, or cut-up plagiarism. As Hawkins explains, “Acker’s textual appropriations allow her to create…a pseudonymous, plagiarized identity as she steals from, but simultaneously dismantles the tradition and privilege of the textual fathers” (639) whereby her discursive enactment of a “feminine identity in constant negotiation…affirms the possibility of a feminine subject capable of restricting patriarchal power” (640).  Thus, just as the oedipal narrative conveys the schizophrenic nature of a capitalist America, so too does Acker’s use of “hysterical pastiche” (Brennan 1) in its illustration of the schizophrenic tendencies of Janey’s mind. As Brennan conveys “Acker’s witty pastiche systematically deconstructs and parodies Freudian, Lacanian, and Kristevan by making the penis - clearly the focal point of Acker’s illustration - stand for “everything” Janey wants.” (255). Thus, Janey’s desire becomes a signifier for the subversion of patriarchal tropes of female subjectivity and victimhood, whereby Acker’s use of pastiche conveys this subversion from within the realm of phallic language. In Acker’s use of the Latin author Propretius’ poems, she illustrates the lack of “framework” (Wasdin 272) available for female expression, whereby it serves as the only, and critically, male voice through which Janey is able to express her “love for her oppressor” (272). In this way, Acker is not only utilising pastiche to bolster the schizophrenic quality of her anti-narrative, but additionally to subvert the literary hierarchies that exist in American patriarchal society, and thus Acker’s engagement with the schizophrenic process through her use of pastiche serves to critique and challenge the existing social order.

In summary, Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School is radical in its political engagement with the schizophrenic process as a method of dismantlement of American patriarchal society, and the inherency of capitalism. Acker’s use of the poststructuralist Oedipal anti-narrative subverts oppressive tropes of female subjectivity and victimhood, through Janey’s embodiment as the perpetually desiring victim. Additionally, Acker’s use of pastiche serves to critique the divisive masculine hierarchies of literary society, in her utilisation of Latin poetry to convey female desire and affection, under the guise of the male voice and phallic language. Therefore, Acker’s “radically postmodern” (Hawkins 637) novel is highly political, in its critique of the existing social order, and its elucidation of its destructive and masochistic tendencies, whereby the schizophrenic Janey Smith serves as both a victim and transgressor of oppressive capitalist sentiment, and of American patriarchal society.

Works Cited

Acker, Kathy. Blood and Guts in High School. Penguin Classics, 2017.

Brennan, Karen. “The Geography of Enunciation: Hysterical Pastiche in Kathy Ackers Fiction.” Boundary 2, vol. 21, no. 2, 1994, p. 243., doi:10.2307/303195.

Hawkins, Susan E. “All in the Family: Kathy Ackers Blood and Guts in High School.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 45, no. 4, 2004, pp. 637–658., doi:10.1353/cli.2005.0005.

Holland, Eugene W. “The Anti-Oedipus: Postmodernism in Theory; Or, the Post-Lacanian Historical Contextualization of Psychoanalysis.” Boundary 2, vol. 14, no. 1/2, 1985, p. 291., doi:10.2307/303526.

Mccaffery, Larry. “The Artists of Hell: Kathy Acker and ‘Punk’ Aesthetics.” Breaking the Sequence, 1992, pp. 215–230., doi:10.1515/9781400859948.215.

Muth, Katie R. “Postmodern Fiction as Poststructuralist Theory: Kathy Ackers Blood and Guts in High School.” Narrative, vol. 19, no. 1, 2011, pp. 86–110., doi:10.1353/nar.2011.0000.

“Towards a Radical Anti-Capitalist Schizophrenia?” Critical Legal Thinking, Law and the Political, 11 Nov. 2013, criticallegalthinking.com/2010/12/21/towards-a-radical-anti-capitalist-schizophrenia/.

Wasdin, Katherine. “The Undead Past in Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School.” Classical Receptions Journal, 2016, doi:10.1093/crj/clw016.