Through the alienation of their female protagonists, writers Kathy Acker and Carole Maso reject capitalist, patriarchal realities and resurrect the body’s power in the abyss of non-being – a realm where memory, desire, and art create a revolutionary language. Sarah C. Schuster examines how experimental fiction becomes a site of resistance and radical self-creation.
[…] when a woman doesn’t believe in God, she, like everyone else, validates her existence by believing in man. […] The only way that she can escape this kind of structure (this society, this community, this language) is to make her own. But then she’d be outside society, or nonexistent. […] I write in dizziness that seizes that which is fed up with language and attempts to escape through it: the abyss named fiction. For I can only be concerned with the imaginary when I discuss reality or women. […] I realized I was on the edge of existence. Since I was no longer part of society, everything around me is malevolent to me. In this world. I’m only an object.1
In Kathy Acker’s novel My Mother: Demonology and Carole Maso’s novel Ava, the female protagonists Cathy and Ava are navigating their lives through the modern, male-dominated capitalistic society. Where being mostly means being like them – the white men who had control over centuries and are unsurprisingly not willing to share that control – women negate the alienated female body in a repressive existence and, therefore, negate their state of being in order to create meaning through their absence in society with the power of their memories and dreams; they now exist in the inner world called non-being. This way, both protagonists practice their free will to eliminate the borders of a reality that controls their perceptions and dreams; a reality built out of an impersonal educational system, mass media and capitalist constructs that Marx calls the social superstructure.2 This process of negation will be examined on the basis of the characters’ different stages of alienation as forms of being or non-being to understand how the free will influences the characters’ fates in modern capitalistic society.
Reality and repression – the alienation of the body
Modern life is, more than ever, defined by physical, mental, interpersonal and political repression that is built on self-interest, competition and violence.3 The reality of contemporary society shows itself as a picture of profit, drawn with the blood of the masses, in order to achieve more and more wealth for those who have economic power. People call it the American dream; Kathy Acker calls it the American death.
In the face of death, (There’s no more education, no more culture – if culture depends on a commonly understood history – and perhaps no more middle class in the United States. There’s War.) when all is real, (In the face of this very real American death, there is only the will to live.) I will be able (to have a self) to say something: “I’ve seen him. I can say his real name. I know that nothing, including this, matters.” In other words: there’s nothing. Because there’s nothing, I don’t have to be trained, as females are, to want to stop existing.4
The image of the alpha-male in an environment of male dominance is designed to oppress the free development not only of the female body, but any possible competitor in a structure of predatory capitalism. In Kathy Acker’s novel My Mother: Demonology, the representative of the oppressed female body par excellence is Cathy’s mother. By hurting her daughter, the mother mutilates the child’s identity in order to serve the male dominance in search for security; this male security can be the husband, the boss, etc. The mother imitates the mechanisms of the capitalistic machine in the form of control and destruction of human identities because she accepted competition as her reality.
Mother just hates everyone who isn’t of our blood. She uses the word blood. She hates everyone and everything that she can’t control: everything gay, lively, everything that’s growing, productive. Humanness throws her into panic; when she panics, she does her best to hurt me.5
This loss of family as a community based on the mother figure in Kathy Acker’s novel My Mother: Demonology personates the climax of alienation (after all it’s a demonology). But alienation is a sneaky process. First, the individual discovers that there is something in its head that doesn’t belong to the self. Marx calls this self-alienation.6 It is the voice of repression; the voice of control that tells you that you are worth nothing if you decide not to try to achieve wealth and work hard for too little money. The individual barely survives. It’s the consequence of the capitalistic ideals that influenced the protagonist Cathy since her early childhood. The child is taught to define herself through possessions, while the material belongings only estrange her further from others and herself; it’s the alienation of the thing.7
The protagonist in Kathy Acker’s novel already realizes early on: There’s war.8 There’s no human collective anymore; it’s just one against another: the alienation from other persons.9 Having passed all these stages of alienation in everyday-life, Cathy finally reaches the worst effect of the repression by her mother: the alienation of man’s species being.10 The individual is unable to work as a free individual to create an “ideal future”. Instead, the workers are just laboring to stay alive without achieving anything progressive. In view of this demise, Kathy Acker introduces the life form of the pirate:
(Pirates knew that animals, kin to them, were also their natural enemies. As if civil war. Even if you hack animals to ribbons, pirates understood, if your sword hashes their flesh and rips their inside apart, in no time they recover their animal image and life. Not even if you thwack off an animal’s head with one blow can you make, pirates said, the demons disappear, since animals not only possess the fabulous magic ability to know what others, including humans, feel, therefore think, but also are immortal and as all-powerful as the gods of their forebears.).11
The pirates, in contrast to Cathy’s mother, are described as still being human and willing to fight the army of dehumanized recruits of the capitalistic machine by abstracting themselves from the system of being.
The choice of non-being – pirates, memory and freedom
Pirates have the power to dismiss the deadly form of being and fight for the freedom of the individual. But this fight is not a violent one. The pirates don’t participate in the war violently but regain dominance over the female body through sexual emancipation and their absence in the repressive social system.
The day will finally come, wrote Marie Leneru in 1915, when our duty will no longer be to accept war and be quiet, but to judge and revolt.12
With their absence, the protagonists Cathy and Ava negate being as reality and create through their sexual freedom a perversion of being and non-being through S&M – it stood for sex and magic. It was all about desire. It was all about trust.13 This means that they actively seek to create an alternate reality outside the reaches of society by eliminating borders and resurrecting the dominance of the female body over itself in the depth of the own mind and the abyss of fiction. This perversion is more than an escape caused by alienation; it is fictio: poetry as an appropriation of reality through the power of the will. In the inner world of non-being, the female body is safe from the oppressive social system.
According to Elisabeth Roudinesco in her study of Lacan, around 1924 a conjuncture of early Feminism, a new wave of Freudianism, and Surrealism gave rise to a new representation of the female: nocturnal, dangerous, fragile and powerful. The rebellious, criminal, insane, or gay woman is no longer perceived as a slave of her symptoms. Instead, “in negative idealization of crime {she} discovers the means to struggle against a society {that disgusts}”.14
The power of translating the negation of the anticipated form of the female body into the reality of non-being by the pirate’s memory, expectations, and desires, resurrects the female power through sexual freedom and the annihilation of borders. The imagination and emancipation of the free will is inherently uncontrollable. The free, absent body is homeless and can’t be tracked down.
At the same time, the free body keeps on exposing the absurdities behind capitalism as a root of social turmoil and exploitation. The media the free bodies use are spaces of the free will and, thus, manifest as art. Within this structure, Kathy Acker’s pirates reveal themselves as artists. This way, Acker’s protagonist Cathy exercises the power of the female poet (the pirate) to lead the homeless and independent spirits out of an impersonal materialistic society into the free space of art to build an army of resistance: it’s the revolution of the wanderers.
Outside [of society]: through a patch of shade, then into the sunlight. (I have suddenly realized the meaning of My Mother: Demonology.) In all the sunlight and cut grass, the child knows that she is safe. Where will she go without home? She is homeless. She realizes that she can be safe (live) as a wanderer. Free.15
Kathy Acker’s writing shows that non-being is not just dream, illusion, or an escape from reality by numbing down memories with artificial comfort; instead, it is the ability to revive past experiences in a productive process of remembering. It is a production and self-creation that forms strong present desires of the wanderer to create the future through the medium of art and with it, possibly, freedom.
The creation of meaning
In Kathy Acker’s and Carole Maso’s works My Mother: Demonology and Ava, we discover the absence of borders to create freedom on a formal level in the structures of the texts. Maso’s style of experimental writing in her novel Ava can be described as a construction like a jazz-composition. Instead of chapters, we find the repetition of different themes, which creates special waves of tension and relief. We find rhythm created through an arrangement of temporal orders like a musical groove that resonates with the reader in the way that musical beats are measured in relation to heartbeats.
You will have literary texts that tolerate all kinds of freedom – unlike the more classical texts – which are not texts that delimit themselves, are not texts with territory with neat borders, with chapters, with beginnings, endings, etc., and which will be a little disquieting because you do not feel the border. The edge.16
This way, Maso’s text is, like songs, a musical and poetic code on the page that can take you places.17 The repetition of different themes is a mental guide of direction, while we, as the readers, can let us fall into the flow of the composition of the piece and enjoy the inner intellectual journey.
Yet, Carole Maso’s composition does not allow the reader to blindly consume the complex arrangement of sentences, but demands awareness, especially when the protagonist Ava suddenly builds a wall made from political grievances within her memories of aesthetic pleasures, enjoying art, music, film, and literature. This wall is painted with examples of resistance throughout history: In 1600 Iroquois women organized a “Lysistrata” action, refusing sex or childbearing until unregulated welfare stopped.18
This form of reflection and critical awareness of historical and contemporary political and social events follows the tradition of Antonin Artaud’s theater of cruelty, Bertolt Brecht’s alienation effect and some of Alban Berg’s experimental operas.19 The created free space in the mind of the reader is a delicately woven combination of pleasure and critical reflection that metaphorically plays with the simultaneous use of major and minor scales: truth and illusion, life and death, time and space, causality and chance, compassion and indifference.20
My parents singing the world into existence for themselves. Prolonging the world with song. Golden gown of morning. So you can say without Schubert and Mozart, without Brahms and without Wagner, I would never have lived.21
Where Kathy Acker’s style of experimental writing follows the tradition of the cut-up technique of beat generation writers like William S. Burroughs, Carole Maso’s temporal order is highly important for the creation of meaning. In contrast, Acker dismisses the order of time and space to let the fragmented structure of her novel cut through the borders of traditional literary composition.
It’s necessary to cut life into bits, for neither the butcher store nor the bed of a woman who’s giving birth is bloody as this. Absurdity, blessed insolence that saves, and connivance are found in these cuts, the cuts into “veracity”.22
Acker provokes through her aggressive language and sexual dominance in My Mother: Demonology as a strong female character in order to blow up the small walls of conservative minds who continue to spread ideas of racism, sexism, and religious fanaticism. In the process, Acker’s words become part of the new female body.
[Cathy:] “It’s like the body.” [Beatrice:] “Words are like the body?” I tried to explain. [Cathy:] “I can’t find out who I am. I know nothing about my body.
Whenever there’s a chance of knowing, for any of us, the government, Bush if you like, reacts to knowledge about the female body by censoring.” [Beatrice:] “Bush as in bush?” [Cathy:] “Bush on bush, Bush as in blush.” “The word has made flesh.”23
Carole Maso describes the process of creating meaning as a matter of death and birth, which takes place in what Acker would call “the abyss of fiction”: The poem demands the demise of the poet who writes it and the birth of the poet who reads it.24 Acker sums up the power of language by showing the two opposite effects on the spectrum: separation and healing.
The ideal, or the dream, would be to arrive at a language that heals as much as it separates. Could one imagine a language sufficiently transparent, sufficiently supple, intense, faithful so that there would be reparation and not only separation?25
Kathy Acker’s novel My Mother: Demonology and Carole Maso’s novel Ava speak a language that is drawn to the non-being – the extinction of the female body – to heal the female identity that was separated from the body by means of social alienation and to give the individuals the power to create a body that is their own. The works of both Kathy Acker and Carole Maso – writers, pirates, artists – encourage change that starts with the one individual that creates it and ends with the chance to truly have lived.
Aus dem Buch An-denken
1 Kathy Acker: My Mother: Demonology. New York: Grove Press, 1994. p. 80 f.
2 George A. Reisch (ed.): Pink Floyd and Philosophy. Careful with that Axiom, Eugene! Chicago and La Salle, Illinois: Carus Publishing Company, 2007. p. 185.
3 Ibid. p. 194 f.
4 Kathy Acker: My Mother: Demonology. p. 29.
5 Ibid. p. 11.
6 George A. Reisch (ed.): Pink Floyd and Philosophy. p. 195.
7 Ibid.
8 Kathy Acker: My Mother: Demonology. p. 29.
9 George A. Reisch (ed.): Pink Floyd and Philosophy. p. 195.
10 Ibid.
11 Kathy Acker: My Mother: Demonology. p. 102 f.
12 Carole Maso: Ava. Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press, 1995. p. 240.
13 Ibid. p. 209.
14 Kathy Acker: My Mother: Demonology. p. 30.
15 Ibid. p. 142.
16 Carole Maso: Ava. p. 113.
17 Ibid. p. 63.
18 Ibid. p. 251.
19 See George A. Reisch (ed.): Pink Floyd and Philosophy. p. 194
20 Ibid. p. 192.
21 Carole Maso: Ava. p. 76.
22 Kathy Acker: My Mother: Demonology. p. 267.
23 Ibid. p. 62.
24 Carole Maso: Ava. p. 65.
25 Ibid. p. 163.
Acker, Kathy: My Mother: Demonology. New York: Grove Press, 1994.
Maso, Carole: Ava. Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press, 1995.
Letzte Änderung: 09.05.2025 | Erstellt am: 09.05.2025
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