In Memoriam to Identity

“Women need to become literary ‘criminals,' break the literary laws and reinvent their own, because the established laws prevent women from presenting the reality of their lives.”

Kathy Acker blows me away. She has influenced many writers, and is among the most important postmodernist authors. Her writing is a mix of obscenity, violence, and literariness.

“In Memoriam to Identity” (1990) is inspired by the writings and lives of Rimbaud and Faulkner; in one passage, she rewrites Faulkner's “The Story of Temple Drake;” in another, she retells the relationship between Rimbaud and Verlaine.

Her writing is challenging. She ignores rules of story, grammar, punctuation, and good manners. It is immediate, as if she wrote in an automatic way, spewing out thoughts, obscenities, ideas, scenes, memories, knowledge, nonsense. Here's a passage from “In Memoriam to Identity:”

**“R[imbaud] wrote Delahaye about all that had happened to him and what he, R, wanted:My friend, You're eating white flour and mud in your pigsty. I don't miss Charleville. I don't miss being a bored pig where the sun dries up all brains but sloth. Your brains or feelings're being dried up: dead pig Delahaye. Emotions are the movers of this world. Me: I'm thirsty. What I'm thirsty for—whom I'm thirsty for—I can't get so I drink poisons. I've got to free myself. From what? Pain? Oh—for more poisons. Maybe more poisons'll come and I'll go so far, I'll emerge. Something is trying to emerge from this mess. I don't know how.**

Acker used literature to rebel against everything. She wrote, “Literature is that which denounces and slashes apart the repressing machine at the level of the signified.”