Eurydice in the Underworld

"It’s funny with Acker, I think people have such a received idea of her. Her work does contain hyper-violence and hyper-sexuality; it can be very cartoonish and very choppy. But one of the things that I was really struck by when I went through my Kathy Acker season last summer and reread all her books is that they’re also intensely emotional. They have these lingering moods of grief and desolation, that lurk as atmosphere. Eurydice in the Underworld is the one that I think deals with grief in the most straightforward way. In all Acker’s books, she steals an avatar, so she might be Pip from Great Expectations or she might be Don Quixote. She takes these personae and uses them to tell a story, but often the story is very much about her own existence and her own childhood, and at the same time about a kind of mythic girlhood in a world of violence, a world both like and unlike our world, our so-called civilisation that isn’t by any means civilised to all of its inhabitants. Eurydice is particularly touching because it’s very much about Acker’s own experiences with breast cancer. She’s telling a story that happened to her and that is agonisingly painful. At the same time, she’s making it into a myth. She’s making it into a universal story about illness, death, descent. It’s so beautiful. I find it so moving. Did you like it? What did you think of it? Yes. I also think there’s something very economical about it. I think one of Acker’s stylish attributes is an incredible economy. She just doesn’t bother to make stuff up. I had a conversation with Chris Kraus where we were talking about having a horror of invention. Why not just use something real? Acker does that. She just takes whatever it is that she needs to create a scene or a scenario or an emotional state. Sometimes that’s from canonical works and sometimes it’s very much lifted from her own life. I feel like Eurydice has some cathartic power too, because we know that she did have breast cancer and that she did die of breast cancer. But, actually, it’s got a really similar tone to books that she wrote long before her diagnosis, as well. That idea of abjection, being an abject body, being a desiring abject body, and what that means, is something she had circled around her entire life. “One of Acker’s stylish attributes is an incredible economy. She just doesn’t bother to make stuff up” So, it adds some sort of charge, that we know the narrative is borrowed from her life, but actually, when she was doing things with The Story of O , say, has very similar material. Maybe the mood is slightly sharpened, but it’s very much a psychic territory that she’s been patrolling for a long time. That’s interesting. I feel like the experimental, surreal elements in Acker are an attempt to get at something real. She’s charting unconscious space, psychic space. It feels familiar, and even accurate, even though the content is so extreme. The same with Isherwood, he’s not really writing something that’s a realist novel in terms of having a plot or having a structure that comes to a resolution. What he is doing is capturing the texture of reality by logging the everyday ephemera along the way. Acker really underscores that by refusing to make up proper, realistic characters. She just takes whatever characters she needs for a minute and then drops them again, converting them abruptly into somebody else. That constant morphing feels, to me, very exciting, but it is also a strategy to disrupt you as a reader. Not just for the sake of disruption, I don’t think. It’s to make you wake up in some sort of way. I do! I think what deploying Kathy allowed me to do was steal freely from my own life. I could use all kind of experiences that were coming my way but I could regard them through a different consciousness, this exaggerated, cartoonish, super-anxious, super-paranoid consciousness—which, I should add, isn’t Kathy Acker either, but some sort of hybrid, fictional composite self. Doing that allowed me to make a painfully realistic account of what it felt like to be a person in this time, while keeping me well away from awful earnestness of memoir. The fractured consciousness was vital. I wanted to report on a moment but the hallmark of the moment was the fracturing of any steady consciousness, a perpetual sense of interruption, a dizzying simultaneity. It felt like a very difficult time to maintain a coherent sense of self, not least because of a social media and its performances. So an account that didn’t involve a fractured self wouldn’t have been an entirely accurate record. Yes. That was what I wasn’t going to say when you asked me earlier about reviews. But since you’re asking. I definitely haven’t noticed it so much from readers, but I’ve noticed that some reviews were very caught up in trying to figure out what was from my life, in a ‘gotcha’ kind of way. I mean, that seems like a fairly pointless exercise. Everything was from my life, unless it was from Kathy Acker’s. That’s kind of the point! That’s why is says “Kathy, by which I mean I” in the first sentence, to explain that this Kathy is me and now let’s move on to explore the world she’s experiencing. But reviewers literally trawled through my Twitter and Instagram to try and find what restaurant I’d eaten in on what day. It was quite a strange experience because it wasn’t the question I thought would be asked about the book. The personal element wasn’t disguised. It’s not like I sent it out as a realist novel and then it turned out that I actually hadn’t made anything up. I’d sent it as out as something that is about real life now—that is, trying to record a moment in time in a particular way, for a particular reason, which is that I had an instinct darker times were ahead. I wanted, à la Isherwood, to try and record exactly this season of transition, and especially what it felt like to be inside it, with all the confusion and anxiety and grotesque contrasts between privilege and lack. Yes. Definitely. And I’m not immune to that. I remember when I was reviewing Sheila Heti’s book How Should A Person Be I was absolutely fascinated by the question: Well, is this all her? Is she really friends with this person? I googled the painter in it, Marguax Williamson, and thought, ‘Oh, she’s a really interesting painter.’ So I can see how you might go about it in that sort of way. But it was also a shock to me. Anyway, I’ve deleted Twitter now, so no one can dig through that particular trash-heap anymore. This takes us very neatly to what I love about Chris Kraus. But, go on, ask your question."