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In Memoriam to Identity

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kathy deconstructs rimbaud, baudelaire, and faulkner in this beautiful mess of a book. it tells the tale of the ill-fated relationship between rimbaud and baudelaire and asks if being alone is better than being in a relationship that isn't supposed to be. it also retells faulkner's sound and the fury in an updated, perverse manner. 'come alive dead heart, and sing...' kathy's approach is never subtle, and is not recommended for those easily offended, but when you accept the dirtiness, all of the beauty seeps in.

Acker is not for everyone, but if you're a fan or a literary fiction reader or open to Acker's wild ride through language and heartbreak and sensuality, I highly recommend this novel. Her language is never more distilled and powerful than here, if you have the ears for it. One of my very favorite Acker books, and obviously I'm a fan.

A Review of IN MEMORIAM TO IDENTITY
by Dr. Joseph Suglia

Resonating with the title of Kathy Acker's most mature work, IN MEMORIAM TO IDENTITY (1990), is the notion that the self is inseparable from its own becoming-other, from the forms that it assumes and the masks that it dons. The book serves as a series of largely disconnected epitaphs to a discarded concept of identity---that is, to "identity" conceived as transcendental and substantialized subjectivity that endured unchanged through time and exist a priori independently of all relations to the other. What Acker's book suggests, in a manner that seems disjointed and even at times haphazard, is that personal identity is based on the exposure to the other person that is revealed by sexuality (the final and perhaps most significant word of the book).

Three cycles of narrative intersect with each other: 1.) A willfully anachronistic and reconstructive transcription of Rimbaud's biography (broken off arbitrarily when Acker grew disgusted with the poet's imperialist conversion) interspersed with references to AIDS and postmodernist theorist Jean Baudrillard (here decried as a cynic), deliberate mistranslations of Rimbaud's verse, and intentionally unacknowledged citations from Buechner, Lautreamont, and Artaud---members of the counter-tradition of subversive literature within which Acker would like to insert herself. Of foremost importance is Rimbaud's impassioned relationship to Verlaine, who is compelled to choose between a socially unacceptable liaison with the boy and his responsibilities as a father, husband, and member of the bourgeoisie. The narrative is set against the background of the Franco-German War of 1870. According to the logic of Acker's repoliticization, the Germans appear as yuppies who wage a ceaseless battle against the unemployed and arrogate to themselves services that only they can afford. 2.) A narrative oriented around Airplane, a young girl who exists in a relationship of absolute dependency to her rapist (later nominated as her "boyfriend")---a relationship that mirrors, despite Acker's own self-interpretive claims, Rimbaud's relationship to Verlaine. She is inexorably driven to dance at a strip club. 3.) A transformative replication of Faulkner's THE SOUND AND THE FURY that concerns the sexually voracious Capitol, who is erotically obsessed with her brother Quentin. Her goal, to couple with every man in the world, is the indirect endeavor to achieve sexual congress with her brother, the only man who matters to her. Capitol is the pure desire to consume men, the will to conquer through copulation; she generalizes her male sexual partners to the point at which they are reduced to nothing. Because Capitol can never remember any of the men with whom she couples (and does not exercise any discrimination in her choices), she not only erases these men as individual human beings: by eliding all memory, she effectively destroys her self as an identity that would persist through time. She "herself," a female Don Giovanni (and this is the joint that links her narrative to the Rimbaud section), is "No One": non-identical with herself, "she" is a multiple series of drives to overcome men through sexuality. 4.) "The Wild Palms" alternates successively between the narrative of Airplane and that of Capitol; both narratives are sutured together in counterpoint (this is a Faulknerian practice).

To love, in each context, is to demolish and shape one's personal history. The work is an extended, productive commentary on Rimbaud's dictum, "Je suis un autre." The most productive point of departure for an analysis of this work would be the first narrative, which concerns this dictum most directly. Rimbaud longs to free himself not merely from the self that he is and has been, but from the stability of identity in general: "*I* want to die..."

Rimbaud prefers "the vulnerability of real identity" to the bourgeois self (a pre-existing self that would be identical with itself). R.'s identity is, strictly speaking, a non-identity: he is a multiple series of selves rather than the self-sameness of the unique self that would come before all others. His desire to become other-than-himself, to be exteriorized as his own double, is inextricably bound to his relation to V. Identity is both constituted and destroyed by the sexual relation.

It is a relation that gives rise to the most intense experience of pain. Sexuality is not absolute communion, the fusion of the self and the Other, but rather absolute loneliness: what is most distinctive about the sexual relation is the *absence* of all bonds between the persons involved. Whereas R.'s relationship to V. is one of submission, fragility, and addiction, the latter's relationship to the former is something that could be reduced to a moral decision... One witnesses a certain dissymmetry in the relation between R. and V. in scene after scene of this work. What marks their rapport is the fact that this relation is unequal and without a future. The hopelessness of the relation belongs to it essentially and defines both of its members. Love becomes, as well, synonymous with coercion, the penetration of rape, and the agony of torture...

R. hates to desire V. He desires V. because he hates V., because he is killing him. He discovers love through pain and this is the only experience that would allow him to demolish identity altogether.

When V. withdraws from R.'s life altogether in order not to be named a "homosexual," R. accedes to another relation... It is at this point that R. renounces poetry and pronounces poetry's end---although one cannot assign a precise date, August 1873, for instance, to this renunciation and pronouncement---and is transformed utterly... It is not as if Rimbaud discarded his past self as if it were an old shell and entered into a new one (that of an arms dealer and ivory trader). What is affirmed is the esential instability and uncertainty of all identity: that the "I" is already the "Non-I."

The renunciation of poetry corresponds precisely to the renunciation of Verlaine and what he represents: the self-sameness of subjectivity conceived as substance. Such is Acker's implicit explanation of R.'s alleged "silence"---which was not a form of silence at all, but the accession to another order of writing. It is not merely the case that R. has broken with his past self and is transmuted into an imperialist (such is a conclusion that Acker has rejected). He enters into an experience in which the self is continually annihilated and reformed, an experience in which the self proliferates into a series of duplicable selves or non-selves. R.'s narrative ends with the affirmation of an *other* consciousness: not a new consciousness that would supersede one that would come before it, but a consciousness that is always entirely other-than-itself. R.'s apparent renunciation of poetry, mistyped as his "silence," was in fact a phenomenological turn toward the experience of the self as an other.

All of Acker's work is severely flawed and IN MEMORIAM TO IDENTITY is no exception. But these flaws are tied to the success of her densely individuated style. Acker's "bad writing" (and carelessness is in evidence here---I have seldom read a book with more typographical and syntactical errors) may be read, charitably, as a mark of her iconoclasm, her refusal to fashion a well-crafted masterpiece that would be accepted within the canon of traditional literary history. Unfortunately, the stylization of the narrative is not immune to this prctice. The description of the relationship between R. and V. is, I'm afraid, only intermittently compelling and tends to veer toward mere compilation and summary of biographical data. The deadpan repetition of "facts" from R.'s life denies any pathetic identification on the part of the reader. This, in itself, would not be disturbing if pathos were not what IN MEMORIAM TO IDENTITY were all about. The work is most impressive when Acker gives herself over to the desire, however juvenile, to shock her audience and approximates the punk sensibility of her vastly inferior early novel, BLOOD AND GUTS IN HIGH SCHOOL (1980), while bringing to the work a far greater intelligence. And yet the work lacks the critical naivete that made Acker's early writing powerful. Most troubling in this regard are the frequent intrusions of Acker the Professor and Literary Theorist into the space of the narrative. Everything proceeds as if the author had surfeited herself with postmodern theory to the point at which she could only write narratives fraught with savvy, self-interpretive statements. She *anticipates* the interpretation of her work in the hands of her informed readership. IN MEMORIAM TO IDENTITY thus takes on the strange appearance of a book that reads itself.

Dr. Joseph Suglia

This book was just way over my head. I was impressed with Acker's ability to vividly expose the true inner monologues of her characters, but I just didn't grasp the point or even what was going on half the time. This book just totally bummed me out, and left me confused.

Okay, perhaps I'm just not as "punk" as I used to be (or consider myself), but this was instantly the worst book I've read -- well, skimmed through -- in recent memory. It is one of the few times I've ever "walked out" on a book, because it was simply unreadable.

Perhaps in 1992 this would have been considered shocking and oh-so-postmodern, but today it seems ridiculously contrived in its attempts to use offensive language, and to blur lines of pseudohistorical drama and political tracts, that it's actually laughable. Acker proves herself the queen of the non-sequitur; as these non-characters explore their useless, sex-and-violence-based relationships, they'll throw in comments about the smell of their ..., or half-baked sociopolitical theories for ABSOLUTELY NO REASON. One fun game is to count how many times a character will use the phrase "I love you" or "I hate you," with no provocation whatsoever -- somehow it reminds me of awful Italian modernist movies from the 60's. At first, her awkward style is mildly intriguing, but about 20 pages in you realize that Acker relentlessly continues in this vein, ad absurdum.

You will get NOTHING out of this novel. No insight, or even much entertainment, I expect. Perhaps for some historical value, that is, to rediscover what kind of ... people were fawning over back when postmodernism was still hot in academic (not so much artistic) circles. But nowadays, it's just a joke.