ACKER, Kathy. Essay on Writing "The Invisible Universe".

Winnie-the-Pooh and Owl Experience Semantic Crisis

ACKER, Kathy. Essay on Writing "The Invisible Universe". [London. c. 1980].

Typescript stapled at upper left corner (277 x 217 mm); ff. [1], 13; illustration to f. [11]; lightly toned (heavier to title), central horizontal crease, foliation cut off to a few ff., last two ff. browned at head, small ink stain to title with a few marginal chips.

Typescript of a typically unsettling essay containing unpublished material, a disorienting discussion of Acker’s (1947–1997) thesis that literature emerges when ‘meaning is destroyed’.

This is possibly a photocopy given the apparent cropping of the text on f. 8
and at the tops of a couple of leaves, of an essay that would be published in truncated form in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Volume Four (Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein eds.), the final issue of the avant-garde journal Open Letter (Fifth Series No. 1, Winter 1982, ed. Frank Davey, pp. 83–86). The same issue contains an appreciation of Kathy Acker by Steve Benson (pp. 77–82). Born in New York, experimental poet, performance artist, and novelist Kathy Acker – whose work frequently incorporates themes of trauma, sexuality, language, and identity – moved to London in the early 1980s, returning to the United States at the end of the decade.

The published version omits the title ‘Essay on Writing’ and the parts of this article containing fantastical letters between Alfred de Musset, Georges Sand, and Gustave Flaubert, as well as the ‘VOODOO MAP WITH PICTURES OF EEYORE LOOKING FOR HIS TAIL’, although it does include the closing section that features Winnie-the-Pooh and Owl facing a semantic crisis. Acker’s argument that literature emerges from the destruction of meaning is initially laid out in a fairly straightforward manner but is quickly complicated by Acker’s characteristic mixture of allusion, sexual fantasy, and brutal humour. It is given an autobiographical slant by a passage describing a bitter middle-class female poet whose father disappears and whose mother quickly remarries, leaving her bereft of security.

In a harrowing section omitted in the published version, Acker goes further by creating a desperate, abandoned persona called Wendy, the name of her estranged stepsister. The lesson seems to be that the loss of meaning, and therefore the origin of literature, lies in the kind of trauma that leaves a person unsure of what’s true, good, or safe: ‘This is how mothers crap up their children. My attitude toward language stinks.’

SKU: 2123083