HAPPENSTANCE

"Language, on one level, constitutes a set of codes and social and historical agreements. Nonsense doesn't per se break down the codes; speaking precisely that which the codes forbid breaks the codes."

—Kathy Acker, Empire of the Senseless

A few days ago, I was visiting the Center for Book Culture website to check on the newly released and forthcoming books from Dalkey Archive Press. When I was there, I noticed a link that I am sure has always been there but that has repeatedly eluded my attention. It is a series of author interviews. The first interview listed, since she is first in alphabetical order, is Kathy Acker.

I love Kathy Acker's writing. When I was younger I loved her writing because it was subversive and obscene; it was in your face and "giving the finger" to anyone who was "The Man." As I have aged, I love her writing for different reasons. I love it because it makes you think as a reader. It assumes that you know something, and if you don't then you had better quickly learn. It borrows and assimilates and transforms and annihilates cultural references.

In the interview, Acker talks about her "plagiarism," her delving into established texts and turning them inside-out. She talks about how the culmination of her playing with texts is made known in Empire of the Senseless (which at the time of the interview in 1988 was her most recent book). It is a disjointed novel that follows two characters—Abhor, part robot and part human, and Thivai, pirate—in the wasteland of near future, postapocalyptic Paris. The interview sent me to its pages once again and I just started to randomly thumb through it, remembering pieces of the narrative.

By happenstance, the first passage I opened to was the text quoted above (page 134). I believe it to be the modus operandi of Acker in all of her novels. She is trying to end the virus that language has become a la the "theory" of William S. Burroughs, who was similarly trying to break language's stranglehold upon reality. She is trying to break the codes by writing the forbidden.

The second passage I opened to was the following (page 164):

"What is language? Does anyone speak to anyone? Is language computer language, journalese, dictation of expectation and behaviour, announcement of the allowed possibilities or reality? Does language control like money?"

The question asked by one of the characters is pertinent to today when we hide from one another behind the facades of Myspace accounts, blogs, email addresses, text messages, cell phones, while simultaneously publishing intimate details and pictures of our lives on our personal websites. We hide in a world of lies, where we have killed truth but won't acknowledge our own culpability.

These two passages from Empire of the Senseless became all the more meaningful for me this week when I discovered that the Puyallup Library had obtained a copy of Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die! by Mark Binelli. (I was planning on buying it when I had a few extra dollars to spend.) I checked it out and am now one-third through the novel. Binelli is also playing with language and codes in his "attack" on "established texts." Sacco and Vanzetti in Binelli's imaginings are not the anarchists who were executed by the U. S. Federal Government for their "crimes," but vaudeville stars cum film actors in the vein of Laurel and Hardy or Abbott and Costello.

Binelli not only challenges the "codes and social and historical agreements" but even himself, as in this statement from the fictional film critic Hylo Pierce (page 50):

"This may be a personal bias, but from my standpoint, there's always a certain depseration implied on the part of the artist in trotting out a prominent cultural figure, whether this occurs in a film or a novel or an epic mural."

Hilarious stuff, if you ask me.

Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die!, like Empire of the Senseless, is dense with cultural references. It is also a somewhat difficult read (although more enjoyable than Empire) due to the rich tapestry of interconnections that Binelli weaves. I keep finding myself having to backtrack a few pages to make sure I have all of the relationships between individual artworks and persons in place. (Binelli also "forces" the reader to do the same with his Supplementary Material interludes that are critical to the narrative.) I am glad that Binelli is challenging not only my own assumptions about the world but also my intelligence, all the while making it fun.

I am looking forward to what Binelli does in the last two-thirds of the book, although that is another story for another time.