I immediately disliked Kathy Acker’s short story “Humility.” It is written in a twisted third person, often omitting pronouns. It’s partly about her evasion of the Black Mountain poet’s concept of voice:
To her, every word wasn’t only material in itself, but also sent out like beacons other words. Blue sent out heaven and The Virgin. Material is rich. I didn’t create language, writer thought. Later she would think about ownership and copyright. I’m constantly being given language. Since this language-world is rich and always changing, flowing, when I write, I enter a world which has complex relations and is perhaps, illimitable. This world both represents and is human history, public memories and private memories turned public, the records and the actualizations of human intentions. This world is more than life and death, for there life and death conjoin. I can’t make language, but in this world, I can play and be played.
So where is “my voice”?
Wanted to be a writer.
The reason why I dislike it so intensely isn’t because I disagree with the concepts contained in it (although I do), but because it is so forced, contrived, and self-consciously “arty-farty.” The issues, cast in an angry-feminist sort of rant, speak of voice as if it were solely a male construct. I begin to think that it is better to think of the gendered aspect of writing more abstractly. Giving birth to writing casts most writers (particularly literary ones) in largely female terms. There are notable exceptions, for instance Aphra Behn who spoke of writing as her “male part.” The gender confusion and the issues which Acker addresses, I think, are better expressed by John Keats in his letter to Benjamin Bailey of November 22, 1817:
In passing however I must say of one thing that has pressed upon me lately and encreased my Humility and capability of submission and that is this truth—Men of Genius are great as certain ethereal Chemicals operating on the Mass of neutral intellect—but they have not any individuality, any determined Character. I would call the top and head of those who have a proper self Men of Power—
But I am running my head into a Subject which I am certain I could not do justice to under five years s[t]udy and 3 vol octavo—and moreover long to be talking about the Imagination.
This anticipates in a weird way Kurt Vonnegut’s concern over “bad chemicals” though a biographical reading of this trope as being rooted in his son’s bout with schizophrenia is probably closer. Keat’s observation that an individual “voice” is not a necessary condition of genius seems in agreement with Acker, though his choice of the word “humility” is meant to produce an entirely different effect. Humility, for Acker, is the internalization of “humiliation.” Keats didn’t really see it that way, I suspect. Humility is what one felt when faced with the sublime. In the same letter, Keats uses much the same imagery that Acker does to decidedly different ends:
What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not—for I have the same Idea of all our passions as of Love and they are all in their sublime, creative of essential beauty—in a Word, you may know of my favorite speculation by my first Book and the little song I sent in my last—which is a representation of the probable mode of operating in these matters—The imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream—he awoke and found it truth.
Keats taught himself to be a poet by mimicking other poets, thus I suspect he would not be hostile to Acker’s mash-ups. What seems different is the emotional distance instilled by Acker into her words; to renounce the voice in order to find one. I read so little passion in her words; they are just so antiseptic that I can’t stand it. But the real point of confluence between Acker and Keats’s positions slips through in Keat’s reference to “Adam’s dream” from Paradise Lost. Adam’s dream was of the instant that Eve was plucked from his ribs—it was a virgin birth. Though, of course, the pregnant party was a man. Acker’s “Blue— Heaven— The Virgin . . .” is too contrived. Cleverness leaves me cold, most of the time.
I think that the sophistication of Keats is admirable, for he understands that identity and voice are central to any concept of effective discourse. However, it may certainly be the case that identity is not essential to be affective. But an affective utterance, without an identity or voice attached to it, is a virgin birth.
I don’t think that literature should aspire to being that miraculous. Or, more importantly, I don’t think that literature should aspire to being playfully ineffective.
