[In the following essay, Phillips explores the significance of Acker's allusions to Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter in Blood and Guts in High School.]

In the years since critics first took notice of Kathy Acker, considerable comment has been made on her use of other writers' language and plot lines in her fiction—and rightfully so. Acker has taken literary "borrowing" to its most bizarre extreme. Large portions of her books are undisguised reworkings of earlier writers' fictions; often such passages are used verbatim with no clue as to where the borrowed material ends and Acker's own language begins. Her 1982 work, Great Expectations, has as the title of its first section a single word: "Plagiarism." The novel's first few lines do indeed live up to the title:

My father's name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Peter.

In her earlier works, Acker chose to supply her readers with footnotes or authorial credits when she made use of other writers' words; but as her career progressed, she dropped this convention and has since borrowed, paraphrased, and plagiarized from the words and ideas of others with impunity. Ironically, plagiarism—the negation of another writer's trademark—has become one of the most distinctive trademarks of Acker's own fiction.

In fiction as experimental, fragmented, and disorienting as Acker's, these moments of familiar text can provide brief comfort in an otherwise very uncomfortable body of work. As critics, we are trained to look for "keys" to a text's "meaning," such as allusion, influence, and symbol. This is, no doubt, why so many of Acker's critics have made mention of the element of plagiarism in her art. As critics trained in the analysis of more traditional forms of literature, we may feel uncertain of how to approach many aspects of Acker's writing: her multigeneric style, her merging of visual art with text, and her shifting, often unreliable, narration. But we recognize Dickens when we see it (and Hawthorne, and Jong, and Genet), and we feel compelled to make use of these familiar handholds as a way of making meaning within Acker's fictions.

But, unfortunately, most critics have done little more than note that plagiarism is an element in Acker's writing; little analysis has been done of how it functions in her work. Poet and critic Ron Silliman (himself a character in Acker's novel The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec) has offered an oversimplified equation for what he calls the "persistent formula" for Acker's fiction: "plagiarism + pornography = autobiography." Other critics have been almost as dismissive in their remarks on Acker's borrowings. Larry McCaffery, one of the first critics to deal seriously with Acker's work, also has put forth a rather limited view of the purpose and function of Acker's plagiarism of earlier, more well-known texts:

Part of the point behind such strategies is to foreground textual jouissance, to insure that readers perceive that the "unity" found here is not produced by the questionable concept of an authorial ego or character "identity," but results from a confrontation with a consciousness presenting moments in its experience-in-practice.

Both critics are correct—at least in part. Acker's plagiarism is, as Silliman suggests, one of the ways in which she talks about her own life. And it is also, just as McCaffery points out, a means of unsettling reader expectations about authorial identity. But there is more to Acker's extensive use of plagiarized material than either critic's explanation can afford.

Acker's 1978 work, Blood and Guts in High School, may offer some answers concerning the purposes, and the effects, of her plagiarism. The novel deals with a ten-year old's journey through a dark world whose most distinct features are the absence of love and the presence of sexual perversion. Janey, Acker's protagonist, is the victim of first, her father's incest and second, his rejection. Forced to live on her own in New York City, Janey enters into a life of drugs, gratuitous sex, and violence—culminating in her kidnapping and captivity at the hands of a "Persian slave trader."

Like her other fictions, Blood and Guts contains a number of borrowings from other texts and from popular culture. The figures of Erica Jong, Jean Genet, and Jimmy Carter, among others, drift in and out of Acker's text like players in a nightmare. But the authorial presence most clearly felt in the book, except for Acker's of course, is that of Nathaniel Hawthorne. While Janey is being held captive by the Persian slave trader, she lives in total isolation, with no outside contact except for daily visits from her captor—visits in which she is "taught to be a whore." "One day she found a pencil stub and a scrap of paper in a forgotten corner of the room," Acker writes. "She began to write down her life." What follows is a lengthy section entitled "A Book Report," in which Janey writes, ostensibly at least, about Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. From the start, however, it is clear that Janey is indeed "writing down her own life" as much as she is engaging in a book report. "We all live in prison," she begins. "Most of us don't know we live in prison."

The question arises: Why select Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter as the fictional device with which to describe Janey's life? What qualities make Hawthorne's novel, written over one and a quarter centuries earlier, suitable collage material for Acker's postmodern, punk fiction? One answer, certainly, lies in the similarity of the two protagonists. Both are female outsiders who violate societal rules. Both are victims of male oppression, and both are in some way imprisoned. Most importantly, perhaps, both are "prisoners" of their own desire to be loved.

The popularity and high regard of Hawthorne's novel may suggest a second reason for Acker's use of the book. Few books can be considered to be universally known by Americans, but The Scarlet Letter is certainly one of the most widely taught novels in American schools. It follows that if Acker were seeking a work to use as a source of symbol and meaning, she would select a well-known text like Hawthorne's. Beyond this instant recognition, however, Larry McCaffery suggests a more perverse reason for using the novel in Acker's work. He notes the punk penchant for "crossing images together unexpectedly." Often this is done, McCaffery writes: "by profaning, mocking, and otherwise decontextualizing sacred texts (Johnny Rotten blaring out 'God Save the Queen,'…) into blasphemous metatexts." The Scarlet Letter, with its high position in the canon of American literature, is ripe for this type of approach. What, after all, could be more unexpected than a juxtaposition of Puritan and punk cultures? This may be at the root of Acker's choice of Hawthorne's "sacred text."

Early in her "book report," Acker's Janey engages in the kind of image crossing that McCaffery speaks of. By joining together thumbnail sketches of Hester Prynne's world and Janey's, Acker is able to discuss the current position of women in American society:

Long ago, when Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter, he was living in a society that was more socially repressive and less materialistic than ours. He wrote about a wild woman. This woman challenged the society by fucking a guy who wasn't her husband and having his kid. The society punished her by sending her to gaol, making her wear a red 'A' for adultery right on her tits, and excommunicating her.

In the next paragraph, Janey abruptly shifts from her "book report" on Hester's life and times and focuses on the realities of her own:

Nowadays most women fuck around 'cause fucking doesn't mean anything. All anybody cares about today is money. The woman who lives her life according to nonmaterialistic ideals is the wild antisocial monster: the more openly she does so, the more everyone hates her.

Clearly Acker is engaging in social criticism by using the borrowed text as a touchstone for Janey's present reality. By attempting to assimilate Hawthorne's world, Janey tries to understand the forces of history that have led to what she sees as the near collapse of her society:

The society in which I'm living is totally fuckedup. I don't know what to do…. If I knew how society got so fucked-up, if we all knew, maybe we'd have a way of destroying hell. I think that's what Hawthorne thought. So he set his story in the time of the first Puritans: the first people who came to the northern North American shore and created the society Hawthorne lived in, the society that created the one we live in today.

But Acker's use of Hawthorne's text allows for more than just a simple critique of American society; it also gives her a device with which to discuss the powers and the limitations of literature. Locked in her cell-like room, Janey uses a series of images—Hawthorne's novel—to describe her condition, to "write down her life." Soon after, however, she finds a Persian grammar book and begins to learn to write and compose poetry in Persian. The language system of her captor, the Persian slave trader, replaces, for a time at least, the language and plot of Hawthorne's tale. Unstated, but implicit in this plot development, is the idea that we adopt—perhaps without knowing it—the language of our oppressors. Just as the slave trader's grammar book has colored and shaped Janey's thinking, so have Hawthorne and all those who have contributed to the "fucked-up-culture" to which she belongs.

Janey, unlike Acker, seems quite unaware of the power that the literature of her oppressors has over her. She negates the power of the written word—claiming it to be a part of a much older time. Hawthorne, she says, "was living in a society to which ideas and writing still mattered." Janey sees her position as a writer as nearly meaningless—because literature is treated as a commodity:

Right now I can speak as directly as I want 'cause no one gives a shit about writing or ideas, all anyone cares about is money…. A book that can be advertised. Define culture that way.

You see, things are much better nowadays than in those dark old repressed Puritan days: anybody can say anything today; progress does occur.

Blind to the power that literature has had over her, Janey believes her own pen to be powerless. Unlike Hawthorne, who had to cloak "all the wild things he wanted to say" because his society valued ideas, Janey can say anything she wants because ideas no longer matter.

Janey's comments on the commodification of literature may point to another reason behind Acker's use of other writers' texts. In a time when the only ideas that count are those that "will net a half-million in movie and/or TV rights," perhaps Acker's borrowings from Hawthorne and other writers is a radical denial of literature as property. McCaffery has noted that deeply ingrained in the punk aesthetic is a distrust of the "conventions which govern traditional artistic forms"—a belief that "the traditions and language of Great Art had derived from the same elitist, authoritative sensibility that had elevated profit and reason at the expense of human needs and feelings." By using Hawthorne or other writers, as the basis for her own text, Acker may be rejecting the notion that art can be turned into property, and in turn may be rejecting the entire system that has tried to do so. Under such a mindset, plagiarism is not stealing because that which cannot be owned cannot be stolen. Words and ideas then, are not property but are free-floating objects that (like the title of the Poe story which I've used as the title for this essay) can be used freely by all.

For Janey, this characteristic punk distrust of literature and culture is an enigma. She faces the Catch 22 of wanting to rail against her culture but finding that she has no means to do so except those that are culturally prescribed (i.e., a book report on Hawthorne). Later, in her "Persian Poems," Janey again faces this problem. One of her poems, written in Persian and translated, reads:

     Culture stinks: books
     and great men and the
     fine arts
     beautiful women

Written in the language of her captors, the poem—like the book report—is a product of the culture that Janey so violently hates.

But the possible reasons for Acker's use of Hawthorne that I've outlined so far—forum for social critique, symbol for male literary dominance, and subject for punk literary anarchy—may prove to be secondary to what I believe to be the main effect realized by the author's borrowings from The Scarlet Letter. Above all, I think, the sections of the novel dealing with Hawthorne allow a radical feminist reworking of the story of Hester Prynne—a kind of "taking back" of a woman's story from a male author. By removing the story of Hester Prynne and her daughter Pearl from the limits of Hawthorne's text and placing them in Janey's consciousness, Acker both modernizes and feminizes the novel.

The Scarlet Letter section of the book is not the only part of Blood and Guts in which Acker voices the desire to revise male texts along feminist lines. In the section of the novel in which Janey travels with French novelist Jean Genet, she notes a passage from Genet's autobiographical novel Le Journal du Voleur in which the author describes his masochistic joy at being "beaten up and hurt" by his male lovers. Janey's response is not one of recognition with her own situation as a woman who has had similar experiences; instead, it is one of disgust at his lack of understanding for the true position of women in a male-dominated culture:

Genet doesn't know how to be a woman. He thinks all he has to do to be a woman is slobber. He has to do more. He has to get down on his knees and crawl mentally every minute of the day. If he wants a lover, if he doesn't want to be alone every single goddamn minute of the day and horny so bad he feels the tip of his clit stuck in a porcupine's quill, he has to perfectly read his lover's mind, silently, unobtrusively, like a corpse, and figure out at every changing second what his lover wants. He can't be a slave. Women aren't just slaves. They are whatever men want them to be. They are made, created by men. They are nothing without men.

The passage is a telling one concerning the authenticity of texts written by men about women. Genet, although perhaps closer in his experience to what Janey sees as the position of women in society, still lacks the necessary emotional, physical, and social conditioning to portray accurately the experience of being a woman. In Janey's view, Genet has the wrong mind-set, the wrong genitals, and the wrong social status to do anything more than play-act the role of woman.

The type of feminist correction to which Janey submits Genet's text is also at the heart of her treatment of Hawthorne's novel. The story line of the book is taken back from Hawthorne and his omniscient narrator as Janey and Hester merge in Acker's text. The structure of Acker's text becomes more confused and fragmentary as Janey's isolation and illness change the form of her discourse from a standard high school book report to a hallucinatory stream of consciousness:

       Everything takes place at night.
     In the centres of nightmares and dreams,
     I know I'm being torn apart by my needs,
     I don't know how to see anymore.

I'm too bruised and I'm scared. At this point in The Scarlet Letter and in my life politics don't disappear but take place inside my body.

As Janey's assimilation of Hester's character becomes complete, all punctuation that might have separated the quoted material of Hester from Janey's speech disappears. Janey seems to melt into the character of Hester Prynne, voicing openly the desires of the heroine from Hawthorne's novel. But the words she uses also fit her own situation; it is a speech that could be addressed to either Hester's Reverend Dimmesdale or Janey's absent, incestuous father:

I want to fuck you, Dimwit. I know I don't know you very well you won't ever let me get near you. I have no idea how you feel about me. You kissed me once with your tongue when I didn't expect it and then you broke a date. I used to have lots of fantasies about you: you'd marry me, you'd dump me, you'd fuck me…. Now the only image in my mind is your cock in my cunt. I can't think of anything else.

I've been alone for a very long time. I'm locked up in a room and I can't get out…. I don't know how to talk to people, I especially have difficulty talking to you; and I'm ashamed and scared 'cause I want you so badly, Dimwit.

Critic Linda Hutcheon has written that the type of postmodern intertextuality that we see in passages such as this is a "manifestation of both a desire to close the gap between past and present for the reader and a desire to rewrite the past in a new context." The two texts—Hawthorne's and Acker's—ricochet off each other, creating, if not great art, at least a brief moment of recognition in the reader's mind concerning their connectedness. Such a text, Hutcheon writes:

uses and abuses these intertextual echoes, inscribing their powerful allusions and then subverting that power through irony. In all, there is little of the modernist sense of a unique, symbolic, visionary "work of art"; there are only texts, already written ones.

Clearly, in the section of Blood and Guts dealing with Hawthorne, Acker attempts, as Hutcheon says, "to rewrite the past in a new context." But in Acker's novel, such a revision of older texts does not just involve the addition of a feminist subtext or the inclusion of pornographic elements to the original work: it also involves experimentation with language that strives to break free from traditional genres (like the Romantic novel) and move toward a more meaningful form. "TEACH ME A NEW LANGUAGE, DIMWIT," Janey writes, "A LANGUAGE THAT MEANS SOMETHING TO ME."

One passage that illustrates this quest for a "new language" occurs when Janey engages in a "lesson" with another voice in Acker's text. Prefaced with the line "Teach me a new language," the passage involves an exercise in repetition of simple phrases, first uttered, presumably, by a male voice (perhaps Hawthorne's Reverend Dimmesdale) and then repeated by Janey. At first, Janey repeats the lines verbatim; but as the lesson continues, she begins to alter the phrases—subtly at first, and then radically:

     "The night is red."
                                "The night is all around
                                    me and it's black."
     "The streets are deserted."
                            "I can't even see the streets
                          from my room; how would I
                             know if they're deserted?"

The passage is emblematic of the entire section of the novel dealing with Hawthorne. It begins with an acceptance of the male voice (Hawthorne's text) but finally Janey begins to question and ultimately reject the syntax and logic of her teacher's voice. What began as a straightforward exercise in repetition (plagiarism) ends in a complete rejection of authority and a further blurring of "sanity and insanity":

The "new language" that Janey strives for, this departure from the traditional, male-dominated form of the novel (represented by Hawthorne and Dimmesdale), takes many forms in Janey's reworking of The Scarlet Letter. Often, her ramblings seem almost incoherent, as in this prose paragraph that melts suddenly into poetry:

     Sex in America is S & M. This is the glorification of S & M and slavery
     and prison. In this society there was a woman who
     freedom and suddenly the black night opens up and
     fucked a lot and she got tied up with ropes and
     on upward and it doesn't stop
     beaten a lot and made to spread her legs too wide
     the night is open space that goes on and on,
     this woman got so mentally and physically hurt
     not opaque black, but a black that is extension
     she stopped fucking even though fucking is the thing to do.

On its surface, the poem seems a jumble of images, without any real relation to the rest of the text. But at work here is one of the "new language" systems that Janey speaks of. By reading alternate lines of the poem, a new meaning emerges: one that has considerable relevance to the stories of both Hester and Janey:

     In this society there was a woman who
     fucked a lot and she got tied up with ropes and
     beaten a lot and made to spread her legs too wide
     this woman got so mentally and physically hurt
     she stopped fucking even though fucking is the
     thing to do.

For Kathy Acker, the rejection and subversion of the traditional forms of discourse that have been dominated by males seem as important as the subversion of their meanings. Her fictions may begin with what seem to be borrowings, extensions, or plagiarisms of male works; but they move quickly beyond these original works—into new meanings and new forms that their authors could never have imagined. Larry McCaffery has called Acker's work "fiction to slam dance by." Acker at times also seems to downplay the complexity of her work: "Everything is surface," she writes, "that everything is me: I'm just surface: surface is surface." But her work is more than just "surface," more than just simple "plagiarism," more than just punk "fiction to slam dance by." Acker's Blood and Guts in High School, with its strange and complex reworking of Hawthorne, offers a new and powerful perspective on literature and gender in postmodern America.