"writers create what they do out of their own frightful agony and blood and mushed-up guts and horrible mixed-up insides."
this might be the late 20th century's showing for the Great American Novel, precisely because of its dripping disdain for greatness, america, and novels.
almost as desperate as janey's hunger for intimacy is the book's own hunger for novelty. its hostility to continuity means that there are really exactly two characters, janey and janey's desire. "janey isn't me. which of the two do i think is real?"
the thing that most compels me about its depiction of trauma is its refusal to moralize about the men that hurt janey. we're obviously expected to recoil from, for example, her incestuous relationship with her father, but unlike us she can't exempt herself from her world. this web of social power is the one she's stuck with, and she determines herself to wring every drop of experience from it. this reaches a feverish nadir in the section on her love for president carter, which follows a nauseous assessment of his political and sexual vices with a genuinely heartbreaking description of their slow breakup.
i'm reminded of donna haraway's cyborg, who takes "pleasure in the confusion of boundaries". fittingly enough, janey's father, too, is inessential. because the first section of the book was written last, it barely has an effect on the narrative structure, and her father never figures in the later sections.
one of acker's subtler obsessions is architecture - both the narrative world of cramped tenements, upscale hotels, and abandoned temples, and the rigorously sketched dream maps that populate its pages. the meaning of a building, she tells us twice, is its function. one of the book's main exercises, then, is determining the function of dreams.
there's one scene that's vaguely orientalist but i can't tell how self-aware it is. acker, as a detached narrator, tells us that "all the women's houses in the arab section [of alexandria] are brothels, so to speak... for [prostitutes] there is no class struggle, no movements of the left, and no right-wing terror because all the men are fascists." the framing seems to imply that this is uniquely true of arab women. however, a few lines later, acker-as-janey expresses a similar sentiment about women in general, and later scenes certainly don't depict the unnamed colonial power kindly.
all in all: good book, and i felt compelled to say something about it even if it's short and fragmented. that fits the spirit of it anyway.