Great Expectations: A Novel

The personal interiorization of the practice of humiliation is called humility.

This is Jon typing. Jon has been reading. All day. Mortality has reaped recklessly as of late. Right now two people Jon loves are ill in a real bad way. Jon muses and frets. He reads. Jon loved this book despite it being Wrong. He'd love to quote and paste and rant-and-riff about LIFE. But he won't. Jon listens to Marcin Wasilewski and Morrissey. Jon can't turn off his brain. Jon wallows and wonders. He'd love to read more Acker, but not just yet.

"A narrative is an emotional moving ..." says Acker in Great Expectations, and that seems a fitting hypothesis for the work. It is a river of pathos, and all else is an uncontainable storm. Narrative voices shift frequently and characters are uprooted from time and place, transformed in name and gender.

Acker is a skilled plagiarist in the most complimentary sense of the word, and this time uses Dickens' work, Melville's Moby Dick, and Reáge's Story of O as schema for her characters to live in. They argue, they whine, they fuck, they philosophize; stuck in a post-structural narrative, they announce repeatedly that they have no idea what any of it means. A central point Acker makes here is that language is indomitable. Another, that the show more artist isolates themselves and chases away love. The stereotype becomes the rule. That which is said becomes which is, because that is what we perceive.

Maybe. And lots of cunts, always lots of cunts. Acker embraced this same narrative techniques many times over, and her work in the nineteen eighties employs them to excellent effect. This one hell of a book, and it gets even better from here. show less

In this novel Acker aims her critique at the gnarly intersection of capitalism, violence, sexual dysfunction, and male dominance. In order to live out this critique, Acker jettisons most of the (male-dominated) traditions of narrative as she writes, systematically disrupting the stability of characters and setting, and rejecting the claim to authorial originality (as you might guess from the title). Some might say that this rejection is a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but I'm more inclined to say it's form following function. Exemplary.

fascinating meditation on love and identity. not my favourite (toss-up between Blood and Guts and the Portrait of an Eye collection), gonna have to reread it again soon.

This is a tough one. Going to have to think this through and detail my struggles with it on the blog.

Made me think!