''Blood and Guts in High School'' is a novel by
Kathy Acker
Kathy Acker (April 18, 1947 isputed– November 30, 1997) was an American experimental novelist, playwright, essayist, and postmodernist writer, known for her idiosyncratic and transgressive writing that dealt with themes such as childhood trau ...
. It was written in the late 1970s and copyrighted in 1978. It traveled a complex and circuitous route to publication, before being officially released in 1984. It remains Acker's most popular and best-selling book. The novel is also considered a
metafictional text, which is aware of its status as a fictional piece. The novel explores but simultaneously deconstructs the American politics of the time it was written and intercontinental history tying into the novel's subject of
human trafficking, while being interspersed with sections of sexually detailed drawings,
dream maps,
symbolism
Symbolism or symbolist may refer to:
Arts
* Symbolism (arts), a 19th-century movement rejecting Realism
** Symbolist movement in Romania, symbolist literature and visual arts in Romania during the late 19th and early 20th centuries
** Russian sym ...
and
non-linear writing
A writing system is a method of visually representing verbal communication, based on a script and a set of rules regulating its use. While both writing and speech are useful in conveying messages, writing differs in also being a reliable form ...
.
Plot and narrative
''Blood and Guts in High School'', while having a frequently disrupted and heavily surreal narrative, is the story of Janey Smith, a ten-year-old American girl living in
Mérida, Mexico, who departs to the US to live on her own. She has an
incest
Incest ( ) is human sexual activity between family members or close relatives. This typically includes sexual activity between people in consanguinity (blood relations), and sometimes those related by affinity (marriage or stepfamily), adopti ...
uous sexual relationship with her father, whom she treats as "boyfriend, brother, sister, money, amusement, and father." They live together in Mexico until another woman begins to interest Janey's father, leading Janey to realize he hates her because she limits him by dominating his life, and he wants to have his own life. Her father agrees to let her go and puts her into a school in New York City. For a period of time her father sends her money, but later she begins to work at a
hippie bakery and is appalled by the customers, whose behavior gradually spirals out of control. She has many sexual partners. She ends up pregnant twice and has two abortions; she seems to be furiously addicted to sex and does not care whom she sleeps with. In New York City she joins a gang, the Scorpions. One day, while the gang is driving frantically in a stolen car from the police, they are involved in a car crash: Janey is the only one who survives. Afterwards, she begins to live in the New York slums. Two thieves break into her apartment, kidnap her, and
sell her into prostitution. She becomes the property of a Persian
slave trader
The history of slavery spans many cultures, nationalities, and religions from ancient times to the present day. Likewise, its victims have come from many different ethnicities and religious groups. The social, economic, and legal positions of e ...
who keeps her locked up, trying to turn her out as a prostitute. We see Janey's dreams and visions, and read her journal entries and poems as the lines between reality and fiction begin to become blurred.
Shortly before the kidnapper is to release her to become a prostitute for him, she discovers she has cancer. The slave trader lets her go and she illegally goes to
Tangier
Tangier ( ; ; ar, طنجة, Ṭanja) is a city in northwestern Morocco. It is on the Moroccan coast at the western entrance to the Strait of Gibraltar, where the Mediterranean Sea meets the Atlantic Ocean off Cape Spartel. The town is the capi ...
,
Morocco
Morocco (),, ) officially the Kingdom of Morocco, is the westernmost country in the Maghreb region of North Africa. It overlooks the Mediterranean Sea to the north and the Atlantic Ocean to the west, and has land borders with Algeria t ...
. There she meets
Jean Genet, the iconic French writer, and they develop a relationship while Janey vulgarly and intensely discusses but later becomes attracted to President
Jimmy Carter
James Earl Carter Jr. (born October 1, 1924) is an American politician who served as the 39th president of the United States from 1977 to 1981. A member of the Democratic Party, he previously served as the 76th governor of Georgia from 1 ...
. Janey and Genet travel through
North Africa
North Africa, or Northern Africa is a region encompassing the northern portion of the African continent. There is no singularly accepted scope for the region, and it is sometimes defined as stretching from the Atlantic shores of Mauritania in ...
and stop in
Alexandria
Alexandria ( or ; ar, ٱلْإِسْكَنْدَرِيَّةُ ; grc-gre, Αλεξάνδρεια, Alexándria) is the second largest city in Egypt, and the largest city on the Mediterranean coast. Founded in by Alexander the Great, Alexandri ...
. Genet treats Janey badly and thinks little of her, but the worse he treats her the more she loves him. He decides to leave her. Janey gets arrested for stealing Genet's property, and shortly afterwards, by her luck, he joins her in prison. A rebellion breaks out as the narrative continues to deteriorate while particular figures, collectively named the
Capitalist
Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. Central characteristics of capitalism include capital accumulation, competitive markets, price system, priva ...
s, meet to discuss how their society is collapsing. As it peaks, Janey and Genet are both thrown out of Alexandria. After travelling together across North Africa for some time, Genet gives Janey some money and leaves. However, soon after they part company, Janey dies suddenly, leaving time to pass endlessly as the narrative breaks into a final set of dream maps; here, the novel concludes.
Storytelling technique
In ''Blood and Guts in High School'', Acker uses the technique of
collage. She inserts letters, poems, drama scenes, dream visions and drawings. This creates a challenging text with a disturbed linearity. Acker freely admitted to using plagiarism in her work. The novel is considered an anti-narrative work since it jumps in and out of narration and contains different narrators. The narrative of the story is disrupted with pornographic drawings, letters, and dream maps to further disembody the plot but place the reader in the narrative itself. “Acker’s novel incorporates at least three main threads of
poststructuralist
Post-structuralism is a term for philosophical and literary forms of theory that both build upon and reject ideas established by structuralism, the intellectual project that preceded it. Though post-structuralists all present different critique ...
discourse into Janey’s narrative. The first is an exploration biopower; the second is a reading of the
oedipal family as pathology; and the third is an analysis of the gender politics of language” (Muth 90).
''Blood and Guts in High School'' incorporates the text from one of Acker's previous works, "Hello, I'm Erica Jong", a
chapbook written
passive-aggressively and vulgarly towards novelist and feminist satirist
Erica Jong
Erica Jong (née Mann; born March 26, 1942) is an American novelist, satirist, and poet, known particularly for her 1973 novel ''Fear of Flying''. The book became famously controversial for its attitudes towards female sexuality and figured pro ...
.
Like the novel's heroine, Janey, Acker also died of breast cancer, twenty years after writing ''Blood and Guts''. Many of Acker's heroines have or fear getting cancer.
Critical reception
Out of all of Acker's books, ''Blood and Guts in High School'' has received the most diverse criticisms and reviews. Many writers have tried analyzing ''Blood and Guts'' to understand exactly what Acker was trying to accomplish. Katie R. Muth in her article described ''Blood and Guts'' as a novel that draws arguments from
gender studies
Gender studies is an interdisciplinary academic field devoted to analysing gender identity and gendered representation. Gender studies originated in the field of women's studies, concerning women, feminism, gender, and politics. The field ...
, global capitalism, and theories of subject formation (89). Susan E. Hawkins describes ''Blood and Guts'' as a text that contains
plagiarism,
parody
A parody, also known as a spoof, a satire, a send-up, a take-off, a lampoon, a play on (something), or a caricature, is a creative work designed to imitate, comment on, and/or mock its subject by means of satiric or ironic imitation. Often its sub ...
,
pastiche, and other
antirealist techniques that mark her work as postmodern (Hawkins 637). According to Hawkins, Acker is motivated by two discourses: the oedipal and the imperial (642). Using the mechanism of sexual and economic oppression, Acker is able to actualize the taboo surrounding incest by associating it with capitalism to demystify the oedipal formation of desire in the Western culture (Hawkins 646).
Another critical review that ''Blood and Guts'' received is the narrative technique in the story. Not only is the narrating technique unstable and at times, unreliable, but the narrator herself, Janey, a 10-year-old girl, who lives until 14, experiences things that no little girl should. Kathy Hughes in her analysis takes a look at this approach by Acker and the overall effect of the novel when told from a 10-year-old perspective. Hughes argues that Acker attacks and flips the Freudian theory upside down through sarcasm and irony (Hughes 124). And a 10-year-old can accomplish what society is afraid of doing because of their simple matter of fact speaking, “Janey, as a child, does not have the socialization to throw the veil of intellectual language over the horrors of her daily life, thus Acker does not utilize poetics when describing her life” (Hughes 127).
It is featured in Peter Boxall's book, ''
1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die
''1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die'' is a literary reference book compiled by over one hundred literary critics worldwide and edited by Peter Boxall, Professor of English at Sussex University, with an introduction by Peter Ackroyd. Each tit ...
'' and ''The Little Black Book of Books''.
Adaptations
Laura Parnes
Laura Parnes is contemporary American artist who creates non-linear narratives that engage strategies of film and video art and blur the lines between storytelling conventions and experimentation. Her work is often episodic, references pop cultu ...
created a "re-imagining" of the novel as a multi-screen
video art
Video art is an art form which relies on using video technology as a visual and audio medium. Video art emerged during the late 1960s as new consumer video technology such as video tape recorders became available outside corporate broadcasting ...
piece in 2007.
References
Notes
*Hawkins, Susan E
“All in the Family: Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School.”''Contemporary Literature'' 45.4 (2004) : 637–658. Print.
*Hughes, Kathy
“Incest and Innocence: Janey’s Youth in Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School.”''Nebula'' 3.1 (2006) : Print.
*Muth, Katie R
''Narrative'' 19.1 (2011) : 87-111. Print.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Blood And Guts In High School
1984 American novels
Metafictional novels
Postmodern novels
Jean Genet
Fiction with unreliable narrators
Novels set in Mexico
Novels set in New York City
Novels set in Morocco
Novels set in Egypt
Novels about American prostitution
Novels about child sexual abuse
Obscenity controversies in literature
Nonlinear narrative novels
Experimental literature