The Novel of De-Formation:

Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School as Postmodern Bildungsroman

by
Eva Silverman
Class of 2020

A senior essay submitted to the faculty of The New School

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the
Degree of Bachelor of Arts in Literary Studies at Eugene Lang College

New York, New York

May 2020
 In a 1995 essay on copyright, authorship, and identity, Kathy Acker did something she

had never done before: she talked about the philosophy behind her writing, without any scruples.

Just six years prior, she began an essay that she published in the Review of Contemporary Fiction

in the interest of clarifying some commonly held misconceptions about two of her novels by

stating that such exercises in explication were anathema to her. “If I had something to say about

my writing outside my writing,” she pronounced, “my writing wouldn’t be sufficient or

adequate” (“A Few Notes on Two of My Books” 6). But in her later essay, she rolled back this

declaration, explicitly articulating the beliefs upon which her literary practice was grounded—

even going so far as to hazard an answer to the question of what the practice of writing is

“about.” “To write,” she proclaimed, “should be to write the world and simultaneously, to

engage in the world.” In her view, “the word” and “the world” were mutually constitutive,

always in the middle of a process of “bestowing meaning” upon one another (“Writing, Identity,

and Copyright in the Net Age” 103).

Acker, who began publishing her fiction in 1972 and continued to do so up until her

untimely death in 1997, was writing into a world that was, as she herself put it, “dominated by

radical change” (Bodies of Work viii). Born and raised in New York City, she witnessed

firsthand the innumerable mutations that American culture underwent as the latter half of the

twentieth century unfolded, watching as wars raged on, prejudice and fear ran rampant, and the

social democracy put in place by the FDR administration gradually gave way to the Reaganite

neoliberalism we know today. “Our society,” she wrote in the aforementioned essay, “is in the

process of, or has already changed into, a postindustrial ex-national economic beast,” and this

ongoing transfiguration had generated, for all but the most privileged members of the population,

2
a form of “hardship and suffering” that revealed the world to be “chaotic and senseless” (100,

101).

In a world such as this, as Acker saw it, the writer holds a great ethical responsibility.

“Art for art’s sake” was no longer a tenable philosophy, if it ever had been; the political import

of language needed to be acknowledged. “Political, economic, and moral forces are major

determiners of meanings and values in a society,” she wrote in another essay. “When I use

words, any words, I am always taking part in the constructing of the political, economic, and

moral community in which my discourse is taking place” (“Postmodernism” 4). The words that

we use, and the contexts in which we use them, have the power to subvert what Acker has

described as the “unbearable political reality” of contemporary American life, but they also have

the power to reinforce that reality, and, in her eyes, ethical writers needed to make conscious

efforts to develop a poetics that achieved the former aim rather than the latter (Dew 15).

Acker was never under the impression that, from her position as a writer, she had the

power to dismantle capitalism, imperialism, and patriarchy, or any of the other power structures

that she saw as contributing to the unbearableness of her political reality. She recognized that her

attempts at subversion through literary means could lead to revelation, but not to revolution

(Friedman 44). But this does not mean that literature does not carry the power to do something

radical. Any revolution is built upon the accretion of many small revelations, and each writer

whose work serves to demystify and critique the political forces that produced it is performing a

political act.

The style of writing that Acker developed as a means to her political ends was, above all,

experimental. When I use this term, I am following in the footsteps of Georgina Colby, who, in

her study of Acker’s work and legacy, Kathy Acker: Writing the Impossible, defines

3
“experimental writing” as any writing that aims for “the obstruction of normal reading” (Colby

5). Acker’s literary methods, which underwent a series of mutations over the course of her

career, sprang from her belief that “the only reaction against an unbearable society is equally

unbearable nonsense” (Wollen 1). In her writing, she aimed to stage an assault on rationality,

reason, and logic—all of which she saw as being inherently oppressive forces—through “textual

demolition” (Hawkins 655).

Each of the fifteen novels she published is characterized in its own way by a concurrence

of “textual breakdown, bodily breakdown, and characterological breakdown” (Hawkins 644).

Both their form and their content are extremely jarring; their language is brutal and often vulgar,

the characters who populate them are indistinct and impossible to pin down, and their plots never

develop in a linear fashion. More often than not, Acker gravitates towards the depiction of taboo

subjects—her protagonists are almost always criminals or sexual deviants (or both), and scenes

of violence and the grotesque recur with reliable frequency. She regularly employs what Susan

E. Hawkins calls “antirealist techniques” such as plagiarism, parody, and pastiche, weaving other

texts into her own without alerting her readers to the fact that she is doing so (Hawkins 637).

Spencer Dew, the first scholar to publish a book-length study of Acker’s work, has

emphasized the importance of recognizing “a unifying drive and function” across each of

Acker’s books, explaining that the components of the novel on which we typically focus our

analysis, such as character and plot, are far less important to her literary project than the task of

demystifying “the experience of textuality” (Dew 22, 161). But this does not mean that all of her

novels take the same approach to engaging with the experience of textuality. Dew believes that

her career can be divided into four distinct stages, each of which were characterized by particular

literary techniques and philosophical preoccupations.

4
 Her principal method in the earliest stage of her career, a method which is on display in

the novels and shorter works that she published throughout the 1970s, was a practice that Dew

names “pirated autobiography.” Her work from this era is characterized by the interweaving of

original autobiographical narrative with preexisting texts, a technique that she developed in the

interest of revealing the “subjective ‘I’” to be “something shifting, temporal, and fragmentary”

(Dew 21). In the works she produced during the early eighties, which for Dew marks her

“deconstructive period,” she steps away from autobiography and leans more heavily into the

practice of plagiarism (the two novels that typify this phase of her career, Great Expectations and

Don Quixote, both go so far as to take their titles from the texts that she plagiarized most

heavily). What motivated this shift, Dew writes, was an increasing urge to critique both

canonical and commercial texts for “their inherent advancements of capitalist or patriarchal

ideology” (Dew 21). This was followed by a waning of her interest in appropriation and the

project of creating “an acceptable mythology on which to found a new society,” a practice that

she eventually augmented with attempts to develop a “language of the body” (Dew 22).

Virtually all of Acker’s novels can be slotted relatively neatly into one of these periods or

another, with one exception: Blood and Guts in High School. Perhaps because of its protracted

composition, Blood and Guts does not match up with any of the periods outlined by Dew in the

same way that the rest of her novels do. Blood and Guts in High School was published in 1984—

right in the middle of her deconstructive period—but Acker copyrighted the novel in 1978 and

published sections of it independently as early as 1972 (Colby 70). In interviews, Acker has

noted that Blood and Guts indexes a shift in her philosophy and literary practice; some of its

content was composed in accordance with the fixations that animated her experiments in pirated

5
autobiography, while other parts were informed by the deconstructive impulse that those

fixations gave way to (Lotringer 202).

It is not just the fact that Blood and Guts merges these two approaches that lends it a

unique position within Acker’s oeuvre, however. It also, in form and in content, uses strategies to

manifest its political aims that are not present in any of her other novels. It is arguably her most

character-driven novel, the book in which her concerns regarding matters of identity reach their

peak. Like all of her novels, it troubles the notion of the self as a unitary subject, but unlike them,

its narrative is entirely focalized around a single protagonist. This protagonist, Janey Smith, is a

young girl—the novel follows her from ages ten to fourteen—whose childhood has been marred

by the sexual abuse she faces from her father. The plot of Blood and Guts is set into motion

when Janey’s father forces her to leave their home in the Yucatan peninsula and make her way in

the world independently.

Throughout the novel’s three sections, Janey moves through a variety of rites of passage,

most of which are not typical of people as early on in their adolescence as she is—moving into

her first apartment, securing her first job, embarking on love affairs—while simultaneously

finding herself subject to an inordinate degree of trauma. Over the course of Blood and Guts,

Janey contracts multiple diseases, is sold into sexual slavery and held in captivity, and faces all

manner of abuses from the men with whom she becomes sexually involved. Her experience

focalizes and accentuates the unbearableness of our given reality, distilling all of the dispersed

and nebulous injustices that capitalism inflicts onto its marginalized populations into a narratable

form. The fragmented, nonlinear, and tonally inconsistent narrative structure of Blood and Guts

mirrors Janey’s traumatized subjectivity.

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 In an interview with Ellen G. Friedman, Acker revealed that the text of Blood and Guts

was shaped by a vague desire to write something closer to “a traditional narrative” than her prior

output had been (“An Interview with Kathy Acker”). Although the novel ended up being just as

baldly experimental as anything else in her oeuvre, its plot, when isolated from the formal

experimentation in which Acker shrouded it, does bear a certain resemblance to one particular

traditional narrative form: The Bildungsroman.

The Bildungsroman, which roughly translates to the “novel of formation,” is a term that

has been used to describe virtually all novels that follow a protagonist throughout their process

of coming of age, but the generic category was not initially intended to cover so broad a range of

novels.1 Rather, it was developed in the early nineteenth century in order to give a name to a

selection of exemplary novels that narrativized the philosophical concept of bildung, which

concerns “the self-realization of the individual in his wholeness” (Swales 15).

In an 1819 speech delivered at a provincial German university, Karl Morgenstern, the

scholar who is credited with naming the Bildungsroman as a genre, elaborated upon what such

narratives of self-realization might look like (Boes 647). The task of the Bildungsroman, he tells

his audience, is “to depict a human being who develops toward his true nature by means of a

collaboration of his inner dispositions with outer circumstances” (Morgenstern 656). It is

essential to note that when he uses the term “depict,” he does not mean simply to narrate: the

author of the Bildungsroman is responsible not only for representing their protagonist’s self-

realization but also for promoting such harmonious development in their representation. This

1
Though “novel of formation” is the most widely used translation of the term Bildungsroman, anglophone critics
sometimes also translate the term Bildungsroman as “the novel of education” and “the apprenticeship novel,” all of
which are translations that, as Douglas Boes has observed, “imply a stable and integrative end point to personal
growth.” (“Modernist Studies and the Bildungsroman” 241)

7
author, he explains, will aim to “unite the purpose of art, which is to please and to entertain by

means of the beautiful, with the strictly human purpose to serve, to instruct, and to better— in a

word, to form” (Morgenstern 655).

Drawing a connection between Blood and Guts and the Bildungsroman may appear to be

a leap. Acker’s work embodies the polar opposite of harmony, not to mention the fact that her

characters are distinctly lacking in “true natures” and share a tendency to fight against their

“outer circumstances” at every chance they get. Blood and Guts looks nothing like the

Bildungsroman as outlined by Morgenstern. But here’s the thing: even most Bildungsromane

look nothing like the Bildungsroman as outlined by Morgenstern.

As Marc Redfield notes, Morgenstern’s definition of the Bildungsroman is replete with

“such extravagant aesthetic promises that few if any novels can be said to achieve the right to be

so defined” (Redfield 40). This sentiment is echoed by Joseph Slaughter, who has gone so far as

to claim that “the genre persists more in the breach of its original conventions than in their

observance” (Slaughter 299).

Much has been made of the question of genre within the field of literary studies, and

debates surrounding the relationship between generic categories and individual texts abound. In

his essay “The Bildungsroman as Genre,” Martin Swales offers us some useful perspective on

this matter, writing that “our understanding of the individual text is a constant movement

between generality and specificity, between notional genre and given work” (Swales 10). When

an author sets out to write, Swales notes, it is almost inevitable that the nature of the text they

create will be informed by the expectations that have been attached to its genre, but it is far from

inevitable that they will draw upon these generic expectations solely in the interests of

8
conforming to them. Rather, they may employ the structural and narrative tropes of genre “in

order to debate with them, to refashion, to challenge, perhaps even parody them” (Swales 11).

In his book Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of

Development, Jed Esty looks at the ways in which modernist authors such as James Joyce,

Virginia Woolf, and Joseph Conrad debated, challenged, refashioned, and parodied the classical

Bildungsroman in order to develop a new kind of novel of formation better suited to narrating the

conditions of the epoch they were living through. These authors were writing in Europe in the

early twentieth century, a historical juncture marked by a “historiographical crisis in the narrative

of progress and [an] interlocking political crisis of imperial legitimacy”—two synchronous crises

that laid bare the untenability of “the bildungsroman ideal of smooth progress toward a final,

integrated state” (Esty 21, 27).

The works by these authors that narrativized the transition from youth to adulthood—The

Voyage Out, for Woolf, or Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, for Joyce—employed

experimental literary devices like stream of consciousness narration and ekphrastic interlude in

order to stall, accelerate, or otherwise warp the process of bildung (Esty 33, 36). In this way, they

function as what Esty terms “metabildungsromane”—novels that perform an “inside-out

critique” of the genre they emerged from (Esty 36). Metabildungsromane do not function as a

“direct counterdiscourse” to their classical predecessors. Instead, by carrying the tenets of the

Bildungsroman genre into their era, they inevitably recirculate the genre’s “sticky ideological

content” even as they “interrogate and revise” it (Esty 33). But their imbrication with the

classical Bildungsroman’s ideology does not undermine their capacity to critique. Like Acker,

they find political potency in the act of revelation, even if genuine revolution eludes them.

9
 The metabildungsroman can thus be described as a “provisional aesthetic solution” to an

unbearable reality, an attempt to square the human desire for narrative with a world that so

frequently challenges aesthetic containment (Esty 27). If modernist writers brought this

provisional aesthetic solution into being out of a desire to properly narrate the colossal impact

that colonialism and modern warfare had on notions of youth, progress, and temporality, then

Acker builds upon their legacy, reinventing their reinventions in hopes of creating a novel of

formation that makes space for meaningful engagement with the concerns unique to the

postmodern epoch.

Formally and philosophically, Blood and Guts has very little in common with any

classical Bildungsroman. But I believe that it is in fact an exemplary postmodern

metabildungsroman, and reading it as such can offer us unique insight into Acker’s conceptions

of identity, history, and the task of the author. The philosophical problems that Blood and Guts

interrogates—the forces that shape a person’s subjectivity; the tricky interrelation of the past,

future, and present; the tensions that emerge when the self makes contact with the other—are all

problems that the classical Bildungsroman set out to address as well. While the classical

Bildungsroman sought to use narrative to resolve these problems, Acker uses it to argue that they

cannot and should not be resolved. She engages the discourse on the matters that preoccupy her

in order to make her own contribution to that discourse, poking holes in the logic of the classical

Bildungsroman as she goes along.

As I have noted, Acker’s primary objective was to negate given reality, the same reality

that the traditional Bildungsroman worked so hard to fortify. But while their ends may have

directly opposed each other, both she and the originators of the Bildungsroman genre gravitated

towards coming-of-age narratives as their means to achieve them. The story of a subject’s

10
formation is a potent story, no matter who tells it, because it is during our youth that “reality” is

defined for us. The story of bildung begins with a protagonist whose conception of the possible

has yet to be circumscribed by ideology, following them as that ideology is inculcated in them.

By attaching an idyllic conclusion to this process of education and indoctrination and reinforcing

the bildung ideal, the classical Bildungsroman posited that the current reality was not so bad after

all. And by obliterating any semblance of harmony or fulfillment from Janey’s journey towards

maturity, Acker informed her readers that precisely the opposite was true: that clearing the

ground for possible new realities was nothing short of a necessity.

Inventing the Self: The Question of Identity in the Novel of Formation

Every protagonist’s journey towards maturity and independence will follow a slightly

different course, and thus, no Bildungsroman’s plot will precisely mirror that of another. That

being said, canonical Bildungsromane are linked by more than just a common philosophy—the

stories they tell share with each other several “principal elements.” In his study of the

Bildungsroman, Seasons of Youth, Jerome Hamilton Buckley outlines what he considers these

principal plot elements to be: childhood, the conflict of generations, provinciality, the larger

society, self-education, alienation, ordeal by love, the search of a vocation and the search for a

working philosophy (18).2 Although Acker’s experimental literary techniques deviate greatly

from the formal conventions of the traditional Bildungsroman, each of these principal elements

figures prominently into the plot of Blood and Guts in High School. The difference between

2
According to Buckley, it is not necessary for a novel to systematically address each and every one of these themes
in order to be classified as a Bildungsroman, but it must incorporate all but two or three.

11
Janey’s story and the story of say, Wilhelm Meister, lies in the conclusion that these narrative

building blocks build up to.3

The plot of Blood and Guts eludes succinct summary, but it can be broken down into

several distinct episodes, each of which can be connected to one of Buckley’s principal elements.

The novel begins with a series of arguments between Janey and her father Johnny spurred by his

announcement that he no longer wishes to be Janey’s caretaker because he has become infatuated

with a young woman named Sally and is no longer interested in Janey as a sexual object. These

arguments come to an end when Janey makes the decision to leave her hometown of Merida,

Mexico for New York City, where she briefly enrolls in an all-girl’s high school, falls in with a

gang of teenagers who call themselves “The Scorpions,” and gets a job as a salesgirl at a bakery

in the East Village.

This episode is abruptly cut short when Janey is kidnapped by a slave trader called Mr.

Linker who forces her into captivity, where she attempts to keep her mind active by writing

poetry, reading books like The Scarlet Letter, and attempting to teach herself Persian. After an

indefinite period of entrapment, Janey contracts cancer and is let out of captivity, and she decides

to use her newfound freedom to travel to Tangier. In Tangier, she meets and enters a relationship

with the author Jean Genet, commits some petty theft that lands her in prison, and then, almost

immediately after her sentence is lifted, dies. The novel ends in the immediate aftermath of her

death, with a supernatural turn of events: as soon as her life comes to an end, “many other Janeys

are born and these Janeys covered the Earth” (Acker 141).

3
Wilhelm Meister is the titular protagonist of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 1896 novel Wilhelm Meister’s
Apprenticeship, which Morgenstern describes in his lecture as “the work that appears to us… as the most general
and comprehensive tendency of human Bildung” and is regarded to this day as the genre’s prototype (“On the
Nature of the ‘Bildungsroman’” 655).

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 It goes without saying that Janey’s story is a profoundly tragic one. Every step that she

takes towards independence ends traumatically, her attempts to gain a sense of freedom and

agency repeatedly hindered by the gratuitous cruelty that she faces from almost everyone with

whom she comes into contact. Every Bildungsroman protagonist runs into conflict on their

journey towards self-realization—without the stakes that conflict introduces, their narratives

would fail to keep us readers in their thrall—but typically, they are able to emerge from that

conflict stronger and more self-assured, equipped with the tools they need to thrive within

bourgeois society. The struggles that they undergo as they transition from youth to maturity

ultimately function to fortify their sense of self. This is not the case for Janey, whose struggles

are extreme enough and pervasive enough to erode any sense of identity she might once have

possessed.

The Bildung philosophy is rooted in humanist thinking, and thus falls apart when

confronted with the pervasive dehumanization that Janey encounters from the individuals and

institutions that use their power to subjugate her. Whereas the hero of the classical

Bildungsroman learns who they are and where they fit into the world through experience,

Janey’s experiences teach her that there is no place in the world for her. “I don’t find the external

world stable,” she admits at one point, which poses a problem because she requires

“someone/something stable” to “base [herself] on” (Acker 112). She cannot make sense of what

lies outside of the boundaries of her “self,” and as a result, she cannot make sense of what lies

within the self’s boundaries either. “I I I I I I I I I I,” she writes in her journal, “I wish that there

was a reason to believe this letter” (Acker 108).

In contradistinction to Janey’s uncertainty, the Bildung philosophy postulates that the

crux of maturity lies in coming to believe in this letter. One of the primary tasks of the

13
Bildungsroman is, as Franco Moretti describes it, is “to build the Ego” (11). The object being

formed within the novel of formation is the protagonist’s identity—the principal elements of the

genre’s archetypal plot that Buckley outlines all serve the purpose of teaching the protagonist

something about who they are and who they are not. Maturity may entail the acquisition of a

spouse, a vocation, and a home, but these acquisitions are merely the external manifestations of

the ineffable ideal that underpins Bildung: “the creation of an acceptable public self” (Nashel

11). The journey upon which the Bildungsroman protagonist embarks is thus a journey, quite

literally, of self-invention. Our interest in their story lies less in the discrete events that make up

this journey and more in the cumulative effect these events will have on the protagonist’s

subjectivity—we read on because we want to learn what kind of person their experiences will

lead them to become.

Much of the recent scholarship on the Bildungsroman genre has posited that the genre

can be seen as “the symbolic form of modernity,” the consensus being that novels of formation

historically functioned to aid the public in their adjustment to “an age that generates explosive

upheavals in every dimension of personal, social, and political life” by narrating a singular young

individual’s self-realization within this context (Berman 17).4 This tumultuous epoch took root in

the aftermath of the French Revolution of 1789, which upended every aspect of society in the

nations that felt its impact.5 The revolution instantiated a decisive break from the past, and the

public had to reckon with a dawning awareness that the world they now inhabited was radically

different than the world they had been born into. The future that they faced was nothing if not

4
This idea was first articulated by Franco Moretti in his 1987 book The Way of the World, but many other theorists,
among them Esty (2011), Douglas Boes (2006), and Douglas Mao (2008), have elaborated upon and complicated his
insights in the decades since The Way of the World was published.
5
These changes included large-scale urbanization, the development of new zones of industrial production, a shift
away towards secularization, the expansion of the market, and a new orientation towards aesthetics and cultural
production that prized originality and innovation (Berman 18-19, Taylor 206).

14
uncertain. Whether one conceived of the novel environment of modernity as being marked by “a

great absence and emptiness of values” or by “a remarkable abundance of possibilities,” it was

undeniable that there was a void-like quality to post-revolutionary existence (Berman 21).

The nineteenth century saw a florescence of attempts to fill that void through

technological innovation, scientific inquiry, and the invention of new cultural forms. These new

practices necessitated, in turn, a new conception of selfhood. The modern subject was marked by

rationality and individuality, they were a “singular person in control of and answerable for

her/his actions, capable of associating her-/himself with, or disassociating her-/himself from,

larger communities and causes” (Raud 1). The individual’s autonomy was foregrounded; their

fate, which had once been thought to lie in God’s hands, was now their own responsibility,

something over which they could exert control (Raud 4). People could no longer count on

achieving self-realization from a passive position— as Michel Foucault puts it, “modern man is

the man who tries to invent himself” (“What is Enlightenment?” 42).

As Zygmunt Bauman has astutely pointed out, the “essential features” of this notion of

selfhood have remained consistent even as modernity has given way to the postmodern condition

we know today (Practices of Selfhood 10). In 1972, when Acker began work on Blood and Guts,

self-invention was no less central to our value system than it was a century prior. It had simply

become a more complicated process.6

One of the hallmarks of the philosophy of postmodernity is a belief that we can no longer

picture the world as “a totality full of connections and differentiations” and must instead regard it

as being composed by “perpetually shifting fragments” (Harvey 52). This belief has had a

6
It is worth noting that, in addition to being the year that Acker first set to work on the project that would eventually
coalesce into Blood and Guts in High School, 1972 was the year that David Harvey has pinpointed as the beginning
of the postmodern epoch in the industrialized West (Pitchford 40).

15
profound influence on our conception of selfhood, so much that the fragmentation of the subject

has become the dominant psychological problem of the postmodern age (Jameson 14).7

For the postmodern subject, self-invention is not so much a matter of organic creation as

it is a practice akin to patische—individuals must “build a self out of existing images and stories”

(Pitchford 61). For Acker, who sees society as “a series of texts written by the powerful,” this is

a dangerous ground to build an identity upon, especially for people like Janey who must bear the

adverse effects of such texts (Pitchford 59). Seen in this way, identity is merely “the most

intimate expression of a domination that is almost total” (Glück 47).

As Naomi Jacobs has observed, “only a fixed and thus dead self is recognizable; only a

recognizable self is useful, locatable, controllable in the world of work and wages” (“Kathy

Acker’s Plagiarized Selves” 52). In order to truly disrupt the mechanisms of late capitalism, the

self would need to be rendered unrecognizable, to be released from its shackles and brought back

to life. And this was precisely what Acker sought to achieve through Blood and Guts.

One of the precepts of the Bildung philosophy is the idea that we become who we are

through our encounters with the people, places, and things that cross our paths during our youth

and our adolescence. In his aforementioned lecture on the Bildungsroman, Morgenstern named

the genre’s capacity to offer insight on the human condition by foregrounding “the influence that

men and environments exert on the hero” rather than the inverse (as had been typical of the epic)

as one of its distinguishing features (“On the Nature of the ‘Bildungsroman’” 654).

7
Jameson and other scholars who have written on the subject of postmodernity attribute this shift in thinking to a
wide array of cultural and economic changes, some of the most significant being the development of digital
technology and communications, the shift away from a Fordist production model towards a labor market in which
the boundaries between consumer and producer are increasingly blurred, and multinational capitalism’s aim to
“tailor itself to the most personal, formerly private identifications of a wide range of consumers” (Pitchford 71).

16
 The Bildungsroman’s foregrounding of the environment’s impact on individual

subjectivity belies another pivotal component of the modern conception of selfhood: its

dependence on a binary between inside and outside. As Charles Taylor has written, “our modern

notion of the self is… constituted by a certain sense (or family of senses) of inwardness”

(Sources of the Self 111). The classical Bildungsroman generates its narrative force by erecting

clear, fixed boundaries between interiority and exterior, and in doing so, reifies a vision of

individual autonomy as “an identity stronger than circumstances,” capable of adapting itself to

whatever external stimuli it may find itself confronted by without altering its fundamental nature

in the process (Moretti 80).

By this definition, Janey is utterly lacking in individual autonomy. Her sense of who she

is almost exclusively based upon what others tell her about herself. Her persona is, as Gabrielle

Dane refers to it, “osmotic”— “the outside leaks into [her], interiors provide no protection”

(Dane 248). This lack of boundaries lies at the root of Janey’s problems—without the capacity to

separate what she is from what she is not, she has trouble believing that she is anything. “I’m not

sure what I care about and if I’m a real person,” she writes in her diary, in which, just a few

pages prior, she had observed that “most people are what they sense” (Acker 57, 59). These two

sentiments are inextricable from one another; for as long as she can remember, Janey’s

personhood had been denied to her, and because she has sensed this, she has built her

understanding of herself around it.

For Janey, growing up is not just a matter of self-invention, but of self-description as

well. To feel like a “real person,” she must feel like she possesses the authority to declare herself

as such, and the desire for this autonomy is a major factor in her decision to venture out into the

world at such a young age. Her failure to find this autonomy (or, perhaps more accurately, her

17
society’s failure to provide an adequate setting for her to find it within) is mirrored in the text’s

failure to adhere to narrative conventions or offer readers a satisfying denouement.

For Acker, failure is a generative position—it is her answer to the question that plagues

her of “how to represent a world you find unsatisfactory without succumbing to its methods and

modes” (Muth 102). She cannot provide a positive alternative to the Bildungsroman, but she can

stretch the generic template to its breaking point, signaling to readers that we cannot responsibly

take its conclusions about identity, progress, and social consent to be unambiguous truths.

The import of the classical Bildungsroman comes from its depiction of “the integration of

a particular ‘I’ into the general subjectivity of a community, and thus, finally, into the universal

subjectivity of humanity,” but Janey’s “I” cannot be integrated in this way because the texts

authored by the powerful have excluded her from any sort of “community” or “universal

subjectivity” (Redfield 38). Blood and Guts ostensibly sets out to tell the story of Janey’s

integration, but as the world around her continually thwarts her attempts to stake out a place

within it, both her inner monologue and the novel that contains it descend into chaos, proving

that the form of the Bildungsroman is only capable of accommodating the stories of certain

individuals’ formation. The formative experiences of people who have been marginalized by the

powerful rarely lead to the “happy resolution of poetic ideal and prosaic reality” that

characterizes the Bildungsroman (Boes 239). Blood and Guts suggests that attempting to squeeze

these people’s stories into the genre’s template will not result in “the self-realization of the

individual in his wholeness,” but rather in the total disintegration of their “I,” a self stripped of

all but its blood and guts.

The Bildung Blocks of Blood and Guts

18
 Like the archetypal Bildungsroman narrative, the plot of Blood and Guts is “episodic,”

and the episodes that make it up align quite closely with the principal elements that Buckley

outlines in Seasons of Youth (Hawkins 643). But while these principal elements—childhood, the

conflict of generations, provinciality, the larger society, alienation, ordeal by love, self-

education, the search for a vocation, and the search for a working philosophy—serve to propel

the heroes of classical Bildungsromane towards maturity and greater knowledge, Janey’s

experience of them only propels her further into the void that is her inner self. By examining the

way that some of Buckley’s principal elements function within the plot of Blood and Guts, we

can get a clearer sense of where Acker believes that the Bildungsroman template fails to offer an

effective model for narrating the formation of postmodern subjects and how she proposes we

respond to the genre’s insufficiencies.

Although I will touch on the way each plot element described by Buckley figures into

Blood and Guts, I will only be extensively analyzing five out of the nine: childhood, the conflict

of generations, ordeal by love, self-education, and the search for a vocation.

Let us begin with the element that necessarily precedes the rest: childhood. Acker wrote

into a world that remained molded around the valorization of youth that was so endemic of

modernity. In spite of all that had changed in the centuries that passed between the dawn of

modernity and the publication of Blood and Guts, the prevailing conception of childhood in her

time was still inflected with traces of the romantic notion that “children [were] both the bearers

and the symbols of innocence in a morally doubtful world” (Mao 19).

The popular philosophies surrounding childhood in the 1970s may have been informed

by those of the 1870s, but they were not identical to them. One of the key shifts that occurred in

our cultural sensibility in the twentieth century took place in our relationship to time, and

19
because the way that we conceive of youth is bound up with the way we conceive of temporality,

this shift had significant reverberations on the way we regard childhood.

Youth took on such a high value in the long nineteenth century because of its association

with potentiality—the mentality of the child is “yet-to-be-formed,” and the possible trajectories

its formation could end up following are plentiful enough to appear almost infinite (Harryman

41). Within this framework, the figure of the child “furnished the principal ‘window on eternity’”

in the cultural imagination (Mao 19). Children, whose pasts were minimal and who approached

the present with boundless curiosity, were figures who evoked the future, and the future was the

raison d’etre of the project of modernity.

In contrast to this teleological line of thinking, postmodernity has replaced “premonitions

of the future, catastrophic or redemptive… [with] senses of the end of this or that” (Jameson 1).

As the force that the specter of the future carried dwindled, both childhood and its endpoint

became increasingly difficult to pin down. This somewhat inchoate new framework gave rise to

the trope that Esty names “unseasonable youth”—a narrative that frames youth as a potentially

endless stage of life characterized simultaneously by the absence of growth and by continuous

transformation (Esty 16). While the teleology of the classical Bildungsroman depends on the

eventual cessation of youth, drawing its meaning from its protagonist’s acceptance of maturity’s

delimitation of the realm of the possible, the twentieth-century literary canon is made up of texts

in which there is no guarantee that youth will come to an end.

Acker’s depiction of Janey’s childhood continues the legacy of narratives of

unseasonable youth, plotting both the form and the content of Blood and Guts around this

muddled conception of youth and maturity. The abuse Janey faces at her father’s hands precludes

her from experiencing the childhood “free from grown-up cares and duties” that Romantic

20
philosophers regarded as “a possession to which each person could seem eminently entitled”

(Mao 19). The book’s opening scenes, in which Janey and her father argue about the nature of

their relationship, emphasize the disjunction between Janey’s real age and the adult role that she

has been forced to play when in dialogue with her father. These arguments constellate around the

fact that Janey’s father is trying to “get rid of” Janey so he can devote himself to pursuing a new

sexual relationship with a twenty-one-year-old woman named Sally (Acker 7).

Janey finds herself distressed, quite rationally, by the thought of being abandoned by her

sole caretaker, and her initial response to this emotion is to tear up his bed and petulantly display

her unhappiness, as ten-year-old children are wont to do (Acker 7). But she quickly realizes that

these instinctive responses are not getting through to her father and forces herself to think

strategically, mulling over what she says to him before she says it and modulating her reactions

to his words. These scenes are conveyed in the form of dramatic scripts between the characters

of “Janey” and “Father,” and we can see the internal struggle between Janey’s viscerally felt

responses and the pressure she feels to perform “maturity” play out in the stage directions that

accompany her dialogue. These stage directions reveal that Janey is constantly “collecting her

emotions and stashing them,” taking on the role of “the rational one” when her father fails to rise

to that mantle (Acker 9, 12).

Janey’s father’s speech is just as loaded and revealing as her own words are. Although he

sometimes draws upon his parental authority to exert control over Janey, condescending to her

and barking out the occasional command, the way he speaks to her is for the most part out of

keeping with the way one expects a parent to communicate with their child. He even goes so far

as to reveal to Janey that he thinks of her as his mother rather than his daughter, admitting that

“all the resentment he had felt against her” has been redirected onto her (Acker 20). “You’ve

21
completely dominated my life… for the last nine years,” he complains, acting as though the

entanglement of his own life with the life of his daughter stems from romantic codependence

rather than a filial bond (Acker 12). He inundates her with statements that suggest that the sexual

nature of their relationship is normal, that his treatment of her is acceptable and his expectations

of her are reasonable, leaving her no space to consider the possibility that she is being abused or

deserves any better.

The experience of childhood as a phase of life distinct from what follows it is crucial to

the successful realization of the Bildung philosophy. Because Janey’s childhood has been denied

to her, she cannot reach a point of maturity without being thrown into disequilibrium. The steps

in Janey’s journey towards independence that Blood and Guts narrates—her move from her

childhood home to her own apartment in New York City, her many love affairs and their

disastrous fallout, her struggle to make a living and keep herself financially afloat—are rites of

passage typically reserved for adults or almost-adults, but Janey is just barely pubescent when

she experiences them, and the childish mindset she brings to them comes to inflect Acker’s

narration. Carla Harryman summarizes this phenomenon in an essay on the figure of the child in

Acker’s work, writing that “in Acker, the a-architectural narrative space of the novel is

frequently collapsed into the yet-to-be-formed mentality of the child” (“Acker Un-Formed” 41).

The discontinuous chronology and cacophony of discourses in Blood and Guts mirrors

“the manner of a child telling you about what happened and making something up in an all-

mixed up fashion,” and the visceral, sometimes profane language that the novel regularly erupts

into is a warped, corrupted version of the “language of contact… where there is 'no room to be a

subject’” that erupts in children’s speech (Harryman 43). As Blood and Guts progresses,

language becomes increasingly slippery, retreating further and further away from sense and

22
rationality. In the novel’s first section, the language each character uses to communicate is

relatively conventional and easy for readers to comprehend the meaning of, but as the novel

continues, Acker severs language from subjectivity, lapsing more and more frequently into the

child’s jumbled language of contact.8

Acker devises a variety of experimental literary techniques to integrate this “language of

contact” into the text of Blood and Guts. She does not rely on one mode of narration throughout

the novel, opting instead to oscillate between prose, dramatic dialogue, verse, and even

illustrations. There is no consistent narrator presiding over the novel; at times, Janey’s story is

conveyed from the point of view of an omniscient third-person narrator, while at others it shifts

into first-person narration, and at others still, Acker interpolates texts that Janey has purportedly

authored herself—diary entries, a book report on The Scarlet Letter, the contents of the

workbook she uses to teach herself Persian—into the novel. The multiplicity of discourses that

Acker draws upon is reminiscent of the combination of playfulness and rapacious curiosity that

characterizes the speech of a child for whom the breadth of language is still a novelty, the rules

that delimit it not yet apparent.

Ours is a culture that “displaces rough/difficult knowledge with ‘educated’ observations

about surfaces,” which means that it is a culture that makes no space for the language of contact,

refusing to consider the insights we could glean if we adopted a discourse in which the word “I”

is not the center of gravity (Harryman 43). By merging her own language with the language of

the child, Acker brings us closer to the difficult knowledge that “mature” language glosses over.

The language Janey has at her disposal represents all that she encounters in its brute reality—

8
While she was in the process of writing the first draft of Blood and Guts, Acker conducted several experiments in
which she attempted to “push herself to a point of self-dissolution” using sex and hallucinogenic drugs in hopes that
by dissolving the self to some degree, she could “regain a childhood consciousness.” (Kraus 1)

23
because she is a child whose development has been forestalled, she “does not have the

socialization to throw the veil of intellectual language over the horrors of her daily life” (Hughes

127).

The trauma that Janey has experienced cannot be intellectualized away, nor can its

perpetrators (both the individuals who abuse her and the structures that enable their abuse) be

rendered sympathetic through literary flourishes. Moments in the text such as the one where

Janey interrupts her own narrative with an entire paragraph consisting only of the word “No”

repeated over 150 times bring us closer to the devastating reality of what it is like to inhabit her

traumatized subjectivity than the most vivid descriptions of her experiences could (Acker 109).

Moments like this throw the disjunction between the horrors that Janey has experienced and the

stage of her mental and physical development that she is in when she experiences them into

sharp relief. She does not have the language necessary to articulate her pain or the knowledge of

the world necessary to understand that the abuse she has suffered is neither normal nor her

fault—when she is reminded of what has been inflicted on her, her only way of processing her

emotions and fighting back is to cry out in nonlinguistic resistance. Because her socialization is

never completed, she is never put in a position from which she is capable of looking back on

what she has endured and drawing some sort of meaning or beauty from it, and therefore, neither

are we.

I have already gone into some detail regarding the role that the conflict of generations has

played in Janey’s formation, but it is nonetheless worth expanding upon. Parents play a pivotal

role in any individual’s formation, no matter what kind of relationship they have with each other,

because, as Charles Taylor has noted, they are the people who provide us with our very first

definitions of ourselves (“The Dialogical Self” 312). Human beings, Taylor explains, are

24
“constituted in conversation,” our sense of self emerging from the dialogue in which we engage,

and it is our parents who provide us with “our first scenarios of dialogic action” (314). As we get

older, we can argue against the ways our parents define us and even, if need be, sever ties with

them in the interests of our own attempts at self-definition, but we can never erase the formative

moments at which they first proffered their notions of who we are from our personal histories.

The roots of the struggle to recognize herself as an autonomous human being that

animates Janey’s “crisis of self-description” can be traced to her father’s persistent denial of her

humanity and her agency throughout her childhood (Colby 90). Because, as we learn in the very

first paragraph of Blood and Guts, her mother died during her infancy, Janey “undergoes subject

formation and acquires epistemological verification from Johnny’s description of her” (Acker 7,

Colby 93). Before she came into relation with anybody else, she was vaulted into dialogical

action with Johnny, and his descriptions of her (as well as his descriptions of everything else)

take on a singular primacy in her worldview.

In the classical Bildungsroman, the “conflict of generations” emerges as a plot element

on the occasion of “the loss of the father [and/or mother] by death or alienation.” This loss,

Buckley writes, is accompanied by a loss of faith in the values associated with that estranged

parent and “leads inevitably to the search for a substitute parent or creed” (Buckley 19). Without

a mother in the picture (not to mention the fact that her father seems to deploy the common abuse

tactic of isolating his victim from everyone but himself), this process of disentangling one’s

identity from the influence of their parents is especially fraught for Janey.

When Blood and Guts begins, Janey depends on her father “for everything,” regarding

him as “boyfriend, brother, sister, money, amusement, and father” (Acker 7). He, in turn, seems

to project a similar variety of interchangeable identities onto her—he sometimes regards her as

25
his lover, sometimes as a proxy for his own lost mother, and seemingly least often, as the

daughter she actually is. As a result of this relational confusion, the majority of the principal

elements that follow the conflict of generations in the Bildungsroman plot—especially trial by

love and the shift from provinciality into the larger society—are inseparable from this filial

conflict.

In the era of Wilhelm Meister, the family was regarded as a “haven in an otherwise

inhospitable world” in which a sense of stability and emotional support could reliably be found

(Taylor 293). In Blood and Guts, the family is the inhospitable world, or at least a microcosm of

it. In Acker’s diegeses, “society is a kind of macro-family of powerful rulers and powerless

subjects,” with the conflicts between the figures of the father and the daughter in particular

symbolizing the asymmetrical power relations that structure our society (Wollen 9). Acker

narrativizes the Lacanian notion that individual human fathers represent the Father, the

“phantasized figure who governs desire and meaning” (Dane 233). The abuses doled out by the

father, then, symbolize the abuses doled out by the patriarchy, and the daughter’s revolt against

him symbolizes her revolt against the systems of oppression he represents.9

In the classical Bildungsroman, cutting filial ties was a necessary step on the path to

Bildung, but when Janey does the same in Blood and Guts, it upends the Bildungsroman’s

project of affirming the social order. This is one of Acker’s most profound subversions of the

narrative logic of the Bildungsroman—by rendering one of its principal elements incompatible

with its overarching aim, she reveals this aim as dubious. If Janey wants to make a life for herself

9
Ellen G. Friedman has written that, within all of Acker’s novels, the daughter’s principal “weapon of revolt”
against patriarchal figures and systems is irrationality and desire, the feminine language that, as it writes the female
body, defies the law of the father.” (“Now Eat Your Mind” 42)

26
as she declares, it is necessary the conflict of generations to occur and for her to sever ties with

her father.

But this act of severance does not clear the road for unmitigated freedom or

independence; as Janey moves through the world, the cruelty she faced at Johnny’s hands is

reenacted by a rotating cast of authority figures. Interestingly, once Janey cuts ties with her

father, his presence disappears from the narrative almost entirely—she only glancingly reflects

on his treatment of her and rarely ever invokes his name. She is too focused on surviving her

present circumstances to ruminate on her past trauma—the conflicts found in larger society are

interchangeable with the conflict of generations, the players different but the stories

fundamentally the same.

When Janey trades the relative provinciality of her father’s home in the Yucatan

Peninsula for an apartment of her own in the East Village, she finds herself inundated with male

authority figures who deny her autonomy and sexually exploit her just as her father had

previously done. Sex and romance, like experience more generally, function for Janey as

“repetition and disjunction”—rather than propelling her forward towards greater self-

understanding and maturity, the affairs Janey finds herself embroiled in only serve to mire her

further into a state of subjugation and confusion (Hawkins 645).

In the modern imagination, love is an ideal bound closely with identity. As Moretti has

observed, “every love bond brings with it a possible identity,” and for the Bildungsroman hero to

truly ascend to maturity, he must commit himself to one love bond, one identity: “he will either

learn to break the bond once and for all, or he will just as firmly shape the rest of his life around

it” (The Way of the World 92). Choosing the person you want to be with in a sense means

picking the person you want to be—if we are indeed beings constituted by dialogical action, then

27
the person we choose to attach ourselves to will have a significant influence on our internal

development. In the classical Bildungsroman, a love bond—especially one that has been

sanctioned by the state through the rite of marriage—serves to solidify the self at the center of its

narrative. The protagonist begins the novel struggling with a sense of alienation which gives way

to the conflicts wrought by love’s ordeals, which itself eventually gives way to the cessation of

conflict, with placid, stable companionship taking its place.

Janey, on the contrary, finds no solidity or stability in the arena of romance. Because in

her earliest memories “(parental) love was equated with sex which was equated with pain,” love

and sex and pain all come to seem interchangeable to her (Dane 247). Her formative experiences

with sex blur into one another, each individual encounter fading into a haze of mutual self-

destruction—upon arriving in New York, she falls in with a “wild bunch of kids” who call

themselves The Scorpions, who initiate her into a lifestyle centered around drug use, crime, and

“[hurting] each other sexually as much as we could” (Acker 31-32). Her first real love affair,

with a Scorpion-adjacent boy named Tommy, crystalizes itself around a shared desire to “[do]

everything we could to dull our judgement” (Acker 42).

Every man who Janey grows attached to over the course of Blood and Guts treats her

with alarming cruelty, inundating her with verbal abuse and withholding from her anything

resembling compassion. At one point, Tommy tells her that “I can’t take you Janey, I don’t want

to know who you are” (Acker 43). Her next serious boyfriend, who happens to share a name and

biography with the avant-garde writer Jean Genet, resents the fact that she “still has pretensions,”

telling her over and over again that she is worthless and needs to be “drained of everything” if

she ever wants “to learn.” Janey takes these words to heart— “if Genet thinks she’s shit,” she

tells herself, “she should be invisible” (Acker 131). Because every man she becomes infatuated

28
with sees her as nothing more than a body to be penetrated, she has difficulty remembering that

her mind matters as well, that she is animated by a subjectivity worth knowing and caring for.

Sex, in Blood and Guts, is above all else self-destructive, but it is self-destructive in more

ways than one—it puts Janey at risk physically and emotionally, but it also allows for the

temporary dissolution of her concerns about identity, the physical sensations it produces strong

enough to override her self-awareness. She refers to sex as an “unblocked meeting of selves,” a

form of human contact that reveals “all these unchangeable forever fixtures to be flimsy paper

bits” (Acker 124, 129).

It is in this unblocked meeting of selves, Janey thinks, that love emerges. In her eyes,

love is a force that destroys rather than builds— “rising up and spreading, overtaking everything,

that’s what love’s like” (Acker 67). Unfortunately, Janey is not equipped with the tools to draw a

distinction between a love bond that liberates by destroying oppressive boundaries and a love

bond that oppresses by destroying her autonomy.

The desire for love—as something that can be given and something that can be

received—becomes central to Janey’s self-understanding, and when she cannot find a love bond

that does not deteriorate into abuse or exploitation, her self-estrangement reaches its most acute

point. “If you’re not part of a couple,” she believes, “you don’t exist” (Acker 94). For all of her

rebellious instincts, she cannot escape the thrall of the myth that a romantic union is necessary to

consecrate an adult identity, a myth that has been proffered by so many classical Bildungsroman.

After being told over and over again by the men she falls for that she is not worth

knowing, that she could only be lovable if she were to be drained of all her characteristics, she

starts to believe that she has not been able to enter a fulfilling romantic union because of some

sort of inherent, internal shortcoming, gradually becoming convinced that crossing the threshold

29
into adult sociality is just not possible for her. She longs instead for an imagined preconscious

past, writing towards the end of the novel (in a sentence where each letter is capitalized) that “I

would rather be a baby than have sex” (Acker 126). She cannot envision a mature existence in

which her desires and the external world are not at odds with each other, and thus she retreats

into a fantasy of a pre-symbolic void.

The denial of her own existence that she finds in the ordeal by love is mirrored in and

exacerbated by what she experiences in her search for a vocation. One thing that Blood and Guts

has in common with virtually all classical Bildungsromane is the fact that “position [and]

occupation… took on a life-determining essence” for their protagonists (Bakhtin 18). One’s

vocation does not just determine how they will spend their weekdays or how much money they

will have at their disposal— the treatment a person receives in their workplace will teach them

something about what they deserve and where they fit into the larger society.

Occupation took on its life-determining essence in the Bildungsroman due to the fact that,

with modernity’s dissolution of the aristocracy, “the gentlemanly ideal becomes increasingly

difficult to discover or define,” making financial success a more stable signifier of “good

character” than refined manners or an urbane sensibility (Buckley 21). As the ideal of the “self-

made man” became increasingly widespread, prosperity took on a moral significance—a

person’s vocation and what they reaped from it sent a message to their peers about what kind of

person they were. As a result, a rift was formed between people who worked simply to make

ends meet and people whose job was an essential component of their identity. The classical

Bildungsroman valorized the latter group—the ideal vocation for their heroes was not just a job

that provided them with the wages necessary for survival but one that sparked their passion,

leading to a “synthesis of individual expression and collective benefit” (Moretti 214).

30
 For Janey, who enters the workforce as a prepubescent with no formal education, a job

that allows for this synthesis is never really an option. She does not have a dream job, nor does

she have any expectations that work will bring her emotional fulfillment; she seeks out a job

because she “didn’t have enough food,” because she needs to fulfill her most fundamental

physical needs. The job she gets, at a small, hippie bakery in the East Village, only functions to

sever her further from any tangible sense of identity. The section of Blood and Guts that narrates

Janey’s experience at work is written, like the book’s opening section, in the form of a dramatic

dialogue, but where the first script referred to Janey by her proper name, this second script

replaces her name with the title of “Lousy Mindless Salesgirl.”10 At work, Janey must divorce

herself from her own impulses and emotions and take on this role of nondescript salesgirl, to

“pretend I like the customers and love giving them cookies no matter how they treat me” (Acker

37).

“Because I work, I am nobody,” Janey laments. “As soon as I dare to take the time to

think a thought, to watch a feeling… develop, to rest my aching body, a customer enters” (Acker

38). These customers lecture Janey, they unload their personal struggles onto her, they ask her

invasive questions and project their frustrations onto her. To them, her practical identity as a

salesgirl defines her very being. To them, there is no Janey outside of the confines of the bakery,

and their treatment of her further erodes her already fragile sense that she has an existence

independent from the oppressive circumstances she is forced into.

Although the title may suggest otherwise, high school figures very scarcely into the plot

of Blood and Guts in High School. Janey’s father enrolls her at “a school for nice well-bred

10
There are three sections of Blood and Guts in High School that are conveyed in the form of dramatic scripts, and
all three of them, as Tracy Ann Nashel has observed, narrate parts of Janey’s story that are about “money and
abandonment.” (Coming to Terms With Coming of Age 150)

31
girls” upon her arrival in New York, but Acker offers virtually no accounts of what Janey’s

experience at this school is like, focusing instead on what she does before and after the bells ring

(Acker 33). And Janey’s enrollment at the school is brief—just eleven pages after Acker tells us

that she has begun matriculating there, we are informed that she has dropped out (Acker 44).

That being said, education is immensely important to Janey—even when she has lost hope in

almost everything else, she still longs to educate herself by whatever means she are available to

her. “I WANT TO LEARN,” she writes, the intensity of her desire for knowledge palpable in her

break from the normal rules of capitalization (Acker 98).

This desire to learn is something that Janey shares with the protagonists of virtually every

canonical Bildungsroman—one of the distinguishing characteristics of the novel of formation

was its framing of “the world as… a school,” in which every person, place, and thing the hero

comes into contact with imparts some sort of lesson unto them (Bakhtin 23). In the

Bildungsroman, the goal of self-education is an expansive, somewhat inchoate one: the

“broadening of consciousness” (Moretti 222). But Janey’s drive towards self-education is

propelled by a more particular set of objectives: to “find out how this society got so fucked-up”

and to “find out how I got so fucked up” (Acker 66, 69). If she were to discover the answers to

these questions, she believes, then maybe she could find a way out of her unbearable reality and

even use what she has learned to help other people in circumstances similar to hers find a way

out as well.

The knowledge that Janey seeks cannot be found within the confines of high school or

any other academic institution—like the classical Bildungsroman itself, these institutions are

structured so as to deter people from asking the questions she asks, to convince their students

32
that society is decisively not fucked up and does not need to be rebuilt. Thusly, Janey learns far

more from her autodidactic pursuits than she does inside high school.

The second of Blood and Guts’ four sections, aptly titled “Outside High School,”

documents Janey’s attempts to educate herself through the only methods at her disposal: reading

and writing. In this section of the book, she reads The Scarlet Letter and writes a book on it,

attempts to teach herself the Persian language, copies down fragments of the poetry of Sextus

Propertius, and writes poetry of her own. None of these educational endeavors are assigned to

her by an authority figure—her decision to embark upon them is motivated by her own desires,

unlike almost every other decision she makes over the course of the book.

In Learning for Revolution, Dew writes that Acker’s novels “are always on one level

books about reading, illustrating techniques of critical reading and instructing her readers in

these techniques” (17). Janey’s exercises in self-education are exemplary of this thesis; her essay

on The Scarlet Letter, the poems she writes, and even her efforts at conjugating verbs in Persian

are all profoundly critical of the culture that she is composing them from within. Her book

report, for example, contains a lengthy digression on the state of education in contemporary

America. “A scholar is a top cop,” she muses, “’cause he defines the roads by which people live

so they won’t get in trouble and so society will survive” (Acker 68). She reflects upon the

gendered politics that informed Hester Prynne’s fate and ponders Hawthorne’s intentions as an

author, positing that he set his novel in the time of the Puritans in order to critique the present in

an indirect manner (Acker 66). Her reading of Hawthorne’s novel (arguably a Bildungsroman

itself) is undeniably politicized, and in conducting this reading, she is able to articulate how her

oppressive circumstances have made her feel with a clarity that she cannot access when speaking

about them directly.

33
 On the occasions when Janey claims language for herself, using it as a tool to mediate her

experiences, a glimmer of hope enters the text. This is not to say that the bleakness that

characterizes the rest of Janey’s narrative disappears in these moments—no language can change

the fact that the inhumane treatment she has suffered is fundamentally devastating and unjust—

but the bleakness ceases to be the only thing defining her story. As Dew writes, one encounters a

“radical otherness” in the acts of reading and writing, and this encounter initiates a “disruption of

the limits of the self” (Learning for Revolution 160). The “I” that Janey inhabits when she writes,

the “Janey” that is externalized and memorialized on the page, is a different “I” than the “I” she

identified with prior to writing, and through the act of writing, she becomes a whole new

“Janey.” When she reads, the voices of the author, narrator, and characters whose voices are

indexed in the book she is reading serve to alter and sharpen her own voice. Self-education is

valuable not because it brings you closer to a particular endpoint, but because it enters the

individual into a never-ending dialogue, revealing that knowledge is “never something

transcendent, settled, or settled upon” (Clare 2017).

Squeezing Janey’s story into the narrative structure of the Bildungsroman inevitably

leads to her destruction, because the logic of the classical Bildungsroman is incompatible with

the desacralization of “mastery” that Janey’s liberation would require. After all, “a Bildung is

truly such only if, at a certain point, it can be seen as concluded” (Moretti 26). If the world is

indeed a school, then at some point, everyone enrolled must graduate. Within the

Bildungsroman, youth and maturity form a binary, defining each other in negative terms—what

characterizes youth is immaturity, and what characterizes maturity is the cessation of youth.

Self-education, it follows, plays a very different role in the life of the mature individual

than it does in the life of the child. Education functions to provide the young protagonist with the

34
tools they need to reach maturity, but once that protagonist has reached that threshold, the

acquisition of further knowledge becomes somewhat superfluous, a hobby rather than a

necessity. The mature individual no longer needs to question who they are or who they might

want to be, and perhaps it is the forestalling of this process of questioning that dictates when a

Bildungsroman must come to an end.

In the end, Janey’s attempts at self-education do not prove to be a solution to the

problems posed by her circumstances—her autodidactic experiments inject far more hope into

Acker’s novel than they do into Janey’s actual life. “Outside High School,” the section where

self-education dominates, covers the period of time during which Janey is imprisoned and

enslaved by Mr. Linker—a period of extreme duress. Janey’s writing projects during this time

come from a place of absolute desperation and only offer her the tiniest modicum of relief. And

even when she is released from her enslavement, her suffering is far from over—she is only

released because she has contracted cancer, and in addition to having to endure the physical pain

wrought by her illness, she spends the books next section being inundated by further abuse from

Genet and even ends up imprisoned again. The encounter with radical otherness that reading and

writing facilitate is ultimately not enough to liberate Janey from her identity and all its

baggage—self-education may have the power to restructure one’s personality, but if it does not

connect them to a community as well, it does not have the power to alter the society they exist

within.

Towards the end of Blood and Guts, we readers are made privy to a conversation between

the group of “capitalists” who are responsible for Janey’s second imprisonment about the

methods they have devised to keep the cohort of people who they describe as “Janeys”—

perverts, transgender people, criminals, and women—under their control (Acker 136). “If they

35
think they’re people,” one of these capitalists explains, “they’ll revolt against us.” To keep such a

revolt from occurring, they all agree, they must make sure that nothing threatens the power they

exert over the ideas that culture circulates. “We own the language,” he declares with pride, with

another chiming in to add that “without language the only people the rebels can kill are

themselves” (Acker 135-136).

This statement, unfortunately, portends Janey’s fate. Just a few pages after this exchange

between the capitalists occurs, Janey dies an unceremonious death. The cause of her death is left

up in the air—we can presume that it is due to the untreated cancer that she was diagnosed with

earlier in the novel, but Acker never explicitly reveals this. What she does reveal in no uncertain

terms, on the other hand, is what we have already come to suspect: that Janey’s life has

deteriorated to a point where “my ugliness, my lack of femininity, my wounded body… is all

that is left to speak” (Acker 139). Reduced to the traits that society has ascribed to her and

condemned her for, dying strikes her as the only way she can express agency, the only way to

stop being “totally impotent and passive about her lousy situation” (Acker 116).

In this way, as Katie R. Muth has put it, Janey’s narrative devolves into failure (Muth

97). But who, or what, has failed? Janey’s demise is not the result of Acker’s lack of skill as a

writer, and it is certainly not a failure that can be attributed to Janey herself. By cutting Janey’s

development short in such a jarring fashion, killing her before the formation of her identity is

complete, Acker forces the Bildungsroman genre into a position of failure, and in doing so,

leaves the social order that the novel of formation is meant to affirm vulnerable to attack.

Within the narrative scheme of the Bildungsroman, maturity is the “epiphany of

meaning” that occurs when self-development and integration reach a “point of encounter and

equilibrium” (Moretti 18). But within the narrative scheme of Blood and Guts, maturity, it

36
seems, is equivalent to death. The classical Bildungsroman comes to a conclusion because its

protagonist’s formation is complete; Blood and Guts comes to a conclusion because its

protagonist’s formation cannot be completed.

One of the most striking experimental features of Blood and Guts is that it does not in

fact end when Janey’s life ends—or, perhaps more accurately, it complicates any ideas we might

have about what it means for Janey’s life to end. In the aftermath of Janey’s death, something

fantastical occurs: “many other Janeys were born and these Janeys covered the Earth” (Acker

141). This suggests that the story of the Janey Smith that we readers have been following is not

over, that Janey’s formation was not cut short, but is rather still unfurling. The fate of this Janey

(who Muth refers to as “Ur-Janey”) upends the teleology of human development, and in doing

so, calls into question the very notion of what it means to be a human being.

A Glimpse of the Vision World: Acker’s Incomplete Revelations

In an essay that reads Blood and Guts in High School through the lens of trauma theory,

Carolyn Zaikowski hypothesizes that Janey’s metamorphosis from a singular subject into “many

other Janeys” functions as an assurance that “Janey Smith—and what she represents as a

fictional character—will continue to haunt us until we witness and heal her legacy” (“Reading

Traumatized Bodies of Text” 209). As Zaikowksi notes later in her essay, “the main causes of

PTSD are… external to the survivor” (215). The reasons that Janey was unable to follow a life

course that conformed to the narrative logic of the Bildungsroman come from within her. It was

not any set of innate qualities that made the process of her formation so fraught; what doomed

her, rather, was the sexual abuse she faced from her father, her enslavement by Mr. Linker, and

the barrage of cruelty she faced from every man she attempted to love. She could not fulfill the

37
Bildung ideal, but this was not due to a failure of self-invention on her part. What made the

Bildung ideal an impossibility for her was the unbearable reality she was confined to, the people,

institutions, and political systems that taught her that she was worthless.

Acker does not inform us of the fate of the many new Janeys who now roam the earth—

as readers, we have no way of knowing whether they have been placed into the same

circumstances as their source or if they have each been born into a context of their own. We

don’t know what their fates will look like, and while we can hope that they will be better than

that of the Ur-Janey, it is hard to muster much faith in this possibility.

As Zaikowski tells us, within our postmodern society, “the damage and annihilation of

bodies takes place at a larger and more unfathomable level than it ever has.” Ours is a

“chronically traumatized—and traumatizing— society, and the magnitude of its trauma is a

relatively new development in history” (“Reading Traumatized Bodies of Text” 217). The

traumatic experiences that Janey endures at the hands of other individuals are echoed in the

traumatic experiences that she endures simply by existing as a working-class young woman in

contemporary America. Until the ideologies and institutions that undergird Western society are

dismantled, it is tragically difficult to imagine that the new Janeys will fare much better than

their prototype.

The classical Bildungsroman is not a narrative form that is equipped to accommodate the

unbearable reality of late capitalism, and it is for this reason that Acker found herself compelled

to systematically demolish the “narrative elements and expectations” of the genre in Blood and

Guts (Hawkins 643). But even if this is the case, stories of youth and development still need to

be told. And it is the question of which narrative forms we can turn to in place of the

Bildungsroman when we want to tell these stories that motivates the experimentalism of Blood

38
and Guts. Acker is not necessarily offering up Blood and Guts as an example of such a narrative

form, but through her “textual demolitions,” she is asking her readers to take note of the

shortcomings of traditional developmental narratives and join her in the process of imagining

alternatives.

The narrative structure of Blood and Guts is the product of Acker’s belief that “political

writing, in order to change what it cannot change, must retain some remnant of potentiality”

(Muth 100). Unlike the Bildungsroman, which garners its literary force from the fact that its

narrative will come to an end, its conclusion conferring meaning retrospectively onto all that

came before it, Acker refuses to wrap up Janey’s story into a clear conclusion. Janey’s

contiguous death and rebirth do not mark the end of Blood and Guts—they are followed by an

illustrated epilogue, divided into two parts titled “The Journey” and “The World.”

Neither section of the epilogue bears a recognizable connection to the events that made

up the plot of the novel it is attached to—none of the characters who have peopled Ur-Janey’s

life are mentioned, nor are any of the new Janeys she spawned. “The Journey” and “The

World”—both of which tell the story of a group of “thieves, murderers, [and] firebrands”

embarking upon a quest to unearth a lost ancient book that may offer a definitive answer to the

question of how “humans can become something else”—seem to take place in a future we have

yet to reach (Acker 144, 166). There are few cultural signifiers present to tether their setting to

any familiar historical juncture—several critics, in fact, have described them as reminiscent of a

biblical setting.11 It is described as “a place where there is no more being,” and it is up to us

readers to decide what exactly this means (Acker 150).

11
This comparison has been drawn by Karen Brennan and Carolyn Zaikowksi.

39
 The mythical, atopic air of this coda is compounded by the omniscient voice that narrates

“The Journey” and “The World,” a voice that speaks from the vantage point of a “we” rather

than an “I.” Acker gives us no clues as to whether any or all of the new Janeys make up this we,

or if this we is made up of human beings at all. As Karen Brennan has noted, the narrative

ambiguity of the epilogue leaves room for the possibility that we readers are ourselves part of

this “we” (“The Geography of Enunciation” 266). Whatever the case may be, the sense of

collectivity that structures this epilogue emerges in stark contrast to the world we have spent the

past 150 pages immersed within, wherein the rift between self and other was of a matter of

paramount importance.

In the epilogue to Blood and Guts, Janey’s ego ceases to be of any importance to the

narrative unfolding. The story being told is no longer the story of her formation into a mature

individual—the conclusion that we thought Acker’s novel was careening towards is revealed to

be a false destination. The philosophy behind the Bildungsroman was informed by the notion

that “the biography of the young individual was the most meaningful viewpoint for the

understanding and the evaluation of history,” and by augmenting Blood and Guts with this

epilogue, Acker suggests that the stories that form the biography of a young individual might

include an assortment of stories in which the individual in question is not directly involved

(Moretti 227). The story of Janey’s formation did not begin with her birth, and it does not end

with her death. To understand how she became who she was, we must understand the world that

shaped her. And because a complete understanding of the world is impossible, Acker asks us not

to strive for understanding but to strive for transformation instead.

The ending of Ur-Janey’s story is anything but happy, but the epilogue of Blood and Guts

gives the novel an ending far more hopeful than its protagonist’s fate would suggest. There is a

40
real possibility left open that the questers whose journey the epilogue narrates can “create this

world in our own image” once they find the book they are searching for (Acker 158). Within the

diegesis of Acker’s coda, it is possible to transform oneself and the world through the act of

reading, to unshackle oneself from the bonds of everyday existence by engaging with texts.

Acker does not reveal whether or not the questers succeed in their mission, but in the very act of

withholding the answers we expect her to provide us with, Acker is preserving the potentiality

that gives the plot of her epilogue its optimistic cast. We do not know what is to come, but we

know that the given reality has been negated, and that in itself is reason to celebrate.

Blood and Guts ends with a set of questions. “Shall we look for this wonderful book?”

the epilogue’s speaker ponders. “Shall we stop being dead people? Shall we find our way out of

all expectations?” (Acker 165). These questions radiate outwards, reaching towards the reader. If

we are indeed part of the “we” around whom this narrative constellates, then their quest for “this

wonderful book” is our quest as well. We may not consider ourselves to be dead people, but in

Acker’s framework, “death becomes a figure for a state of mind and even a point of view,

presumably the cultural point of view that has killed Janey” (Brennan 267). If we have yet to

reckon with the fatal implications of this point of view, Acker suggest, we are only partially

alive, because it is the very act of questioning received ideas that animates us.

The cultural point of view that Acker equates with death is precisely the point of view

that the Bildungsroman teaches us to accept. To take on this point of view means to regard the

world we inhabit as unchangeable and ultimately acceptable. It displaces the blame for any

friction between the self and the social order onto the self—if the society you live in inhibits the

realization of your desires, it tells us, it is you who must change. Rebellion, dissent, and even

measured critique are framed as immature responses to one’s circumstances. The “broadening of

41
consciousness” that characterized maturity in the classical Bildungsroman did not mean

expanding your imagination to dream up possibilities for moving beyond the present social

order, it meant honing your capacity to compromise, to understand why things are the way they

are and accept them as such (Moretti 222). The modern man may be one who invents himself,

but he is not one who invents a new world for himself and others to inhabit.

The open questions that conclude Blood and Guts guide readers away from this line of

thinking, asking us to consider what we might want and what we might need to do in order to get

it. In narrating the story of Janey’s formation, Acker illustrated the necessity for dreaming a way

out of our unbearable political reality by walking us through the myriad ways that capitalism,

imperialism, and patriarchy have made the contemporary world all but uninhabitable for many of

its citizens. In the epilogue to Blood and Guts, she does not offer up a positive alternative to this

reality—the details of the world she sketches out in her coda are far too inchoate for us to call

that world a utopia—but she does leave us with a glimmer of hope that it is within our power to

change things.

Acker expands the scope of her novel’s diegetic world to include everyone reading it,

offering her readers a parable about the transformative power of reading to push us towards a

new, critical and creative way of engaging with texts that does not take the ideology they express

for granted. In doing so, she invents a new kind of Bildungsroman, one that finds its meaning in

the boundless potentiality of the future rather than the possibility of living the “good life” in the

present. Where the Bildungsroman once worked to reinforce the social order, Acker’s

metabildungsroman reinforces the importance of dreaming beyond it.

42
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