[7/20/73]
I become a man and a woman:
Kathy Acker’s The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula by The Black Tarantula opens with a direct statement of its goals:
Intention: I become a murderess by repeating in words the lives of other murderesses.
The line stands epigraphically on its own page, introducing the novel’s first section, in which Acker (or the Black Tarantula) embodies a number of famous murderesses throughout history (and later the Trocchi, Yeats and the Marquis de Sade), freely intermingling their narrative voices and points of view. The sentence provides an overview of arguably Acker’s entire corpus and her project of repetition and embodiment. Acker’s work requires multiple Others: other texts to repeat through her cut-up process of open plagiarism and other people, real or fictional, to embody. Acker’s mode of postmodernist intertextuality moves beyond mere literary referentialty to the realm of the social.
The novel’s third chapter opens with another pseudo-epigraph…
I move to San Francisco. I begin to copy my favorite pornography books and become the main person in each of them.
…before moving onto the text proper:
I’m two people and the two people are making love to each other.
And so Acker not only repeats her literary forebears but embodies their textual inventions, and in so doing manages even to repeat her own embodiment by taking on the mental frame of two simultaneous characters. “I begin to copy Therese and Isabelle,” she writes, and the novel — both Acker’s and Leduc’s — comes to life. The Black Tarantula’s narrative adopts the story of a lesbian affair at a girls’ school. Beyond simply borrowing a plot device, Acker’s repetition of Leduc becomes an act of embodiment through which her own character comes to the fore. “At night I read the Marquis de Sade, Artaud’s poems, and my algebra book,” the Black Tarantula tells us. Later: “I read Sartre De Sade Laing Esterson and Leduc.” Each text she encounters offers her a world to inhabit, to live through and within. Through reading, the Black Tarantula becomes the text. As Acker reads and copies Therese and Isabelle, her world takes on its shape. The process of copying moves from transposing words from one page to another and into the realm of hyperstition as the text manifests itself in the reader’s “real-world” narrative. (I’m reminded of B.R. Yeager’s assertion of reading as a form of temporary mind control.)
The Black Tarantula’s process of embodiment works through her adoption of narrative identities: “I’m trying to become other people because this is what I find interesting.” She takes on these characters through first person language in the present tense: “I’m born,” “I become,” “My name is.”
And those names are specific historic personages: the murderesses Charlotte Wood, Sophie Dawes and Laura Lane; the male writers Alexander Trocchi, de Sade and Yeats. When she embodies the last of these writers in the novel’s fifth section, she begins having his thoughts: “Does the soul survive the body? Yes. Then love need not be physical. Is our civilization near an end, or transformation? Yes. We have to consider the terror we are living through.” And what terror the Black Tarantula lives through, taking on the thoughts and experiences of murderers, pirates, outlaws and, of course, poets!
But if the Black Tarantula becomes the subject she reads, so too does her reader naturally become her. I become her in the first person: I’m born the Black Tarantula. I become the Black Tarantula. My name is the Black Tarantula.
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