Yet another opportunity to recommend Kathy Acker, especially Blood and Guts in Highschool and Great Expectations, brilliant, unique, hilarious books both and dear to my heart. Perhaps one day someone here will actually take up one of these recommendations and read one of them.
Acker wrote without rewrites and professed herself uninterested in character or narrative, but said, 'I had an interest in copying'. The hype (partly her own) had her as a plagiarist, but there's very little verbatim copying in her books, more a series of, often deceptively simple, descriptions of works by everyone from Catullus to Hawthorne, woven, with apparent recklessness, into disjointed tales of women in vaguely punky, artistic urban milieus, usually wildly frustrated by everything from dominant political systems to lovelessness to what was supposed to constitute the acceptable place of the intellectual in society. Anomalies are everywhere: Jimmy Carter turns up in a New York punk club and picks up Janey, the heroine of Blood and Guts, beginning an abusive relationship with her. Someone purporting to be Erica Jong appears suddenly and delivers a frantic monologue ('My name is Erica Jong. I'm tearing up my clothes. Goodnight.') Janey is kidnapped by a Persian slavetrader who loves Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre and locks her in a room with nothing but The Scarlet Letter and a pencil.
Hi Etienne. I was surprised your first post left out Roussel, given your other choices. His book Locus Solus is also deeply weird.
A few anecdotes about Roussel: he only wrote Impressions of Africa and Locus Solus to draw attention to his first novel, which he considered his masterpiece. During the writing of it, he felt himself possessed by a sort of brilliant inspiration he called la gloire (the glory) and believed it to cause him to emanate such a bright light that he had to write during the day with the blinds of his windows down so as to save people passing in the street from being blinded. A guy I know who's a big fan of Roussel has read this book and he says it isn't any good at all.
In addition to his novels, Roussel wrote a book of short prose poems with a similar title to Impressions of Africa, each one following a rigid structure incorporating a series of bracketted information within other bracketted information. These kinds of formal experiment were one reason why he was important to the Oulipo writers.
A huge inspiration to surrealist figures such as Duchamp, Roussel was once asked what he thought of the movement and replied that he found them 'un peut obscur' (a bit obscure). This from a man who's books largely consisted of descriptions of strange, impossible machines.
In a similar vein, also look up Alfred Jarry's Ubu plays.
