GROUP: When’s your new novel, Don Quixote, due out?
ACKER: Tomorrow. I brought a copy with me.
GROUP: Does it work with the text in the same way as Great Expectations?
ACKER: It’s a much straighter narrative. It has three sections, it’s very episodic. The first section is straight Don Quixote. I’m just taking the text and usually just copying it—except Don Quixote’s a woman. This first joke needs to be kept up. And then, in the second part, she sort of fails. I mean Don Quixote’s always failing. So she reads other texts to try to find out how she can succeed in her adventures; so the second part of the book is just readings of other texts. There are four other texts, it’s very readable. In the third part you resume the straight narrative. Except that the readings of the text have very much influenced the language. At least that’s how I see it. So that the narrative is straightforward, but it’s changed. It’s as if some sort of multiplication has happened. And that’s the structure of the book, so it’s much more narrative than the earlier ones. Even more than Blood and Guts.
GROUP: Do you think that’s a retreat back to narrative?
ACKER: I don’t think it’s a retreat, I think it’s a step forward because the reason I’m interested in narrative isn’t the eighteenth-century Balzacian narrative, it’s African folktale. I wanted to use narrative because I thought there was a lot of strength in it, but it’s always been a huge problem for me. I saw it as something happening at the beginning of the twentieth century. You can either go the way of Finnegans Wake, so totally cut up at this point that you lose your energy—you lose your rapport with the reader—or you go towards conventions where no one even questions those conventions, the conventions of the nineteenth-century novel. I think that Barthes in Writing Degree Zero described it absolutely perfectly. There is no reason to do more than reiterate his stuff. And also I was very much coming out of a poetry tradition in the United States; I wanted to be able to write and not know what I was going to write. From another point of view, there are two ways of writing: I mean either you start out and know what you’re going to say, and that’s a certain moral position that a writer takes; or you start out and you’re more of a journalist, you’re more investigating and you don’t know what you’re going to say, which I prefer. I mean, I don’t prefer…it’s the only thing I can do. But then you have a problem of how you can have a narrative. And that’s always been a huge problem, which I saw solved a little bit in a lot of the European novelists. First when I was a lot younger I was very influenced by Blaise Cendrars for that reason, especially by a novel called Moravagine and also by Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit. Again, it’s the episodic novel and it’s a narrative, but within the narrative there’s a cut-up. I don’t mean cut-up in the way Burroughs uses it, I mean disjunction. The nouveau roman in France [also] really influenced me. Robbe-Grillet is obviously very conceptual. He works as a minimalist painter would in America. And someone like Claude Simon is a tremendous influence on me. Often his texts come from “Carton” paintings. It’s disjunction. Nothing follows anything else, as in Finnegans Wake. It’s as if you’re at the edges of narrative all the time, and so I did that. I think I got as far as I could in the Pasolini, working on the way themes related to each other, but somehow that seemed as if that were over to me. What had happened is I’d moved here [London] and I became very disillusioned with New York. Pasolini, the last novel in the trilogy Blood and Guts, is very much based on avant-garde moves, and I started to question those moves. I saw New York becoming more and more a fiction about what happens to capitalism, and the art world as a real illustration of what was taking place about rich and poor. And in a way I’d grown up in New York City and I’d been baby-fed Jackson Pollock and the cowboy myths and avant-garde disjunctions and the whole business, and for the first time I started to question all these things and wanted to move to something else but didn’t know what, and totally distrusted the nineteenth-century narrative and distrusted the sort of typical English novel—not that happened in the nineteenth century but certainly that’s happening now. And so there’s something new, which this book simply hints at, which may work or not. I got very interested again in narrative. [And also in] a certain postmodernist technique or ploy I found very helpful: my friends in New York were part of a group of painters called the Metro Pictures painters (Richard Prince and Sherrie Levine, mainly), and what they do is copy other paintings very simply. And I saw that I could have a narrative if I copied another narrative and didn’t interpose too much. I was getting away from the position of elitism, and I wasn’t having to deal with “I’m an expert telling you how I think the world is”—you know, this damned “world position” that I hate—but I could still have narrative, and all I wanted was narrative. There’s a kind of beauty, you know. Something I wanted. But I didn’t want to have to mean by it. So just taking Don Quixote and copying it was a great freedom for me. And then as I proceeded in that book I became more interested in what happened with narrative in a lot of African writing. So that’s what I’m dealing with now. So I don’t see it as a retreat. I can’t say quite where it’s going.
GROUP: You say that you are attracted towards African narrative styles. I wondered how you’d come to that and what roads you’d used to enter into this interest?
ACKER: Just reading them. It’s so hard to talk politically. I mean it’s just so many years of experience, and you sound pompous when you talk about things. So it’s hard to talk about my experiences politically in the United States; it’s maybe not more than here, but to me, there it’s so much about black and white. And it’s about having worked with a lot of blacks—I used to live with Angela Davis for a while. Anyway, maybe that all had to do with things. Anyway, there’s this series of Heinemann books which are incredible and I would go through them. Collett’s of London used to have a whole series, and so I’d go in there to get books, and I’d pick up all of the Heinemann series and there’s some amazing writers in there. There’s Ouologuem’s Bound to Violence, and he was actually exiled [from South Africa]. There’s a writer called Armah, who I’m told is now teaching in the United States, who is a bit like Jean Genet, an incredible structuralist. But the passion in his novels…I think Why Are We So Blest? was the one that most influenced me; and he’s done two sort of like a Zola—Ekwensi. Again, he was solving the problem for me about how to be surprised, how to write something that’s not dogmatic, how to be political. It’s like they were guerrilla people, they spanned all sorts of things and they ended up with really powerful novels. So there’s like structuralism and content.
GROUP: How did your readings of these African narratives enter into Don Quixote?
ACKER: The last part of Don Quixote is all African narrative. What I do is, when I think I have something to learn, I start copying things because that’s how I learn. And I picked [up] on something [of] Aimé Césaire’s, and the last chapter is all Aimé Césaire. And then there are other African tales before that…It’s like tales within tales. I think I have this method of “slippage,” where I will never talk directly about what I might be or who I am. And it’s very much Talmudic tradition.
GROUP: African writing is an oral tradition isn’t it?
ACKER: But I’m terribly based on oral traditions, I make my money by giving readings. Most chapters in my writings are for readings, and usually I’m performing with rock and roll, and so it has to work—and if it doesn’t work I’m a dead duck because the audience just barracks you.