Blood and Guts in High School - Critical Reception

Critical Reception

Out of all of Acker’s books, Blood and Guts in High School has received the widest criticisms and reviews. Many writers have tried analyzing Blood and Guts to understand exactly what Acker was trying to accomplish. Katie R. Muth in her article described Blood and Guts as a novel that draws arguments from gender studies, global capitalism, and theories of subject formation (89).

Susan E. Hawkins describes Blood and Guts as a text that contains plagiarism, parody, pastiche, and other antirealist techniques that mark her work as postmodern (Hawkins 637). According to Hawkins, Acker is motivated by two discourses: the oedipal and the imperial (642). Using the mechanism of sexual and economic oppression, Acker is able to actualize the taboo surrounding incest by associating it with capitalism to demystify the oedipal formation of desire in the Western culture (Hawkins 646).

Another critical review that Blood and Guts received is the narrative technique in the story. Not only is the narrating technique unstable and at times, unreliable, but the narrator itself, Janey, a 10 year old girl, who lives until 14, experiences things that no little girl should. Kathy Hughes in her analysis takes a look at this approach by Acker and the overall effect of the novel when told from a 10 year old perspective. Hughes argues that Acker attacks and flips the Freudian theory upside down through sarcasm and irony (Hughes 124). And a 10 year old can accomplish what society is afraid of doing because of their simple matter of fact speaking, “Janey, as a child, does not have the socialization to throw the veil of intellectual language over the horrors of her daily, life, thus Acker does not utilize poetics when describing her life” (Hughes 127).

Blood and Guts was banned as pornographic in West Germany and South Africa.

It is featured in Peter Boxall's book, 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die and The Little Black Book of Books.