Storytelling Technique
In Blood and Guts in High School, Kathy Acker uses the technique of collage. She inserts letters, poems, drama scenes, dream visions and drawings. This creates a challenging text with a disturbed linearity. Acker freely admitted to using plagiarism in her work.
The novel is considered an anti-narrative work since it jumps in and out of narration and contains different narrators. At times, it’s hard to follow the narration of the story, since readers are interrupted with pornographic drawings, letters, and dream maps. “Acker’s novel incorporates at least three main threads of poststructuralist discourse into Janey’s narrative. The first is an exploration biopower; the second is a reading of the oedipal family as pathology; and the third is an analysis of the gender politics of language” (Muth 90).
“Acker’s work bounces from genre to genre, from location to location, from voice to voice, like a child who wants to experience and express everything” (Hughes 127).
...while writing it, I never considered that Blood and Guts in High School is especially anti-male, but people have been very upset about it on that ground. When I wrote it I think it was in my mind to do a traditional narrative. I thought it was kind of sweet at the time, but of course it's not.
—Kathy Acker,Like her heroine, Janey, Acker also died of breast cancer twenty years after writing Blood and Guts. Many of Acker's heroines have or fear getting cancer.
Read more about this topic: Blood And Guts In High School
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