I’ve been thinking about allusion, quotation, and sampling in the broadest possible terms. It’s led me both deep into the self and what makes up consciousness and way, way outward into what constitutes reality. Some of the concerns are epistemological. That is, how we know what we know. And some are ontological. That is, how we be who we be. I’m zooming in and zooming out to find the limits of the concepts of reference and recycling.

Before we get to Kathy Acker’s writing practices, let’s start with brief survey of other perspectives:

In his book 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl (Tarcher, 2006), Daniel Pinchbeck extends Heisenberg’s idea that observation influences the observed into a Hegelian word-view that consciousness constitutes the core of reality, as if the physical world and our perception of it are merely two sides of the same phenomenon. Taken wholesale, it’s not quite solipsism, but it’s close. The act of writing blurs the lines even further.

In his introduction to Cicero’s On the Good Life, Michael Grant writes,

Cicero strongly believed that the universe is governed by a divine plan… When he looked round him at the marvels of the cosmos he could only conclude, adopting the “argument from design,” that they must be of divine origin. He was happy to adopt this form of religion, purified and illuminated by the knowledge of nature, because it justified his confidence in human beings, which was based, as has been seen, on the conviction that the mind or soul of each individual person is a reflection, indeed a part, of the divine mind.

Cicero held a distributed view of religion, each of us representing one aspect of the divine. Evoking both Immanual Kant and Jakob Johann von Uexküll in her book Ecstatic Worlds (MIT Press, 2017), Janine Marchessault writes,

Building upon Kant’s philosophy, Uexküll maintained that the world of every living organism on the earth is different from that of every other organism because of the uniqueness of its sensory organs and its environment; each creature inhabits a unique environment that is uniquely experienced. The world is thus made up of multiple, overlapping environments.

So, on one side, we’re each the eyes of the divine, but if each of us sees ourselves as the center of our own universe, then we all live in universes made up of our own observations and experiences. It’s its own many-worlds theory, even if just by a slight shift in point of view. For the sake of the discussion at hand, let’s adopt the theory—even if only by analogy. When we write, we take on a point of view, make observations, and relay experiences. Now, what if we step outside of ourselves and borrow points of view, observations, and experiences from others?

“I’m not an enclosed or self-sufficient being.” — Colette Peignot,
channeled by Kathy Acker in My Mother: Demonology

Kathy Acker in London in the late 1980s. [photo by Mark Baker]

Experimental writer and all around badass Kathy Acker would do just that. Her writing practice included variations on William Burroughs and Brion Gysin’s cut-up method, parody, pastiche, postmodernism, and forms that flirted with plagiarism. During a visit to RE/Search headquarters in 2012, her friend and ex-lover McKenzie Wark told V. Vale, “She would just read a book and re-write it. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, she would just read Treasure Island and re-write it. You don’t wait for inspiration, you just get going” (italics in original). Wark met Acker in July of 1995 when she was visiting Sydney, Australia. The next year, Wark visited her in San Francisco. Their brief relationship, which largely existed between those two meetings, is chronicled via their collected emails in I’m Very Into You: Correspondence 1995–1996 (Semiotext(e), 2015).

Like everyone who came in contact with her, Wark was irrevocably inspired. Acker left no stone unthrown, no line uncrossed. Wark continues, “When I met her, she had three books… And she was writing Pussy, King of the Pirates (Grove Press, 1996). It’s one-third Treasure Island and two-thirds something else, and she would just read these three books and, almost at random, re-write them.” Acker explained her methods in a1990 interview with Sylvére Lotringer:

I placed very direct autobiographical, just diary material, right next to fake diary material. I tried to figure out who I wasn’t and I went to texts of murderesses. I just changed them into the first person, really not caring if the writing was good or bad, and put the fake first person text next to the true first person. And then continue to see what would happen. I used pre-Freudian texts because I didn’t want to deal with Freudian jargon. It was a very naive experiment at first. I was experimenting about identity in terms of language.

Like a mash-up artist or hip-hop producer, Acker would sample other texts, recontextualizing them among her own. It wasn’t a shortcut, it was an experiment, an exploration outside herself. Marchessault adds, “The environment described by Uexküll is defined by a multiplicity of overlapping subjective experiences of time.” Acker continues,

What a writer does, in 19th century terms, is that he takes a certain amount of experience and he “represents” that material. What I’m doing is simply taking text to be the same as the world, to be equal to non-text, in fact to be more real than non-text, and start representing text.

Acker was not plagiarizing or imitating but representing another’s text. It’s not mimésis or mimicry in the Aristotelian sense. A symbol on a map represents a particular building or destination, but it isn’t imitating that building or destination. As Acker added, “I didn’t copy it. I didn’t say it was mine.” She was smuggling in other points of view, other observations, other experiences, others. Hers was a proto-punk act of creative destruction.

In her Acker biography, After Kathy Acker, Chris Kraus writes, “But then again, didn’t she do what all writers must do? Create a position from which to write?” Architect of a different vector of bomb, one designed to level the pedestals of the literary canon, Acker could have proclaimed, “Now I am become life, creator of worlds.”

Bibliography:

Kathy Acker, Hannibal Lecter, My Father, New York: Semiotext(e), 1991.
Kathy Acker & McKenzie Wark, I’m Very Into You: Correspondence 1995–1996, New York: Semiotext(e), 2015.
Kathy Acker, My Mother: Demonology, New York: Grove Press, 1994.
Kathy Acker, Pussy, King of the Pirates, New York: Grove Press, 1996.
Aristotle, Poetics, New York: Penguin Classics, 1996.
Michael Grant, Introduction, in Cicero, On the Good Life, New York: Penguin Books, 1971, 8.
Chris Kraus, After Kathy Acker: A Biography, New York: Semiotext(e), 2017.
Janine Marchessault, Ecstatic Worlds: Media, Utopias, Ecologies, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2017.
Steven Shaviro, Doom Patrols: A Theoretical Fiction About Postmodernism, San Francisco, CA: Serpent’s Tail, 1996.
V. Vale, A Visit from McKenzie Wark, San Francisco, CA: RE/Search Publications, 2014, 21.
McKenzie Wark, Philosophy for Spiders: On the Low Theory of Kathy Acker, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021.

During the last episode of season four of True Detective, some cheered and others groaned when Raymond Clark said “time is a flat circle,” repeating Reggie Ledoux and Rustin Cohle’s line from season one. OG creator and showrunner Nic Pizzolato himself did not appreciate the homage to the original. Allusions as such can go either way.

At their best, allusions add layers of meaning to our stories, connecting them to the larger context of a series, genre, or literature at large. At worst, they’re lazy storytelling or fumbling fan service. It feels good to recognize an obscure allusion and feel like a participant in the story. It feels cheap to recognize one and feel manipulated by the writer. They are contrivances after all: legacy characters, echoed dialog, recurring locations or props—all of these can work either way, to cohere or alienate, to enrich the meaning or pull you right out of the story.

[WARNING: Spoilers abound below for all seasons of HBO’s True Detective.]

The spiral as seen in season four of True Detective: a motif smuggled out of the mythology of season one.

Our experience with a story is always informed by our past experience—lived or mediated—but when that experience is directly referenced with an allusion, we feel closer to the story. Allusions are where we share notes with other fans, and they form associative paths, connecting them to other artifacts. So, if you recognized Ledoux or Cohle’s words coming out of Clark’s mouth, or if you recognized all of them as Friedrich Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence, you probably felt a closer tie to the story. As he wrote in The Gay Science (1882), “Do you want this again and innumerable times again?” For Nietzsche, this is all there was, and to embrace this recurrence was to embrace human life just as it is: the same thing over and over.

Rust Cohle and Marty Hart in season three.

Moreover, in season four we got the ghost of Rust Cohle’s father, Travis Cohle, a connection to the vast empire of the Tuttle family, and the goofy gag of recurring spirals. Season three had its passing connections to season one as well, as seen in the newspaper article in the image above. Given the pervasive references to it, season one may have been the show’s peak, but my favorite is still the beleaguered second season, the only one so far that stands free of allusions to the other seasons of the anthology. Perhaps it is the most hated season of the series because of its refusal to connect to and coexist with the others, yet—riding the word-of-mouth wave from season one—it’s also the most watched.

It should be noted that in addition to its lack of allusions to season one and any semblance of interiority, season two also lacks any sense of the spiritual. There is only the world you see and feel in front of you, no inner world, no adjacent beyond, no Carcosa. As Raymond Velcoro says grimly, “My strong suspicion is we get the world we deserve.”

Bezzerides and Velcoro share a moment of quiet contemplation.

Season two continues the gloom of the first season, moving it from the swamps of Louisiana to the sprawl of Los Angeles. Like its suburban setting, season two stretches out in good and bad ways, leaving us by turns enlightened and lost. Though, as Ian Bogost points out, where Cohle got lost in his own head, the characters in season two—Ani Bezzerides, Paul Woodrugh, Frank Semyon, and Velcoro—get lost in their world. The physician and psychoanalyst Dr. John C. Lilly distinguished between what he called insanity and outsanity. Insanity is “your life inside yourself”; outsanity is the chaos of the world, the cruelty of other people. Sometimes we get lost in our heads. Sometimes we get lost in the world.

Rust Cohle in his storage shed in season one.

To be fair, season one isn’t without its references to existing texts. Much of the material in Cohle’s monologues is straight out of Thomas Ligotti’s The Conspiracy Against the Human Race (Hippocampus Press, 2010), where he quotes the Norwegian philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe (even using the word “thresher” to describe the pain of human existence), and the dark-hearted philosophy of Nietzsche, of course. The writings of Ambrose Bierce (“An Inhabitant of Carcosa”), H.P. Lovecraft (Cthulhu Mythos), and Robert W. Chambers (“The Yellow King”) also make appearances. Daniel Fitzpatrick writes in his essay in the book True Detection (Schism, 2014), “Through these references, engaged viewers are offered a means to unlock the show’s secrets, granting a more active involvement, and while these references are often essential and enrich our experience of the show, in its weaker moments they can make it seem like a grab-bag of half thought-through allusions.”

“One of the things that I loved most about that first season of True Detective was the cosmic horror angle of it,” says season four writer, director, and showrunner Issa López. “It had a Carcosa, and it had a Yellow King, which are references to the Cthulhu Mythos with Lovecraft and the idea of ancient gods that live beyond human perception.” The hints of something beyond this world, “the war going on behind things,” as Reverend Billy Lee Tuttle put it, pulled us all in. “That sense of something sinister playing behind the scenes, and watching from the shadows,” she continues, “is something that I very much loved.”

In his book on suicide, The Savage God (1970), Al Álvarez writes, “For the great rationalists, a sense of absurdity—the absurdity of superstition, self-importance, and unreason—was as natural and illuminating as sunlight.” By the end of season one, Rustin Cohle seems to embrace the eternal recurrence of his life, the spiral of light and the dark—including his own daughter’s death. At the end of Night Country, Evangeline Navarro seems to do the same, walking blindly into extinction, one last midnight, a lone sister, fragile and numinous, opting out of a raw deal, lost both in her head and in the world.

Tag: Allusion

The Acker Ethic

The Long Bright Dark: Allusions in True Detective

Further Reading: