Vol. 8 No. 16 · 18 September 1986
pages 19-21 | 4553 words
Cervantics
Robin Chapman
- Don Quixote by E.C. Riley
Allen and Unwin, 224 pp, £18.00, February 1986, ISBN 0 04 800009 4
- Don Quixote – which was a dream by Kathy Acker
Paladin, 207 pp, £2.95, April 1986, ISBN 0 586 08554 8
According to John Constable, the trouble with self-taught painters was that they had such bad teachers. Creative writing workshops notwithstanding, every novelist is self-taught. An enduring reminder of this is Cervantes’s relationship with his equivocal double masterpiece Don Quixote, and the most persuasive analyst of both book and author remains E.C. Riley, who as long ago as 1962 first alerted us in Cervantes’s Theory of the Novel to what has since become received opinion: that Cervantes was a highly self-conscious literary artist who had to teach himself to write the first modern European novel.
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[*] Pandora, 423 pp., £4.95, 22 May, 0 86358 080 7.
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Letters
Vol. 8 No. 20 · 20 November 1986
From Simon Pettifar
SIR: Robin Chapman’s review of Kathy Acker’s Don Quixote – which was a dream (LRB, 18 September) prompts me to write to question your reasons for noticing such a book. Amid an otherwise illuminating piece Chapman disposed of Acker’s book with a somewhat tired and routine half-paragraph: as someone who persevered through her earlier opus Blood and Guts in Highschool I doubt that it merited any more than that, but this does make one wonder why you bothered to notice it. Cervantes’s novel has been inspiration for a host of imitations, variations and pastiches since its first appearance, not to mention a mountain of critical studies, and it may be that Robin Chapman’s intention was simply to round up some of the more recent examples of this proliferation, in which case Acker’s book would quite naturally have fallen into his net. One cannot help but be aware, however, of the extraordinary hype which has accompanied publication of Acker’s work in England in recent years. This seems to me to have been a perfect example of how a large publisher with an imaginative publicity department can command attention in respectable journals for books which would not merit such notice on the basis of their contents alone. If an author is actively hyped by his or her publisher, a situation is created whereby critical journals may, quite rightly, feel obliged to offer their readers an opinion on that author which the work itself would not otherwise justify. Whether or not your own review was prompted in this way most reviews of Acker’s work which have appeared seem to have been: and any such review automatically robs genuinely exciting and original writers of space which might otherwise be devoted to them.
As Robin Chapman’s piece demonstrated, to try to write about Acker’s work is a thankless task. There are, I think, only two questions of any interest which might arise from it. The first is, given that the tremendously talented, radical, exciting and readable writer Kathy Acker does not exist, why have so many reviewers, literary columnists and interviewers here and in America found it necessary, or desirable, to invent her? The second is how does such an intelligent, sensitive, articulate person as Kathy Acker proved herself to be in a South Bank Show television programme devoted to her work manage to write so much to so little effect? As an early reviewer of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road exclaimed, unjustly on that occasion: ‘This is not writing, but typing.’
Simon Pettifar
Black Spring Press, London SE11
