(Kathy Acker)
Why bother with the lie of realism? Why bother being so miserable, reductive, when one could play? If I'm going to tell you what the real is by mirroring it, by telling you a story which expresses reality, I'm attempting to tell you how things are. In other words, realism is simply a control method. Realism doesn't want to negotiate, open into, even know chaos or the body or death. Because those who practice realism want to limit their readers' perceptions, want to limit perceptions to a centric—which in this society is always a phallocentric—reality.
"I am the one," says the realistic writer, "I'm telling
you reality."
I have the same quarrel about narrowing anything to single identity.
In
other words, behind every literary or cultural issue lies the political, the
realm of political power. And whenever we talk about narration, narrative
structure, we're talking about political power.
The desire to play, to make literary structures which play into and in
unknown or unknowable realms, those of chance and death and the lack of
language, is the desire to live in a world that is open and dangerous, that is
limitless. To play, then, both in structure and in content, is to desire to
live in wonder.
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