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Originally Posted by !@#$%!
maybe at 18 you weren't ready to realize her freedom and playfulness and punk rock ways right along her literary and theorethical depth. i certainly wasn't.
but this time around i'm having a blast with her. on the one hand she skewers the absurdity of gender roles and the cruelty of economic social relations, on the other hand she concocts an absurd and rambling melodrama, and then she proceeds to have her way with language and literary history, from the rudiments of writing to allusion to quotation to analysis to overt plagiarism. genius.
it's a book about desire, and oppression, and the misfortune of being born a human and a woman to boot, and be cursed with intelligence, and a struggle for freedom, and as bataille would put it--about evil, which is a return to childhood.
it's a brilliant book, but because it's such outsider art it's also very easy to misunderstand. i have no patience with moronic academics that interpret it like she's literally 10 years old fucking her literal father. it's poetry, motherfucker (fatherfucker?), not journalism, and so it's loaded with metaphor and symbolism and allegory and since it's actual art and not a fucking pamphlet it is wonderfully ambiguous. but anyway-- don't read those academic papers. she's got some great interviews out there instead.
in any case-- it's the only fiction book that i've been able to stomach in a very long time. it's so refreshing to find something so completely different. i'm surprised i'm liking it so much.
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Yeah, but wouldn't an academic (a fluffy academic... y'know, like a lit prof) be more apt to read it as symbolically than literally?
I probably did read it as a literal account when I was 18, but that's certainly one of the ways it can be interpreted. It's not
so satirical in content that it's, like, impossible to imagine it being intended as anything but satire. It's not Animal Farm, you know. If you read that book and think it's about pigs you're a goddamn moron. But Blood and Guts doesn't (from what I can remember) read like a blatant allegory.
I feel like I should probably revisit it, but I made that promise to myself for a very good reason... at least at the time it seems like a very good reason. That book fucked me up a bit, and I don't feel any desire to experience those feelings again.