Disruption, White Space, and New York City in 1979

The first lines of text of Kathy Acker’s New York City in 1979 are short and succinct:

SOME people say New York City is evil and they wouldn’t live there for all the money in the world. 

These are the same people who elected Johnson, Nixon, Carter President and Koch Mayor of New York.

But of course, rending it like this undoes the impact of that statement, because it’s divorced from the important context of the page. When viewed in the book itself — or, in my most recent re-read, the ebook file — that same collection of words is framed very differently by the white space around them. 

I come back to this opening — this prologue — repeatedly to appreciate the heavy lifting it does within the text. The content of the text sets us up for the book that follows, but I’d argue the presentation of the text is equally important. The book starts with an immediate defiance of the most basic of prose conventions, eschewing the page full of text we normally assume is part-and-parcel of such narratives. It foregrounds the coming disruptions in the book, the refusal to obey conventions in style and content alike, but it does so in a way that is unassuming compared to the audacity that follows. If you dislike this four-line opening, the rest of this book is likely to alienate you in ways not yet imagined.

And yet, it’s also a promise to the reader: the effort of engaging with this lack of convention will still bear pleasurable fruit. Prose narratives have always been a curated experience, the author surveys the broader landscape of a character’s fictional life and deciding this moment is worthy of fictional scrutiny and that moment is best kept hidden in the ellipsis between scenes or chapters. This moment is significant for the narrative we’re crafting, and that one is easily ignored.

In this respect, the space around the prose is nuanced and loaded with potential meaning. Acker tights her focus like a poet, evokes a moment — a sentiment — and gets the hell out. Trusts the reader to stitch together the greater meaning in the patchwork of moments that follow, and that the choices where we dip into the flow of the world are highly targeted despite their disparate content. Part of me wishes I had a spare three thousand pounds to invest in some of the original transcripts and publications, to see how the work developed and evolved.

I read a lot of Acker back in the days when I first transitioned from poetry to prose, but it’s only recently that I’ve figured out why her work resonated with me the way it did. The most recent release — a stand-alone Penguin chapbook, which brings me joy — is an interesting study in just how much you can do with 6,000 words if you’re inventive and willing to think about the document as much as the story.