A revolution is like a fever that temporarily grips the patient. Such was the observation of Crane Brinton in his seminal work The Anatomy of Revolution (1938). Not all revolutions, Brinton observed, run the full course of the fever; many are suppressed prematurely. But for others, the initial delirium typically subsides into a convalescence that, ultimately, ends in a restoration of the pre-revolutionary order. So it is that many a revolution observes the same process: the overthrow of the old regime is followed by a brief ‘honeymoon’ period, which lasts until ‘contradictory elements’ arise among the revolutionaries. Finally, the new revolutionary body collapses, devouring itself in a spectacle of political terror. ‘Revolution, like Saturn, devours its children’: Brinton quotes Pierre Vergniaud's prophecy that the French Revolution will end in despotism. The end result? Revolutionaries come out of the experience untransformed, often sadder, sometimes wiser, and most likely to renounce their revolutionary passion. This final reaction ‘comes as naturally to societies in revolution as an ebbing tide, as calm after a storm, as convalescence after fever, as the snapping-back of a stretched elastic band.’

Revolutions in Kathy Acker's novels evoke variations upon this Saturnian refrain. While her fevers often differ in their course, involving different revolutionary agents, different variations of a fundamental phenomenon, each of them either fails to reach their ultimate goal, or heavily compromises that goal in the process. In Acker's final full-length novel, Pussy, King of the Pirates (1996), a fortune-teller in pre-revolutionary China evokes a solemn warning: ‘the revolution, which was just about to happen, had to fail, due to its own nature or origin’. In the cards laid before them, the Chinese soothsayer sees the end of dreaming and the beginnings of revolution's nightmare: ‘As soon as it [the revolution] failed, as soon as sovereignty, be it reigning or revolutionary, disappeared, as soon as sovereignty ate its own head as if it were a snake, when the streets turned to poverty and decay, but a different poverty and decay’. Revolution is presented as if fixed upon a wheel of fortune; fated to return full circle to what had come before, like a snake consuming itself. Like Saturn devouring his young before being resurrected in the form of yet another revolution, with its own unrealised promise of a better world ahead.