On 5 December 1991, Fred Jordan at Pantheon Books sent William Burroughs the proofs of Acker's Portrait of An Eye, the collection of early texts comprising the final manuscripts of the three novellas The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula by the Black Tarantula (1974), I Dreamt I was a Nymphomaniac: Imagining (1975), and The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec by Henri Toulouse Lautrec (1973). In a letter dated 7 January 1992, Burroughs's agent, James Grauerholz, penned a taut reply, pointing to the irony that Acker had been one of his clients in 1977, and that he had, in fact, offered the books to Fred Jordan in the same year, when Jordan was at Grove Press. Grauerholz includes in his letter a quote from Burroughs:

Burroughs's observations here commending the shifting nature of Acker's ‘I’ and the text's subsequent ushering in of multiple identities in her early trilogy are mirrored in Acker's comments in interview with Ellen G. Friedman in 1989. Regarding her early trilogy she states: ‘The major theme was identity, the theme I used from Tarantula through The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec by Henri Toulouse Lautrec, the end of trilogy. After that I lost interest in the problem of identity.’ In response to Acker's turning away from the problem of identity, critics such as Christopher Kocela have referred to Acker's ‘post “identity”’ work. In Memoriam to Identity (1990), the first work in Acker's later trilogy, is a reticulation of four protean narratives, ‘Rimbaud’, ‘Airplane’, Capitol’, and ‘The Wild Palms’. This chapter argues that disjunction gives way to topology in In Memoriam. Chapter 3 revealed Acker's experimentation in Don Quixote to be a practice whereby the reader does emerge from the varying texts but only to enter another text. The strategy in Don Quixote is paratactic disjunction. Whilst there is no escape from the texts, no space as such between the texts, the alternative texts remain distinct from one another, particularly in their registers, despite Acker's overarching metonymical play in her practices of writing through.