Published in London in 1986, two years after Acker had left New York, and nearly two decades after the worldwide countercultural protests of 1968, Don Quixote documents her anxiety over the triumphant conservatism of the Reagan and Thatcher years. With the decline of the American Left and the abatement of social movements, there was a pained feeling of lack of alternatives, and Acker saw a disenchanted American and British society retreating from political life. Cynicism flourished in a climate where utopian belief was in crisis, and Acker wanted to instil revolutionary spirit into politically barren times. In what follows, I argue that she did this by launching a saviour figure, Don Quixote, who is equipped with a set of practical tools derived from the subversive tradition of ancient Cynicism to fight the complacency and self-interest associated with the modern cynical rationality. I aim to show how Don Quixote reveals the many faces of modern cynicism, challenging its claims to realism and uncovering its unsettling affinities with totalitarianism. As an alternative to the pervasive realpolitik, Acker turns to a dreampolitik that she locates in the historical example of Spanish anarchism.

‘What of the night?’ – cynical ‘remainder’

‘[T]here's no world for idealism’, asserts Acker's protagonist in the opening page of Don Quixote. The novel offers one of the most compelling confrontations between a bleak realist outlook on society and the dream of a society transformed. It concerns a single questing knight, here a ‘female-male or a night-knight’, who sets out on a mission to find love and change the world for the better. The knight wants to become a saviour, declaring herself ready ‘to right all wrongs’ (DQ, 14), a mission completely incompatible with the cynicism of a society which has given up on hope. Yet the novel simultaneously projects a more pessimistic view of devoting oneself to bettering the world. The ‘knight’'s homophonic double ‘night’ threatens to reverse the noble quest and thereby render it futile.

Like the author of the original Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes, Acker inserts her narrative within the frame of a chivalric romance to subvert it.