by Chris Kraus
The rhetoric of therapy revolves around belief in personal choice. Until then Sylvère never thought he had any. Georges Lapassade suggested the unthinkable to Sylvère: that he refuse to go to Israel and leave the Zionist mouvement. Under the guidance of Lapassade, Sylvère wrote a formal resignation letter to the comrades who’d been his extended family since age 12. And so he never went to Israel and stayed in school.
The taxi was approaching Houston Street. Eagerly, Chris opened the envelope addressed to her and started reading. It was a xerox copy of Dick’s letter to Sylvère.
She gasped and breathed under the weight of it and got out of the cab and showed her film.
Afterword by Joan Hawkins
THEORETICAL FICTIONS
Critics OFTEN don’t seem to like Chris Kraus’ “NOVELS” much. I say “novels” (in quotes) because I’m not entirely sure Kraus’ works belong in the generic category of “novel.” Rather, as Sylvère Lotringer has noted, Kraus’ prose works constitute “some new kind of literary form,” a new genre, “something in between cultural criticism and fiction” (I Love Dick 258, 43). Kraus herself has called an early manifestation of this genre-bending “Lonely Girl Phenomenology” (137). I prefer to call it theoretical fiction.
By “theoretical fiction” I don’t mean books which are merely informed by theory or which seem to lend themselves to a certain kind of theoretical read—Sartre’s Nausea, for example, or the nouveaux romans of Robbe-Grillet. Rather, I mean the kind of books in which theory becomes an intrinsic part of the “plot,” a mover and shaker in the fictional universe created by the author. IN Kraus’ “novels,” debates over Baudrillard and Deleuze and meditations on the Kierkegaardian Third Remove form an intrinsic part of the narrative, where theory and criticism themselves are occasionally “fictionalized.”
BUT although theory plays such a key role in Kraus’ books, theoretical discussion is often erased from reviews of HER work. I Love Dick, her first book, is generally described as the story of Kraus’ unrequited love for cultural critic Dick Hebdige.
“Who gets to speak and why…” Kraus writes, “is the only question” (191). I would modify that as follows: who gets to speak, who gets to speak about what, and why are the only questions. Certainly they’re the questions which even favorable critiques of Kraus’ work have led me to ask. Why are Kraus’ “novels” mainly inscribed within a genre she has termed “the Dumb Cunt’s Tale” (27)? Why do even art reviewers tend to edit, censor, filter out certain key aspects of her work? I can’t answer these questions, BUT I can try to redress the balance a little BY TALKING about the aspects of Kraus’ art which I believe have OFTEN been overlooked.
I Love Dick is divided into two parts. Part One: Scenes from a Marriage lays out the parameters of the love story—the unifying emotional and narrative device of the book. It reads, the late Giovanni Intra writes, “like Madame Bovary as if Emma had written it.” Certainly, Madame Bovary is the literary analogue that Chris and her husband Sylvère use. In one memorable segment, Sylvère writes to “Dick” about his wife, “Emma,” and signs himself “Charles.” “Dear Dick, This is Charles Bovary” (110–112). Chris joins in the conceit when she tells the reader, in an expositional aside, that “sex with Charles did not replace Dick for Emma” (113).
But Madame Bovary isn’t the only literary reference. “I’m thrown into this weird position,” Chris tells Dick in her first letter to him. “Reactive—like Charlotte Stant to Sylvère’s Maggie Verver, if we were living in the Henry James novel—The Golden Bowl” (26–27). And when he’s not thinking of Flaubert, Sylvère refers to Chris’ infatuation with Dick as the ’90s equivalent of a Marivaux comedy. But since much of the plot is driven by letters, written by a couple who are attempting to seduce a third party into some kind of love-art projet, the book also bears a slight resemblance to Liaisons Dangereuses. Like LD, I Love Dick is self-reflexive as hell, as Sylvère and Chris continually critique and comment upon each other’s prose, arguments, and plot-lines. Like LD, I Love Dick establishes a fictional territory where adolescent obsession and middle-aged perversity overlap and intersect, a territory where the relationship between “always for the first time” and a sort of jaded “here we go again” can be explored (in one letter Chris even refers to herself and Sylvère as “libertines,” a term that invokes both Laclos and Sade). And, as in LD where the relationship between Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil is the one that really counts, the most compelling and enduring relationship in I Love Dick is between the two people who initially seem to have grown a little too used to one another. As one perceptive critic observes, the reader-voyeur ultimately cares less about whether Chris sleeps with Dick than whether she stays with Sylvère (Anne-Christine D’Adesky, The Nation, 1998).
For anyone who likes to read literature, I Love Dick is a good read. But the literary references should also cue us to the textual savvy of the people who populate the piece. These are people who dig each other’s references (32), who analyze and critique each other’s prose, who are very aware that the literary form itself “dictate[s] that Chris end up in Dick’s arms” (67). So it’s strange that critics have tended to treat I Love Dick as more of a memoir than fiction, as an old-fashioned text which we could read as though the past twenty years of literary theory about the signifying practices of language had never happened.
“There’s no way of communicating with you in writing,” Sylvère writes to Dick at one point, “because texts, as we all know, feed upon themselves, become a game” (73). And it’s this self-cannibalizing, self-reproducing, viral and ludic quality of language and text that critics seem to have largely ignored in writing about the book.
I Love Dick opens with the account of an evening Chris Kraus, “a 39-year-old experimental filmmaker,” and her husband Sylvère Lotringer, “a 56-year-old college professor from New York,” spend with “Dick…an English cultural critic who’s relocated from Melbourne to Los Angeles” (19). Dick, “a friendly acquaintance of Sylvère’s,” is interested in inviting Sylvère to give a lecture and a couple of seminars at his school (19). Over dinner, Kraus writes, “the two men discuss recent trends in postmodern critical theory and Chris, who is no intellectual, notices Dick making continual eye contact with her” (19). The radio predicts snow on the San Bernadino Highway and Dick generously invites the couple to spend the night at his house. “Back at Dick’s, the night unfolds like the boozy Christmas Eve in Eric Rohmer’s film My Night at Maud’s,” Kraus notes (20). Dick inadvertently plays an embarrassing phone machine message left for him by a young woman, with whom “things didn’t work out” (22). Sylvère and Chris “come out” as a monogamous hetero-married couple. Dick shows them a videotape of himself dressed as Johnny Cash, and Chris notices Dick is flirting with her. Chris and Sylvère spend the night on Dick’s sofabed. When they wake up the next morning, Dick is gone.
Over breakfast at the Antelope IHOP, Chris informs Sylvère that the flirtatious behavior she shared with Dick the previous night amounts to a “Conceptual Fuck” (21). Because Sylvère and Chris are no longer having sex, Kraus tells us, “the two maintain their intimacy via deconstruction: i.e. they tell each other everything” (21). Chris tells Sylvère that Dick’s disappearance invests the flirtation “with a subcultural subtext she and Dick both share: she’s reminded of all the fuzzy one-time fucks she’s had with men who’re out the door before her eyes are open” (21). Sylvère, “a European intellectual, who teaches Proust, is skilled in the analysis of love’s minutiae” (25). He buys Chris’ interpretation of the evening, and for the next four days the two do little else but talk about Dick.
The couple starts collaborating on billets-doux to Dick. At first they just share the letters with each other, but as the pile grows to 50 then 80 then 180 pages, they begin discussing some kind of Sophie Calle-like art piece, in which they would present the manuscript to Dick. Perhaps hang the letters on the cactus and shrubs in front of his house and videotape his reaction. Perhaps Sylvère should r
ead from the letters during his Critical Studies Seminar when he visits Dick’s school in March? “It seems to be a step towards the kind of confrontational performing art that you’re encouraging,” he writes in one of his darker notes to Dick (43). When Chris finally does give the letters to Dick, “things get pretty weird” (162). But by that time, the letters have become an art form in and of themselves, a means to something that has almost nothing to do with Dick.
“Think of language as a signifying chain,” Chris writes, referencing Lacan (233). And here you can literally see the signifying chain at work, as Chris’ letters to Dick open up to include essays on Kitaj, schizophrenia, Hannah Wilke, the Adirondacks, Eleanor Antin, and Guatemalan politics. “Dear Dick,” she writes at one point, “I guess in a sense I’ve killed you. You’ve become Dear Diary…” (90).
If Chris has metaphorically “killed” Dick by turning him into “Dear Diary,” Dick—when he finally writes back—erases Chris. Despite the fact that he appears to have had sex with her at least twice and has shared several lengthy conversations (“long distance bills fill the gaps left in my diaries,” she writes at one point, 230), he continually maintains that he doesn’t know her and that her obsession with him is based solely on “two genial but not particularly intimate or remarkable meetings spread out over a period of years” (260). At the close of the book, as almost every reviewer notes, Dick finally responds by writing directly to Sylvère but not Chris. “In the letter,” Anne-Christine d’Adesky writes,
he misspells her name as Kris, and seems mostly concerned with salvaging his damaged relationship with Sylvère. He expresses regret, discomfort, and anger at being the objet d’amour in their private game and clearly hopes they won’t publish the correspondence as is. ‘I do not share your conviction that my right to privacy has to be sacrificed for the sake of that talent,’ he tells Lotringer. To Chris, he is more curt, sending only a xeroxed copy of the letter he wrote to her husband. It’s a breathtaking act of humiliation, an unambiguous Fuck You.
But it’s also the appropriate literary conclusion to an adventure that was to some degree initiated by Sylvère. The first love letter in the book was written not by Chris but by her husband. And one of the things the “novel” unveils is the degree to which women in the classic Girardian triangle function as a conduit for a homosocial relationship between men as noted by Sedgwick. “Every letter is a love letter,” Lotringer writes at one point, and certainly his first letter to Dick reveals a desire for intimacy that exceeds the usual hetero-friendly-professional correspondence. “It must be the desert wind that went to our heads that night,” he writes, “or maybe the desire to fictionalize life… We’ve met a few times and I’ve felt a lot of sympathy towards you and a desire to be closer…” (26). The homosocial tone of the letter, as well as Sylvère’s fear that he sounds like a love-struck girl sets up “the game” as one of competition and intimacy between men. No wonder Chris—whose crush on Dick supposedly initiates the adventure—feels “reactive…the Dumb Cunt, a factory of emotions evoked by all the men” (27). When Dick finally writes, he reinforces Chris’ peripheral position. Ignoring everything that has passed between Dick and Chris, he responds to Sylvère’s initial letter to him, in language which illustrates—as d’Adesky notes—that he’s “mostly concerned with salvaging his damaged relationship with Sylvère.”
On the simplest level, then, I Love Dick is a more complicated piece of work than the reviews would indicate. Through the use of letters, taped phone conversations, and written exchanges between Chris and her husband, it deconstructs the classic heterosexual love triangle and lays bare the degree to which—even in the most enlightened circles—women continue to function as an object of exchange. By saying this, however, I don’t mean that it’s simply another illustration of Eve Sedgwick’s arguments in Between Men. Sylvère and Chris are too theoretically savvy to unproblematically present text/language as a transparency through which the real might be read. It’s never clear if the style of Sylvère’s letter is dictated by his feelings for Dick or by his awareness that the “form dictates” certain expressions of sentiment (67). What is clear is that “the real” is not exactly what interests Chris. “The game is real,” she tells Dick in her first letter, “or even better than, reality, and better than is what it’s all about” (28). Sylvère thinks Chris’ evocation of the hyper-real here is “too literary, too Baudrillardian.” But Chris insists. “Better than,” she writes, “means stepping out into complete intensity” (28). And it’s that intensity which Chris craves.
“Lived experience,” Félix Guattari writes in Chaosophy, “does not mean sensible qualities. It means intensification” (235). And while Kraus doesn’t quote Guattari until late in the text, his presence is already felt in the first letter. In fact, what’s interesting is Chris’ idea that you can somehow use Baudrillard’s notion of the hyper-real, the simulacrum, to get to Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of intensification. And that perhaps is the theoretical drive behind the entire project, as the letters and the simulacrum of a passion which receives little encouragement emerge as the truest and best way outside the virtual gridlock and into Deleuzian rematerialization of experience.
Given that Sylvère and Chris’ stated goals ARE the desire to fictionalize life and to surpass the real, it’s curious that the aspect of I Love Dick that is most frequently discussed in reviews is its connection to the banal, its status as a roman à clef. New York magazine revealed that the “Dick” of the book is Dick Hebdige, and rumor had it that Hebdige tried to block publication of I Love Dick by threatening to sue Kraus for invasion of privacy. As a result of this publicity entirely too much attention has been focused on Dick, who—as d’Adesky notes—remains “a mystery man” in the text itself. The fact that he doesn’t return messages, Chris points out, turns his answerphone, and to some extent the man himself, “into a blank screen onto which we can project our fantasies” (29). In an interview with Giovanni Intra, she has called Dick “every Dick…Uber Dick…a transitional object.”
Certainly he is Virtual Dick. It’s difficult to know whether certain things that Kraus describes in the book ever really happened. And Dick’s works, which at times are named and quoted in the book, are fictionalized. Real works are given fictitious titles and some quotes attributed to “Dick” appear to have been written by other people. This may have been done to further blur the real Dick’s identity and so avoid a lawsuit. The net effect, though, is curious, since the camouflage of Dick’s work continually refers back to Kraus and Lotringer themselves. In a postscript to one of Sylvère’s letters, Chris asks Dick to send a copy of his 1988 book, The Ministry of Fear (42; the “real” book is Hebdige’s Hiding in the Light). AND THEN THERE IS the reference Kraus makes to “Dick’s” Aliens & Anorexia, A NOVEL SHE WOULD PUBLISH THREE YEARS LATER. “And then in Aliens & Anorexia you wrote about your own physical experience, being slightly anorexic,” she writes. Then she quotes from “Dick’s” work:
If I’m not touched it becomes impossible to eat. Intersubjectivity occurs at the moment of orgasm: when things break down. If I’m not touched my skin feels like the flip side of a magnet. It’s only after sex sometimes that I can eat a little. (136)
Later she quotes again from “Dick’s book.”
Anorexia is an active stance. The creation of an involuted body. How to abstract oneself from food fluxes and the mechanical sign of the meal? Synchronicity shudders faster than the speed of light around the world. Distant memories of food: strawberry shortcake, mashed potatoes… (136) “This’s one of the most incredible things I’ve read in years,” she says. (137)
Dick Hebdige hasn’t written a book called Aliens & Anorexia, but Chris Kraus has. And I don’t know if Hebdige is slightly anorexic, but Kraus has written that she is. In Aliens, she WRITES
anorexia is not evasion of a social-gender role; it’s not regression. It is an active stance: the rejection of the cynicism that this culture hands us through its food, the creation of an invo
luted body…Synchronicity shudders faster than the speed of light around the world. Strawberry shortcake, mashed potatoes. (163)
The observations about food fluxes and the “mechanical sign of the meal” are a paraphrase of Deleuze—whom she quotes in Aliens (163). BUT the stuff about intersubjectivity appears to have been written specifically for Dick.
“Intersubjectivity occurs at the moment of orgasm,” Kraus writes IN Aliens, “when things break down.” But intersubjectivity in the text occurs through intertextuality, when distinctions between original and citation become blurred. The lines in Aliens & Anorexia aren’t attributed to “Dick.” Given the context, it’s hard to say who is quoting from whom, BUT MY guess is that Kraus attributes her own language to “Dick” in I Love Dick—and in that way acknowledges what she explicitly states elsewhere in the text. It is through her love for Dick that she begins to write, through her passion for him that she finds her own voice. And in that sense he can be seen as an “author” of her work. But this doubling up of language and self-referentiality is also an elaborate part of the “game”—a reminder that even (or perhaps “especially”) critical texts are unstable, are signifying chains which feed off themselves. Even critical texts can be/should be seen as “fiction.”
ONE OF THE QUESTIONS KRAUS STRUGGLES WITH IS HOW TO RECONCILE WRITING WITH THE IDEA OF A FRAGMENTED SUBJECT. IT’S ONLY IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE BOOK THAT SHE SETTLES INTO THE FIRST PERSON PRONOUN. “For years I tried to write,” she tells Dick in the middle of a long piece on schizophrenia, “but the compromises of my life made it impossible to inhabit a position. And ‘who’ ‘am’ ‘I’? Embracing you & failure’s changed all that ’cause now I know I’m no one. And there’s a lot to say…” (221). RECALLING THE FAILURES OF HER EARLY NOTEBOOKS, SHE CONFESSES TO DICK:
