I Love Dick
Page 1
CHRIS KRAUS is the author of the novels Aliens and Anorexia, I Love Dick, and Summer of Hate as well as Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness and Where Art Belongs. A Professor of Writing at the European Graduate School, she writes for various magazines and lives in Los Angeles.
PRAISE FOR I LOVE DICK
“I know there was a time before I read Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick (in fact, that time was only five years ago), but it’s hard to imagine; some works of art do this to you. They tear down so many assumptions about what the form can handle (in this case, what the form of the novel can handle) that there is no way to re-create your mind before your encounter with them”
—Sheila Heti, The Believer
“For years before I read it, I kept hearing about Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick. I mainly heard about it from smart women who liked to talk about their feelings…Then I read it. I was nearly two decades late to the party—I Love Dick came out in 1997—but I loved the party anyway. I was finally part of it, and it made me feel even more part of it—part of something—to have men making asinine comments on the 4 train, pointing at the cover: Good to know what you like! I knew I was holding white-hot text in my hands, written by a woman who had theorized what these guys were doing—with me, with their dick jokes—even before they’d done it. I Love Dick is a ‘novel’ about a woman named Chris Kraus and her unrequited, increasingly obsessive love for a cultural critic named Dick. (What I could have told those men on the subway: See? Dick is actually a cultural critic!) Kraus keeps writing to Dick, keeps calling Dick, even makes her husband a collaborator in her pursuit of Dick, and all the while keeps getting rebuffed by him. She brings us deep into the folds of her relentless pursuit—‘marching boldly into self-abasement,’ in the words of her friend, the poet Eileen Myles. She gives us female desire without shame or passivity, and follows abjection ‘into something bright and exalted, like presence’”
—Leslie Jamison, The New Yorker
“Kraus’s I Love Dick is a written in a clear prose capable of theoretical clarity, descriptive delicacy, articulate rage and melancholic longing”
—The White Review
“[I Love Dick] changed my life… It explained the problem of heterosexuality to me in terms that I had never thought about before. I had been attracted to books by and about gay people or at least people with fluid sexuality for a long time, and had not spent much time thinking about why that was. Worlds without straight men appealed to me; I liked the idea that there could be narratives that didn’t operate on the presumption of women’s dependence on men for love, money, and support. I Love Dick was the first work of fiction I’d ever read that acknowledged that women who were attracted to men and wanted to have relationships with them were not going to somehow create relationships that existed outside of all existing economic and social structures; that women who love men are going to have to come to terms with their complicity in their own repression and subjugation, and find ways to address it. This is not all the book’s about, of course, but that was my first and most lasting takeaway”
—Emily Gould, n+1
“I Love Dick detonated something in me, but it’s been a slow demolition. With each quiet, contained blast I grow more sure that by recognizing our own billboards of desire and failure, and perhaps even finding some dignity there, we are also moving the culture towards the ‘subversive utopia’ that so many women, artists or not, hoped and hope for”
—Stephanie Wong, The Rumpus
“An exploration of desire as something other than passivity or inadequacy and relentless romantic pursuit not as self-degradation but a kind of generative, creative act. Kraus is interested in the dynamics of exposure itself: why we judge acts of self-exposure as self-absorbed or needy, especially if they come from a woman; how any trace of the self can become a kind of shameful stink, the whiff of some failure of imagination or, worse yet, self-pity or self-aggrandizement”
—New York Times
“Chris Kraus’ first novel, I Love Dick, reads like Madame Bovary as if Emma had written it. Kraus spins out the Emma-syndrome of dissatisfied feminine boredom through a chronicle of the ’80s art world. Her book is a damningly intelligent form of ‘confessional’ literature, part love letter and part public document”
—Artnet
“Reading I Love Dick made me laugh—cry—but most importantly it made me think about all the important issues of our time, DESIRE, AGING—Dick is a mere backdrop for this provocative meditation—it’s edgy and deep”
—bell hooks, author of All About Love: New Visions
“Tart, brazen and funny… a cautionary tale, I Love Dick raises disturbing but compelling questions about female social behavior, power, control”
—Nation
“I Love Dick is never a comfortable read, and it is by turns exasperating, horrifying, and lurid, but it is never less than genuine, and often completely illuminating about the life of the mind”
—Rick Moody
ALSO BY CHRIS KRAUS
Aliens & Anorexia
Torpor
Summer of Hate
Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness
Where Art Belongs
I
LOVE
DICK
CHRIS KRAUS
First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Tuskar Rock Press,
an imprint of Profile Books Ltd
3 Holford Yard
Bevin Way
London
WC1X 9HD
First published in 1997 by Semiotext(e), Los Angeles, CA
Copyright © 1997, 2006 by Chris Kraus
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, dead or alive, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
A CIP record for this book can be obtained from the British Library
eISBN 978 1 78283 254 6
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I want to thank the following people who helped with their encouragement and conversation: Romy Ashby, Jim Fletcher, Carol Irving, John Kelsey, Ann Rower and Yvonne Shafir.
Thanks also to Eryk Kvam for legal counsel, Catherine Brennan, Justin Cavin and Andrew Berardini for proofreading and fact-checking, editors Ken Jordan and Jim Fletcher, Marsie Scharlatt for insights and information on the misdiagnosis of schizophrenia; and Sylvère Lotringer as always for everything.
CONTENTS
PART 1 SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE
PART 2 EVERY LETTER IS A LOVE LETTER
ROUTE 126
THE EXEGESIS
KIKE ART
SYLVÈRE AND CHRIS WRITE IN THEIR DIARIES
MONSTERS
ADD IT UP
DICK WRITES BACK
AFTERWORD BY JOAN HAWKINS
PART 1: SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE
SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE
December 3, 1994
Chris Kraus, a 39-year-old experimental filmmaker and Sylvère Lotringer, a 56-year-old college professor from New York, have dinner with Dick ——, a friendly acquaintance of Sylvère’s, at a sushi bar in Pasadena. Dick is an English cultural critic who’s recently relocated from Melbourne to Los Angeles. Chris and Sylvère have spent Sylvère’s sabbatical at a cabin in Crestline, a small town in the San Bernardino Mountains some 90 minutes from Los Angeles. Since Sylvère begins teaching again in January, they w
ill soon be returning to New York. Over dinner the two men discuss recent trends in postmodern critical theory and Chris, who is no intellectual, notices Dick making continual eye contact with her. Dick’s attention makes her feel powerful, and when the check comes she takes out her Diners Club card. “Please,” she says. “Let me pay.” The radio predicts snow on the San Bernardino highway. Dick generously invites them both to spend the night at his home in the Antelope Valley desert, some 30 miles away.
Chris wants to separate herself from her coupleness, so she sells Sylvère on the thrill of riding in Dick’s magnificent vintage Thunderbird convertible. Sylvère, who doesn’t know a T-bird from a hummingbird and doesn’t care, agrees, bemused. Done. Dick gives her copious, concerned directions. “Don’t worry,” she interrupts, flashing hair and smiles, “I’ll tail you.” And she does. Slightly buzzed and keeping the accelerator of her pickup truck steady, she’s reminded of a performance she did called Car Chase at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project in New York when she was 23. She and her friend Liza Martin had tailed the steelily good-looking driver of a Porsche all the way through Connecticut on Highway 95. Finally he’d pulled over to a rest stop, but when Liza and Chris got out he drove off. The performance ended with Liza accidentally-but-really stabbing Chris’ hand onstage with a kitchen knife. Blood flowed, and everyone found Liza dazzlingly sexy and dangerous and beautiful. Liza, belly popping out of a fuzzy midriff top, fish-net legs tearing up against her green vinyl miniskirt as she rocked back to show her crotch, looked like the cheapest kind of whore. A star is born. No one at the show that night had found Chris’ pale anemic looks and piercing gaze remotely endearing. Could anyone? It was a question that’d temporarily been shelved. But now it was a whole new world. The request line on 92.3 The Beat was thumping, Post-Riot Los Angeles, a city strung on fiber optic nerves. Dick’s Thunderbird was always somewhere in her line of sight, the two vehicles strung invisibly together across the concrete riverbed of highway, like John Donne’s eyeballs. And this time Chris was alone.
Back at Dick’s, the night unfolds like the boozy Christmas Eve in Eric Rohmer’s film My Night At Maud’s. Chris notices that Dick is flirting with her, his vast intelligence straining beyond the po-mo rhetoric and words to evince some essential loneliness that only she and he can share. Chris giddily responds. At 2 a.m., Dick plays them a video of himself dressed as Johnny Cash commissioned by English public television. He’s talking about earthquakes and upheaval and his restless longing for a place called home. Chris’ response to Dick’s video, though she does not articulate it at the time, is complex. As an artist she finds Dick’s work hopelessly naive, yet she is a lover of certain kinds of bad art, art which offers a transparency into the hopes and desires of the person who made it. Bad art makes the viewer much more active. (Years later Chris would realize that her fondness for bad art is exactly like Jane Eyre’s attraction to Rochester, a mean horse-faced junky: bad characters invite invention.) But Chris keeps these thoughts to herself. Because she does not express herself in theoretical language, no one expects too much from her and she is used to tripping out on layers of complexity in total silence. Chris’ unarticulated double-flip on Dick’s video draws her even closer to him. She dreams about him all night long. But when Chris and Sylvère wake up on the sofabed the next morning, Dick is gone.
December 4, 1994: 10 a.m.
Sylvère and Chris leave Dick’s house, reluctantly, alone that morning. Chris rises to the challenge of extemporizing the Thank You Note, which must be left behind. She and Sylvère have breakfast at the Antelope IHOP. Because they are no longer having sex, the two maintain their intimacy via deconstruction: i.e., they tell each other everything. Chris tells Sylvère how she believes that she and Dick have just experienced a Conceptual Fuck. His disappearance in the morning clinches it, and invests it 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. She recites a poem by Barbara Barg on this subject to Sylvère:
What do you do with a Kerouac
But go back and back to the sack
with Jack
How do you know when Jack
has come?
You look on your pillow and
Jack is gone…
And then there was the message on Dick’s answerphone. When they came into the house, Dick took his coat off, poured them drinks and hit the Play button. The voice of a very young, very Californian woman came on:
Hi Dick, this’s Kyla. Dick, I—I’m sorry to keep calling you at home, and now I’ve got your answering machine and, and I just wanted to say I’m sorry how things didn’t work out the other night, and—I know it’s not your fault, but I guess all I really wanted was just to thank you for being such a nice person…
“Now I’m totally embarrassed,” Dick mumbled charmingly, opening the vodka. Dick is 46 years old. Does this message mean he’s lost? And, if Dick is lost, could he be saved by entering a conceptual romance with Chris? Was the conceptual fuck merely the first step? For the next few hours, Sylvère and Chris discuss this.
December 4, 1994: 8 p.m.
Back in Crestline, Chris can’t stop thinking about last night with Dick. So she starts to write a story about it, called Abstract Romanticism. It’s the first story she’s written in five years.
“It started in the restaurant,” she begins. “It was the beginning of the evening and we were all laughing a bit too much.”
She addresses this story, intermittently, to David Rattray because she’s convinced that David’s ghost had been with her last night for the car ride, pushing her pickup truck further all the way up Highway 5. Chris, David’s ghost and the truck had merged into a single unit moving forward.
“Last night I felt,” she wrote to David’s ghost, “like I do at times when things seem to open onto new vistas of excitement—that you were here: floating dense beside me, set someplace between my left ear and my shoulder, compressed like thought.”
She thought about David all the time. It was uncanny how Dick had said somewhere in last night’s boozy conversation, as if he’d read her mind, how much he admired David’s book. David Rattray had been a reckless adventurer and a genius and a moralist, indulging in the most improbable infatuations nearly until the moment of his death at age 57. And now Chris felt David’s ghost pushing her to understand infatuation, how the loved person can become a holding pattern for all the tattered ends of memory, experience and thought you’ve ever had. So she started to describe Dick’s face, “pale and mobile, good bones, reddish hair and deepset eyes.” Writing, Chris held his face in her mind, and then the telephone rang and it was Dick.
Chris was so embarrassed. She wondered if the call was really for Sylvère, but Dick didn’t ask for him, so she stayed on the scratchy line. Dick was phoning to explain his disappearance the night before. He’d gotten up early and drove out to Pear Blossom to pick up some eggs and bacon. “I’m a bit of an insomniac, you know.” When he’d gotten home to Antelope Valley he was genuinely surprised to find them gone.
At this moment, Chris could’ve told Dick her own farfetched interpretation: had she, this story would’ve taken another turn. But there was so much static on the line, and already she was afraid of him. She feverishly considered proposing another meeting, but she didn’t, and then Dick got off the phone. Chris stood in her makeshift office, sweating. Then she ran upstairs to find Sylvère.
December 5, 1994
Alone in Crestline, Sylvère and Chris spent most of last night (Sunday) and this morning (Monday) talking about Dick’s 3 minute call. Why does Sylvère entertain this? It could be that for the first time since last summer, Chris seems animated and alive, and since he loves her, Sylvère can’t bear to see her sad. It could be he’s reached an impasse with the book he’s writing on modernism and the holocaust, and dreads returning next month to his teaching job. It could be that he’s perverse.
December 6–8, 1994
/> Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday of this week pass unrecorded, blurred. If memory serves, Tuesday that term was the day that Chris Kraus and Sylvère Lotringer spent in Pasadena, teaching at Art Center College of Design. Shall we attempt a reconstruction? They get up at 8, drive down the hill from Crestline, grab coffee in San Bernardino, hop on the 215 to the 10 and drive for 90 minutes, hitting LA just after traffic. It’s likely they talked about Dick for most of the ride. However, since they planned to move out of Crestline in just 10 days, on December 14 (Sylvère to Paris for the holidays, Chris to New York), they must’ve also briefly talked logistics. A Restless Longing…driving through Fontana and Pomona, through a landscape that meant nothing, with an inconclusive future looming. While Sylvère lectured on poststructuralism, Chris drove out to Hollywood to pick up some publicity photos for her film and shopped for cheese at Trader Joe’s. Then they drove back out to Crestline, winding up the mountain through darkness and thick fog.
Wednesday and Thursday disappear. It’s obvious that Chris’ new film isn’t going to go very far. What will she do next? Her first experience in art had been as a participant in some druggy psychodramas of the ’70s. The idea that Dick may’ve proposed a kind of game between them is incredibly exciting. She explains it over and over to Sylvère. She begs Sylvère to phone him, fish around for some sign that Dick’s aware of her. And if there is, she’ll call.
Friday, December 9, 1994
Sylvère, a European intellectual who teaches Proust, is skilled in the analysis of love’s minutiae. But how long can anyone continue analyzing a single evening and a 3-minute call? Already, Sylvère’s left two unanswered messages on Dick’s answerphone. And Chris has turned into a jumpy bundle of emotions, sexually aroused for the first time in seven years. So on Friday morning, Sylvère finally suggests that Chris write Dick a letter. Since she’s embarrassed she asks him if he wants to write one too. Sylvère agrees.