by Chris Kraus
Do married couples usually collaborate on billets doux? If Sylvère and Chris were not so militantly opposed to psychoanalysis, they might’ve seen this as a turning point.
EXHIBIT A: CHRIS AND SYLVÈRE’S FIRST LETTERS
Crestline, California
December 9, 1994
Dear Dick,
It must be the desert wind that went to our heads that night or maybe the desire to fictionalize life a little bit. I don’t know. We’ve met a few times and I’ve felt a lot of sympathy towards you and a desire to be closer. Though we come from different places, we’ve both tried breaking up with our pasts. You’re a cowboy; for ten years, I was a nomad in New York.
So let’s go back to the evening at your house: the glorious ride in your Thunderbird from Pasadena to the End of the World, I mean the Antelope Valley. It’s a meeting we postponed almost a year. And truer than I imagined. But how did I get into that?
I want to talk about that evening at your house. I had a feeling that somehow I knew you and we could just be what we are together. But now I’m sounding like the bimbo whose voice we heard, unwittingly, that night on your answerphone…
Sylvère
Crestline, California
December 9, 1994
Dear Dick,
Since Sylvère wrote the first letter, I’m thrown into this weird position. Reactive—like Charlotte Stant to Sylvère’s Maggie Verver, if we were living in the Henry James novel The Golden Bowl—the Dumb Cunt, a factory of emotions evoked by all the men. So the only thing that I can do is tell The Dumb Cunt’s Tale. But how?
Sylvère thinks it’s nothing more than a perverse longing for rejection, the love I feel for you. But I disagree, at bottom I’m a very romantic girl. What touched me were all the windows of vulnerability in your house…so Spartan and self-conscious. The propped up Some Girls album cover, the dusky walls—how out of date and déclassé. But I’m a sucker for despair, for faltering—that moment when the act breaks down, ambition fails. I love it and feel guilty for perceiving it and then the warmest indescribable affection floods in to drown the guilt. For years I adored Shake Murphy in New Zealand for these reasons, a hopeless case. But you’re not exactly hopeless: you have a reputation, self-awareness and a job, and so it occurred to me that there might be something to be learned by both of us from playing out this romance in a mutually self-conscious way. Abstract romanticism?
It’s weird, I never really wondered whether I’m ‘your type.’ (’Cause in the past, Empirical Romance, since I’m not pretty or maternal, I never am the type for Cowboy Guys.) But maybe action’s all that really matters now. What people do together overshadows Who They Are. If I can’t make you fall in love with me for who I am, maybe I can interest you with what I understand. So instead of wondering ‘Would he like me?’, I wonder ‘Is he game?’
When you called on Sunday night, I was writing a description of your face. I couldn’t talk, and hung up on the bottom end of the romantic equation with beating heart and sweaty palms. It’s incredible to feel this way. For 10 years my life’s been organized around avoiding this painful elemental state. I wish that I could dabble like you do around romantic myths. But I can’t, because I always lose and already in the course of this three-day totally fictitious romance, I’ve started getting sick. And I wonder if there’ll ever be a possibility of reconciling youth and age, or the anorexic open wound I used to be with the money-hustling hag that I’ve become. We suicide ourselves for our own survival. Is there any hope of dipping back into the past and circling round it like you can in art?
Sylvère, who’s typing this, says this letter lacks a point. What reaction am I looking for? He thinks this letter is too literary, too Baudrillardian. He says I’m squashing out all the trembly little things he found so touching. It’s not the Dumb Cunt Exegesis he expected. But Dick, I know that as you read this, you’ll know these things are true. You understand the game is real, or even better than, reality, and better than is what it’s all about. What sex is better than drugs, what art is better than sex? Better than means stepping out into complete intensity. Being in love with you, being ready to take this ride, made me feel 16, hunched up in a leather jacket in a corner with my friends. A timeless fucking image. It’s about not giving a fuck, or seeing all the consequences looming and doing something anyway. And I think you—I—keep looking for that and it’s thrilling when you find it in other people.
Sylvère thinks he’s that kind of anarchist. But he’s not. I love you Dick.
Chris
But after finishing these, Chris and Sylvère both felt they could do better. That there were things still left to say. So they began a second round, spending most of Friday sitting on their living room floor in Crestline passing the laptop back and forth. And they each wrote a second letter, Sylvère about jealousy, Chris about the Ramones and the Kierkegaardian third remove. “Maybe I’d like to be like you,” Sylvère wrote, “living all alone in a house surrounded by a cemetery. I mean, why not take the shortcut? So I got really involved in the fantasy, erotically too, because desire radiates, even if it is not directed towards you, and it has an energy and beauty, and I think I was turned on to Chris being turned on to you. After awhile it became difficult to remember that nothing really happened. I guess in some dark corner of my mind I realized if I wasn’t going to be jealous, my only choice was to enter this fictional liaison in a sort of perverse fashion. How else could I take my wife having a crush on you? The thoughts that come to mind are pretty distasteful: ménage à trois, the willing husband…all three of us are too sophisticated to deal in such dreary archetypes. Were we trying to open up new ground? Your cowboy persona meshed so well with the dreams Chris has of the torn and silent desperate men she’s been rejected by. The fact that you don’t return messages turns your answerphone into a blank screen onto which we can project our fantasies. So in a sense I did encourage Chris, because thanks to you, she’s been reminded of a bigger picture, the way she was last month after visiting Guatemala, and we’re all potentially bigger people than we are. There’s so much we haven’t talked about. But maybe that’s just the way to become closer friends. To share thoughts that may not be shared…”
Chris’ second letter was less noble. She started off by rhapsodizing once again about Dick’s face: “I started looking at your face that night in the restaurant—oh wow, isn’t that like the first line in the Ramones song, Needles & Pins? ‘I saw your face/It was the face I loved/And I knew’—and I got the same feeling from it that I get every-time I hear that song, and when you called my heart was pounding and then I thought that maybe we could do something together, something that is to adolescent romance what the Ramone’s cover of the song is to the original. The Ramones give Needles & Pins the possibility of irony, but the irony doesn’t undercut the song’s emotion, it makes it stronger and more true. Søren Kierkegaard called this “the Third Remove.” In his book The Crisis In The Life Of An Actress, he claims no actress can play 14-year-old Juliette until she’s at least 32. Because acting’s art, and art involves reaching through some distance. Playing the vibrations between here and there and then and now. And don’t you think reality is best attained through dialectics? PS, Your face is mobile, craggy, beautiful…”
By the time Sylvère and Chris finish their second letters, it’s the end of the afternoon. Lake Gregory shimmers in the distance, ringed by snowy mountains. The landscape’s fiery and distant. For now both of them are satisfied. Memories of domesticity when Chris was young, 20 years before: a China eggcup and a teacup, painted people circling around it, blue and white. A bluebird at the bottom of the cup, seen through amber tea. All the prettiness in the world contained in these two objects. When Chris and Sylvère put away the Toshiba laptop it’s already dark. She fixes dinner. He returns to working on his book.
EXHIBIT B: HYSTERIA
PART 1. SYLVÈRE FLIPS OUT
Crestline, California
December 10, 1994
Dear Dick,
“Dear Dick, l am taking Sylvère to the airport Wednesday morning. I need to talk to you. Can we meet at your place?”
Love,
Chris
I thought it was a brilliant coup: a piece of reality shattering this twisted hotbed of emotions. Because after all, our letters were so self directed, marriage a deux. Actually that’s the title I thought of for this piece before I went to sleep and I wanted to communicate it to Chris as soon as she woke up. But it had the opposite effect. After last night’s brainstorming, she’d somehow put aside her infatuation with you. She was back on the safe side—marriage, art, the family—but my concern reignited her obsession and suddenly we were thrown back into the reality of unreality, the challenge at the bottom of it all. Outwardly it has to do with Chris’ apprehension about turning 40, or so she says. I’m afraid my letters have been too high-minded and patronizing. Anyway, let me try again—
Sylvère
California scrubjays screeched outside the master bedroom. Sylvère sat propped against two pillows, typing, looking out through the glass doors across the deck. No matter how many times they tried to change it, so long as he and Chris slept together their days rarely started before noon. While Chris still dozed, Sylvère would make the first coffee of the day and carry it back to the bedroom. Then Chris would tell Sylvère her dreams, and after that her feelings, and Sylvère would be the best, most subtle and associative listener she’d ever find. Then Sylvère would go to make the toast and second coffees. As the caffeine hit, the conversation shifted, became more general, ranging over everything and everyone they knew. They dug each other’s references and felt smarter in each other’s presence. Sylvère and Chris were among the five most well-read people they each knew, and this a constant miracle, since neither of them had been to good schools. She felt so peaceful with him. Sylvère, Sylvalium, accepted her so totally and she took little sips of coffee to clear her head of morning dreams.
Sylvère never dreamed and rarely knew what he was feeling. So they played a game sometimes that they’d devised to tease his feelings out: Objective Correlative. Who was Sylvère’s metonymic mirror? A student at the art school? Their dog? The Dart Canyon Storage man?
Fully awake around 11, the conversation usually peaked with a passionate discussion of checks and bills. So long as Chris continued making independent films they’d always be juggling money, thousands here and thousands there. Chris spent time buying or acquiring long-term leases to three apartments and two houses which they kept rented at a profit while holing up in rural slums. She kept Sylvère apprised of the status of their mortgages, taxes, rental income and repair bills. And luckily, beyond this primitive foray into acquisition, with Chris’ help Sylvère’s career was becoming lucrative enough to offset the losses incurred by hers. Chris, a diehard feminist who often saw herself as spinning on a great Elizabethan Wheel of Fortune, smiled to think that in order to continue making work she would have to be supported by her husband. “Who’s independent?” Isabelle Huppert’s pimp demanded, spanking her in the backseat of a car in Sauve Qui Peut. “The maid? The bureaucrat? The banker? No!” Yeah. In late capitalism, was anyone truly free? Sylvère’s fans were mostly young white men drawn to the more “transgressive” elements of modernism, heroic sciences of human sacrifice and torture as legitimized by Georges Bataille. They scotch-taped xeroxes of the famous “Torture of a Hundred Pieces” photo from Bataille’s Tears of Eros to their notebooks—a regicide captured on gelatin-plate film by French anthropologists in China in 1902. The Bataille Boys saw beatitude in the victim’s agonized expression as the executioner sawed off his last remaining limb. But even more inexcusably, they were often rude to Chris. Going out to Exchange Ideas with Sylvère Lotringer in bars after his lectures in Paris, Berlin and Montreal, the Boys resented any barrier (especially a wife, and an unseductive one at that) between themselves and the great man. Chris responded by milking money from Sylvère’s growing reputation, setting ever-higher fees. Would the German money and the $2,000 from Vienna be enough to pay her lab bill in Toronto? No. They’d better hit up Dieter for per diem. Et cetera. Around noon, after Coffee Number 3, too buzzed to think about anything but money, they hit the phone.
Dick’s presence in their lives was a vacation from this kind of scheming. It was a foray into scheming of another kind. That Saturday when they drank their morning coffee they were already planning a second round of letters, juggling Sylvère’s laptop between toast and coffee mugs. Sylvère, a great reviser, didn’t like the sound of his first letter. And so he wrote:
Crestline, California
December 10, 1994
Dear Dick,
Last night I fell asleep thinking of a great title for our piece:
Ménage à Deux. But when I woke up it seemed too conclusive and too lame. Have Chris and I spent this past week in turmoil just to turn our lives into a text? While making coffee I came up with the perfect solution, a way of instantly reshuffling the cards. Because Dick, Chris and I have been debating whether we should send the letters that we wrote to you last night. It’s a crazy distillation of our mental state and you, poor Dick, do not deserve to be exposed to such a masturbatory passion. I imagine our 14 pages emerging line by line from your deserted fax. To even consider sending them was crazy. These letters weren’t meant for you; they were a dialectical resolution of a crisis that never was. So that’s why I thought of sending you this terse injunction:
Dear Dick, I’m taking Sylvère to the airport Wednesday morning. I need to talk to you.
Love,
Chris
What are you going to do with that? Probably not answer!
Sylvère
All his life since age 19, Sylvère Lotringer had wanted to be a writer. Carrying a huge tape recorder on the back of his Vespa motorscooter around the British Isles, he’d made interviews in faulty English with all the literary greats—T.S. Eliot, Vita Sackville-West and Brendan Behan—for a French communist literary magazine. He was away from his Holocaust survivor family on the scabby rue des Poissonières for the first time and this was freedom. Two years later, studying at the Sorbonne with Roland Barthes, he wrote an essay on The Function of Narrative Throughout History. This was published in a prestigious literary magazine called Critique. The rest was history. His. He became a specialist of narrative, not a creator of it. Because the French draft for the Algerian war was on, he started trundling between teaching jobs in Turkey and Australia and finally America. Now 40 years later he was writing about Antonin Artaud, trying to find some link between Artaud’s madness and the madness of World War 2. In all these years Sylvère’d never written, really, anything he loved or anything about the War (same thing). And he remembered how David Rattray’d said once about Antonin Artaud: “It’s like the rediscovery of the truths of Gnosticism, the notion that this universe is crazy…” Well Artaud was plenty crazy and so was David. And maybe now instead of just being unhappy Sylvère could be crazy too? So he continued:
“That night with you, we caught the Western bug. Your bug. I mean, Chris and I are sensible people. We don’t do anything without a reason. So you must be responsible. I have the feeling you’ve been watching all these days with a John Wayne grin, manipulating us from a distance. I really resent that part of you, Dick. Intruding on our lives. I mean before that night Chris and I had a good thing going. Perhaps not passionate but comfortable. We could have gone on like that forever and then you came, the rambling man, with all these expatriate philosophies that we’ve outgrown ourselves over the past 20 years. This is really not our problem, Dick. You’re leading a ghost town life, infecting everyone who comes near you with a ghost disease. Take it back, Dick. We don’t need it. Here’s another fax I thought of:
Dear Dick, Why did you do this to us?
Can’t you leave us alone?
You’re
invading our lives—why?
I demand an explanation.
Love,
Sylvère
Were these letters sendable? Chris said yes, Sylvère said no. If not, why write them? Sylvère suggested writing until Dick returned their calls. Okay, she thought, believing in telepathy. But Sylvère, not in love but enjoying the collaboration, understood they might be writing him forever.
Crestline, California
December 10, 1994
Dear Dick,
Come to think of it, why’d you even call us Sunday night? The night after our ‘date’ with you in Antelope Valley. You were supposed to be this cool guy smoking a cigarette behind his bedroom door on Sunday morning, just waiting for us to clear out. It would’ve been totally in character not to call. So why did you call? Because you really wanted it to continue, right? You came up with this lame excuse about going to get breakfast—at 7:30 in the morning in this tiny town where the grocery store is 3 minutes away? It took you three hours, Dick, to get that fucking breakfast. So where’d you go? Did you sneak out to meet the bimbo girl who left her abject message on your answering machine? Can’t you spend a single night alone? Or were you already fighting the invasion of your mental universe by this couple of cynical rapacious libertines? Were you trying to defend yourself; or was it a trap you set, tightening it the following night with your apparently innocent call? Actually, that night I picked up the receiver for a moment and heard your voice. Such a small voice, too, for such enormous stakes. You’ve been holding our destiny in your hands for the last few days. No wonder Chris didn’t know what to say. So what’s your game, Dick? You’ve gone too far into it to keep hiding in the distance, biting your nails and listening to Some Girls or some other girls. You have to deal with what you’ve created. Dick, you have to respond to the following fax: