I Love Dick (29 page)

33. In the blinding sunlight of the Vagabond Motel parking lot you asked me if I'd call again before I left LA. Perhaps we could have dinner. We embraced, and I was first to break away.

34. Sunday, April 9: Writing in my notebook after visiting Ray Johannson in Elysian Park: Bliss.

35. And so I called you up on Monday night. I was booked to leave at 10 p.m. on Tuesday. “The schizophrenic reacts violently when any attempt is made to influence him. This is so because a lack of ego boundaries make it impossible for him to set limits of identification.” (Róheim) The schizophrenic is a sexy Cyborg. When I reached you you were cold, ironic, wondering why I'd called. I hung up sweating. But I couldn't leave like this, I had to try and make it better.

I called you back, apologized, “I—I just felt like I had to ask you why you sounded so distant and defensive.”

“Oh,” you said. “I don't know. Was I defensive? I was just looking for something in my room.”

Visions of you vision of me

Things to do things to see

This's my way to cut it up

You better wait a minute honey

Better add it up

I threw up twice before getting on the plane.

36. Dear Dick,

No woman is an island-ess. We fall in love in hope of anchoring ourselves to someone else, to keep from falling,

Love,
Chris

DICK WRITES BACK

Chris finished writing
Add It Up
before the end of August. The next morning she accidentally cut her right hand on a broken glass. The cut left a bumpy scar. She knew that
Add It Up
would be the last letter.

Chris posted it to Dick after getting back from the hospital. She wanted a response, and fast, because things were finally happening with her film and she'd be travelling, starting in September. Perhaps the only reason Dick had never written back was she'd failed to express her feelings for him forcefully? Surely
Add It Up
would convince him. She waited for his letter, but by Labor Day, Dick still hadn't phoned or written.

Once again her husband, Sylvère Lotringer intervened, phoning Dick and soliciting his compassion. “If nothing else, you must agree that Chris' letters are some new kind of literary form. They're very powerful.” Dick hesitated.

On September 4, Chris went to Toronto to put
Gravity & Grace
through the lab. Stumbling into bed after watching the final answerprint at 5 a.m. a few days later, Chris wrote to Dick: “This is the happiest day of my life.” She never mailed the letter.

She went back briefly to LA before leaving to premiere her film at the Independent Feature Market in New York. Still no word from Dick. Sylvère phoned again and this time Dick promised he'd write Chris a letter.

The Independent Feature Market was a nonstop trial of screenings, meetings, cocktail parties.
Gravity & Grace
wouldn't screen until Day Four. On the first day of the Market, Dick left Chris a message asking her address. He'd like to send his letter via FedEx. The next day Dick left Chris another message, saying that his houseguest had accidentally erased her message. “This time I've instructed him not to touch the answering machine, so if you call back, I promise you, I'll get your message.”

Dick's Fedex arrived before 10 a.m. on the day of Chris' screening. She stuck it in her bag and promised not to read it. But as the taxi rounded Second Avenue, she scrutinized the airbill, changed her mind and ripped it open.

There were two white envelopes inside the package. One was addressed to her; the other to her husband, Sylvère Lotringer. She opened Sylvère's first.

September 19

Dear Sylvère,

Here's the book on altered states and trance that I told you about. Georges Lapassade writes in Italian and French and I suspect this book also available in French. However it hasn't been translated into English. See what you think. The other, more mysterious tract on tarantulism seems to have vanished for now. If and when it turns up I'll send it on.

I apologize for being so resolutely incommunicado and for not following up sooner on this and other matters. I really didn't want to cause either you or Chris unnecessary pain. A large part of the silence and awkwardness between us is undoubtedly attributable to what I still believe to be the unwarranted and uninvited aftermath of your overnight stay at my home at the end of last year when weather reports had indicated you might not be able to make it back to San Bernardino. In retrospect I feel I should have been absolutely unambiguous in my response to the letters you and Kris sent over the following months instead of opting for bemused silence. I can only say that being taken as the object of such obsessive attention on the basis of two genial but not particularly intimate or remarkable meetings spread out over a period of years was, indeed still is, utterly incomprehensible to me. I found the situation initially perplexing, then disturbing and my major regret now is that I didn't find the courage at the time to communicate to you and Kris how uncomfortable I felt being the unwitting object of what you described to me over the phone before Christmas as some kind of bizarre game.

I don't know how our connection stands now that you've both received this package. Friendship, as far as I'm concerned, is a delicate and rare thing that's built up over time and is predicated on mutual trust, mutual respect, reciprocal interests and shared commitments. It's a relation that ultimately is lived out, at least, as if it were chosen not taken for granted or assumed in advance. It's something that has to be renegotiated at every step, not demanded unconditionally. In the circumstances it may be that, for now at least, too much damage has been done on all sides for the kind of negotiated rapprochement that would be needed if we were to restore the trust in which real friendship thrives. That said, I still have immense respect for your work; I still enjoy your company and conversation when we meet and believe, as you do, that Kris has talent as a writer. I can only reiterate what I have said before whenever the topic has been raised in conversation with you or Chris: that I do not share your conviction that my right to privacy has to be sacrificed for the sake of that talent.

Regards,
Dick

A strange coincidence. Sylvère already was familiar with Georges Lapassade (the name means “fling” in French argot). In fact, Sylvère knew Lapassade very well. In Paris, 1957 trance-master Lapassade was at the Sorbonne, practicing an early form of psychodrama. Among the puzzled volunteers was a first-year student by the name of Sylvère Lotringer, who was waiting to leave school the following year with the French
mouvement
to lead a Zionist kibbutz in Israel. Georges Lapassade was fascinated by this ambitious youth who had no personal ambition.

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 read 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.”