Reading the book I Love Dick by Chris Kraus without knowing its background, taking it as a complete work of fiction is no problem. A French critical theorist named Sylvere for a husband who studied with Roland Barthes? Actually, this sounds more like a fantasy than fiction. But given that it is real, I’m sure this kind of person becomes insufferable. So I can understand why the narrator, an American experimental filmmaker who has just spent several years pouring her energy into a failed project (a film named for the French philosopher Simone Weil), starts to find this guy insufferable and becomes obsessed with Dick. Sadly, he turns out to be a huge asshole.
But as hard to take as Sylvere probably was, the novel kind of falls apart without his energy. The section titled “Scenes from a Marriage” is the most touching, and the scene of a couple feeding into each other’s creative impulses is a dreamy fantasy. “Marriage is madness doubled,” Anne Carson wrote in The Beauty of the Husband, and that’s what we can see in this intensely creative coupling, but once they break up, the energy dissipates, the story becomes entropic, and what we get is just a bunch of essay-like musings about the post-war American art scene, injected with vitality because of GI Bill stipends, brutal Guatemalan union busting, critical theory, schizophrenia. Probably this would be a much more interesting section if Dick would just answer the letters written to him by the narrator!
Actually, the whole book kind of reminds me of a less heavy version of Qiu Miaojin’s Letters from Montmartre with its absent protagonist and extended reflections on theory, art, film, and relationships. The lightness is important; without the distance that lightness creates, the effect would be way too adolescent, which is the main problem with Qiu’s novel, or with Violette LeDuc’s writing. They are too caught up in their subjectivity, too in love with the reflection of their pain. But people and artists like these are generally very kind, thoughtful, and fun. It’s just their art is where all the heaviness gets channeled into. If a work is too light, what does that say about the writer?
Madame Bovary is necessary to the text, as the main characters figure themselves as Emma and Charles. Emma got drowned in debt. Chris, the narrator, manages her finances carefully, or rather, outlines them clearly. She doesn’t obscure them like the people you meet, who make their living situation a confusing farce, and whose lifestyle comes at the expense of their wealthy family or their overwhelming debt. She tells the reader everything about how she supports herself and her career. She’s writing of herself as an artist, but if she failed, and failed for good, she would simply be a landlady. Luce Irigaray is never mentioned explicitly, but her concept of “hommeosexuality,” the use of women as a means for men’s communication and partnership, informs our understanding of the relationship between Dick and Sylvere. But Dick isn’t really necessary as a person, he’s only necessary as a fetish, a religious item which inspires.
This book is so heavy in references that I don’t think it’s possible to be familiar with all of them, but at the same time, it can be taken as a light read because the author explains her ideas and positions very clearly, and while a theoretical background could augment the text, it’s not necessary to enjoy it. And this all from someone self-taught. Passion drives the narrative, and the writer dictates her own terms of enjoyment, from her writing, art, relationships.
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