The Idle Book Club 20: I Love Dick

[Argobot]

The Idle Book Club 20:

I Love Dick
Chris Kraus' I Love Dick is an experimental novel that blurs the line between fiction and memoir. In the years since its release, it has experienced a resurgence of popularity culminating in a recent Amazon TV adaptation. Join Sarah and Chris as they discuss whether they...loved it.

I Love Dick by Chris Kraus

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[marginalgloss]

I had a couple of misconceptions about ‘I Love Dick’: firstly, I really thought this was a book written and published in the last few years, since I’d seen it mentioned so frequently in glowing terms online; and secondly, I thought it was entirely a work of fiction. Neither of these are true, but I wasn’t corrected until I finally started googling the book about a third of the way through it. I confess that I was amazed to find that the book is actually a collection of ‘real’ documents edited from life, and that it's basically earnest in its intentions throughout. There is a version of this book that could exist as a comic novel about the intersection of academia and the real world, but this isn’t it. 

 

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It’s a funny book, but it’s a very dry kind of funny. I was not always sure that I was laughing for the right reasons. For example, when Chris writes: ‘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.’ — those two lines could have come out of a Jonathan Franzen story about the peccadilloes of a troubled pair of academics in some sleepy midwestern university town. And in fact the early passages of the book feel the most akin to a conventional novel, perhaps because they necessarily had to be written in retrospect after the rest of the book was finished.  

But of course Chris is nothing if not serious about her project. This brings a kind of dark queasiness to the humour that I associate with Nabokov’s later novels, especially 'Lolita' and 'Pale Fire'. I’m thinking not so much of his style, but of that alienated sense of the American landscape you get in those books. As with Charles Kinbote in 'Pale Fire', an academic who is irrationally obsessed with a local poet, Chris and Sylvere become so totally isolated from conventional means of expression that they take refuge in a singularly intense format. They communicate in a sort of coded language of obsessive referentiality. They seem entirely aware of their feelings in the modern sense, but instead of taking those feelings and putting them into life, or putting them into conventional art, they put them into a third thing: a sort of poetic methodology. It’s as though ‘I Love Dick’ was not a work in itself, but a set of notes towards a potential work that may or may not ever be created. It’s a familiar approach to me; when I did my BA in creative writing, the development and documentation of a ‘methodology’ that accompanied any given assignment of work was highly valued by the professors, while the idea that writing should only be the product of personal inspiration was derided by comparison. But the risk is that the methodology — the ideas and the work behind the work — becomes more interesting than the work itself. 

Is this the case with I Love Dick? I’m not sure. There’s some great moments here, and I highlighted dozens of passages, but there’s a mania for citation that I found distracting. It probably doesn’t help that I have a deep aversion to critical theory, but the text is peppered with references in a way that suggests a desperate craving for authority, power, recognition. An interesting example is the way in which Chris and Sylvere sometimes compare themselves to Emma and Charles Bovary, as if that were a way of validating the arc of their relationship in a way that makes it somehow more worthwhile. I’m not sure the comparison holds up — but why let that get in the way of a fun letter?

Elsewhere, I’m not sure the comparisons are quite so harmless. I was particularly troubled by the constant invocation of ‘schizophrenia’ as if it were just another term borrowed from critical theory. This kind of thing, for example: 

‘I want to write to you about schizophrenia…even though I haven’t got a wooden leg to stand on in relation to this subject, having never studied it or experienced it firsthand. But I’m using you to create a certain schizophrenic atmosphere, OR, love is schizophrenia, OR, I felt a schizophrenic trigger in our confluence of interests—who’s crazier than who? Schizophrenia’s a state that I’ve been drawn to like a faghag since age 16…’

‘Schizophrenics aren’t sunk into themselves. Associatively, they’re hyperactive. The world gets creamy like a library. And schizophrenics are the most generous of scholars because they’re emotionally right there, they don’t just formulate, observe. They’re willing to become the situated person’s expectations…’

This feels like careless misappropriation. It reads like parading one’s own ignorance in service of something else — passion, I suppose? As an act of memoir, it’s certainly daring, but as part of the wider methodology, it adds little to our understanding of that passion. The best you could say of it is that the author’s feelings lead her towards saying some incredible and egregious things. Perhaps the most objectionable example of all these things comes when Chris tries to draw out a comparison between her love of Dick and the case of Jennifer Harbury in Guatemala. It’s a really interesting and important true story, but the idea that Harbury’s hunger strikes and years of political struggle could have anything to do with the author’s temporary romantic preoccupations is absurd.

It’s comparisons like this which make Chris — by which I mean ‘Chris’ the persona on show here, not the author herself — something of an unlikeable figure. It’s hard in a post-2008 world to read the casual way she brags about using Sylvere’s investments to juggle buying and renting houses across the country to tenants she never sees, and for whom she seems to have total contempt. I can only assume passages like this are meant to express a breezy contempt for worldly concerns that would have seemed impressive in the late 90s:

‘“I take money from Sylvère.” Was Bill bothered that such a marginal sexless hag as me wasn’t living in the street? Unlike his favorites, Leslie Thornton and Beth B, I was difficult and unadorable and a Bad Feminist to boot…“Sylvère and I are Marxists,” I told Bill Horrigan. “He takes money from the people who won’t give me money and gives it to me.” Money’s abstract and our culture’s distribution of it is based on values I reject and it occurred to me that I was suffering from the dizziness of contradictions: the only pleasure that remains once you’ve decided you know better than the world.’

That phrase ‘the dizziness of contradictions’ seems as good a description as any for 'I Love Dick'. At heart, there’s the one basic contradiction around which the rest of the book revolves: how to combine a feminist artistic method with an obsession with a patriarchal male authority figure. It's difficult to unpick a coherent political approach out of all of this. It’s this deliberate, almost gleeful inconsistency which might perhaps account for the sudden popularity of this book amongst a new generation of writers (like Sheila Heti) who are also doing interesting things with the first-person memoir/confessional mode. Here is a writer who says that moral and political consistency isn’t as important as framing your life as a work of art. Whatever you make of that is up to you, but to me it seems like a perfect example of a work that bridges the gap between the indie art of the 90s and the current decade, where everyone has the publishing tools available to document their own Dick and broadcast it in whatever media they choose. In this regard, I wonder if the book isn't mainly remarkable for the prescience of its style, rather than the quality of its expression. 
 

 

 

Also the fact that Kevin Bacon has been cast as Dick in the TV adaptation seems like a really strange, bad idea. (I haven't seen it.) I reckon Patrick Stewart would have made for a nice Dick.

[WickedCestus]

What an strange book. It's rather difficult for me to place my feelings about Chris. (I'm going to treat her as a fictional character because these sorts of non-fiction novels make me uncomfortable.)

 

I can strongly relate to the impulse behind her openness. I've often thought about whether human relationships would be much easier if we were just totally honest all the time. However, this book make me think about the fact that, in a way, this can be a selfish worldview, if pushed to the extreme that it is in Chris' case. It seems that all she wants from Dick is some sort of understanding, and she believes that if she just explains it well enough and often enough, it will make sense to him. However, even if he does understand, where does that put him, and where does that put Chris? She's totally honest about her feelings, but in a way that makes it impossible for him to act on his own. On top of that, he doesn't really have any feelings regarding her until she involves him in this strange game, so everything he's going to feel is a reaction to her actions which are based on bizarre feelings that even she can't explain. It's so utterly doomed to fail. And we know this through the whole book, and I guess the idea is to explore whether this failure is intrinsic to the way humans interact, or if there is some way to change society or just individual behaviour to counteract this. 

 

I don't want to sound like I'm criticizing Chris too much. It's hard not to feel bad for both characters. You could argue that Chris chose her actions, while Dick is simply the recipient, but Chris is acting on impulses so strong that they do almost seem out of her control. Her and her husband have this sort of "modern" relationship based on total honesty, which they try to force onto Dick. Well, it's okay to be totally honest with a person (including in possibly hurtful ways) if you both agree to do that, either consciously or unconsciously, but foisting that on a stranger is a bit much! Though, of course, that is easy to say looking back on the story. At the beginning, I was caught up in their whims and I thought it all kind of made sense, in a strange way. But once it starts collapsing there doesn't seem to be any good way out for either of them. 

 

I do agree with marginalgloss that a lot of the allusions feel overdone. As attempt to justify Chris' actions, they sorta fell flat compared to her more straight-forward attempts to analyze herself. I groaned through the whole art-criticism sections, though in hindsight I do appreciate their value in the book as examples of just how wholly her thoughts are devoted to Dick, that even this irrelevant stuff has to be addressed and related to him. 

 

Like marginalgloss said, the whole thing is such a big, bizarre series of contradictions. I like the way Chris accepts this and rolls with it. It works, for me, because of that. It's hard to gleam anything concrete from it, but it's certainly an interesting story. 

[Argobot]

We had a ton of fun recording this one, largely because it is so outside anything that we've read for this podcast. Look for it soon! Meanwhile, our next pick is the The Sellout by Paul Beatty.

[Chris]

Episode posted!

[Patrick R]

I enjoyed this episode even though it definitely sounds like a book that isn't for me.

[Lechimp]

  On 10/26/2016 at 5:04 PM, marginalgloss said:

 

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Also the fact that Kevin Bacon has been cast as Dick in the TV adaptation seems like a really strange, bad idea. (I haven't seen it.) I reckon Patrick Stewart would have made for a nice Dick.

 

 

The show doesn't really seem like it has all that much to do with the book other than it having the same people (characters?) in it. It was ok I guess? One episode didn't really give me enough to make any sort of judgement on it but it apparently got approved for a full season so I guess I'll see where they go with it.