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. I heard about it once on a bus in Philadelphia; I still remember the gray city rolling by. I didn’t understand exactly what it was, but it had an allure, like whispers about a dance club that only opened under the full moon, or an underground bar you needed a password to get into. It was a book that carried the sense of being in the know. And it was apparently about loving dick_._
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.
In her novel “Summer of Hate_,” _Kraus offers a coyly ironic evocation of her own fan base: “Asperger’s boys, girls who’d been hospitalized for mental illness, assistant professors who would not be receiving their tenure, lap dancers, cutters, and whores.” The message: people with wounds and frustrated dreams. The other message: Kraus has a sense of humor. At this point, reading Kraus feels like joining the ranks of those who have already come to love or hate her—those who worship her, idealize her, argue with her; those who wish she would stop talking so much about her sex life.
“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.”
I followed “Dick”_ _into the rest of Kraus’s work, which is nothing if not a bright map of presence. Her books all traverse similar narrative terrain from different angles—a female artist’s frustrated career arc, her childless and nomadic marriage. In some of these books, the artist is named Chris Kraus (“I Love Dick,” “Aliens & Anorexia”); other times, she is named Sylvie (“Torpor”) or Catt (“Summer of Hate”). Sometimes, her story is narrated in the first-person; other times, in the third. Sometimes, her husband is named Sylvere Lotringer (the theorist to whom Kraus was once married, and with whom she co-runs Semiotext(e), the press that releases all her books); other times, the husband is named Jerome or Michele. Their little dachshund is always Lily.
Key plot points recur: an artist who considers herself a failed experimental filmmaker is married to an older cultural theorist, a professor at Columbia; they move between country houses that they rent out for extra money (“It was a profitable scheme, but consequently, the pair are homeless”); the husband has a daughter from his first marriage, but the couple never has children together (they have abortions instead); at a certain point, the female character leaves, moves across the country to Los Angeles, gets involved in the art scene, gets obsessed with Dick, gets involved in S & M, has a lot of anonymous sex: “Giving blowjobs in the parking lot behind the House of Pies, finger-fucking on a stranger’s couch, she is amazed by how completely sex annihilates the need for context.”
Kraus’s entire body of work betrays an abiding obsession with context; one can easily imagine the desire to escape it. Her books return to the same dynamics over and over—romantic abjection, ambiguous and often frustrating intimacies, artistic devotion and ambition, social communion and alienation—in order to explore them in multiple and overlapping contexts: artistic, spiritual, domestic, private, public, historical, political, economic. They are versions of one central drama: a female consciousness struggling to live a meaningful life.
In “Aliens & Anorexia,” from 2000, the production and ultimate “failure” of Kraus’s feature film is interwoven with a series of rigorous reflections on the life and philosophy of Simone Weil. In “Torpor,” published in 2006, Sylvie reckons with her ambiguous relationship with an older and more visibly “successful” man, tries to create a more stable domestic life, grieves her abortions, and ultimately wants to adopt an orphan. “Summer of Hate,” from 2012, presents a similar female character (still a critic and failed filmmaker; still married to an older theorist but now separated from him) exercising new kinds of agency: making money in real estate, financially and emotionally supporting an ex-felon as he builds a new life in sobriety (now the woman is the older one in the dynamic; she’s the one with more cultural and literal capital).
It’s an uncannily coherent landscape, a kind of hyperintellectual, hypersexual, digital-era Yoknapatawpha that moves back and forth across the Atlantic, across the Mexican border, across the former Soviet bloc. “Summer of Hate” starts at a desolate motel in Baja; large chunks of “Aliens & Anorexia” take place at the Berlin Film Festival; much of “Torpor” involves journeying across Romania in search of an orphan. In “I Love Dick,” Kraus describes the intense porousness of a schizophrenic mind—“the world gets creamy like a library”—and the world of her writing is creamy, too: her narratives bleed and echo, texts wink at one another across their separate spines. S & M scenes from “Video Green,” her 2004 collection of essays about the L.A. art scene, pop up in her fictional narratives: ice cubes in wicker baskets, obediently downcast eyes. In “I Love Dick,” she compliments Dick on writing a book called “Aliens & Anorexia”:_ _“That’s one of the most incredible things I’ve read in years.”
As I read Kraus’s books, I found myself returning to an art installation called “Minetta Lane—A Ghost Story,” which she describes in two of them. It’s a wall mounted with three windows, three films playing in them simultaneously, “rear-projected against the window-panes.” The films show distinct scenes—a female painter interrupted by a young girl, a young couple playing together in a bathtub, an old man watching an empty birdcage—but there are occasional points of connection: the little girl wanders across frames, for instance, watching the young couple in their bathtub. The whole installation functions as a kind of “magic Cornell box, a tiny epic,” at once “troubling and ecstatic.” Kraus has built a version of this troubling magic, tenuously connected frames offering partial visions of intimate scenes, inescapably mediated—an experience that can feel like voyeurism but isn’t really voyeurism at all.
Kraus’s own intricately overlapping windows—the craft and play of their correspondences—complicate any easy reading of her work as “confessional.” It’s a label she has resisted. “Confessional of what?” she wonders in one interview. “Personal confessions?” Then she quotes a line from Deleuze: “Life is not personal.”
If not personal, then what? In “Aliens & Anorexia,” Kraus argues against the idea that Weil’s fasting was an exclusively private act. It has become “impossible to accept the self-destruction of a woman as strategic,” she writes. “Impossible to conceive a female life that might extend outside itself.” She says elsewhere that “women have been denied all access to the a-personal,” and that it seems the “straight female ‘I’ can only be narcissistic, confidential, confessional.” She uses the materials of her life to seek this “a-personal” meaning—something larger, more universal. Her work isn’t an expression of narcissism so much as a preëmptive challenge to anyone who might read it that way.
She is well aware of the disdain she courts, imagining how people will start to see her: “Fuck her once, she’ll write a book about it.” But she keeps writing anyway, keeps writing about who she fucks or wants to fuck; who she _may _have fucked, who her fictional avatars have fucked. And why? If her confessions aren’t personal, or aren’t even confessions, what are they? What are they doing?
Kraus insists that all sorts of experience—even romantic obsession, dependence, and desperate pursuit, stereotypically “female” states of abjection—hold universal significance. They carry truths that radiate beyond the bedroom, the finger-fuck, the House of Pies parking lot. She wants to push back against the limited ways in which vulnerability and self-exposure are read: “Why do people still not get it when we handle vulnerability like philosophy, at some remove?” In “Aliens & Anorexia_,” _she thinks about artists who accomplish some version of this remove: Damien Hirst putting his sliced carcasses behind glass, his desire to “create emotions scientifically.” Emotion is “just so terrifying,” she writes, “the world refuses to believe that it can be pursued as discipline, as form.” Analyzing vulnerability is not the same as enacting it; describing positions of pain and longing isn’t an admission of powerlessness but an act of assertion, a way of saying, this female consciousness can hold these states of pain and longing as well.
In Artforum, David Rimanelli described “I Love Dick” as a book “not so much written as secreted,” a verb that evokes the book’s bodily admissions—“Is there a place in this to talk about how wet I’ve been, constantly, since talking on the phone to you 8 days ago?”—as well as the liquid language often applied to female writing about the self: gushing, vomiting, purging, bleeding. In these figurations, identity and experience become fluids that get barfed or sweated onto the page. “Secreted” suggests not just maximal exposure but also minimal effort, as if the self-disclosure were unmediated. But Kraus’s work is contaminated by craft from the get-go, entirely _made _even if not entirely made-up. The back cover of “I Love Dick” shows a photo of Kraus’s face looming huge over a set of dolls: a plastic woman in a pink gown standing beneath a hulking man propped on a mint-green convertible, all muscles and loincloth; a man in a suit (the “husband,” presumably) watches from the sidelines. It’s a kind of play. Kraus is putting on a show. If this book is one of her secretions, then her sweat takes the form of plastic figurines—arranged for narrative effect, carefully manipulated into motion.
As a writer—especially as a woman who has written “personal” material—I’m grateful to Kraus for deploying the materials of her life in rigorous and compelling ways; for holding vulnerability “at some remove” in the face of those determined to read any act of self-disclosure as narcissistic or self-pitying. But as a reader, Kraus makes me confront my own hunger for autobiographical access; it makes me aware of how much I crave a sense of the true story beneath her written narratives, even as I respect the ways they refuse to deliver any kind of one-to-one correspondence between lived and constructed experience.
Kraus’s books dangle the possibility of radical disclosure by “confessing” private things—abortions and suicidal impulses and sexual liaisons—but complicate the terms of these disclosures by refusing to confess their genre. Memoir? Essay? Fiction? Sylvere calls her writing “a new genre, something in between cultural criticism and fiction.” Rimanelli speculates that “I Love Dick” is “masquerading as a novel—perhaps for legal reasons.” But Kraus’s tightrope walk feels more like an intentional aesthetic experiment: a way of placing her readers on simultaneously intimate and ambiguous terrain, making their footing unstable.
At the end of “Emotional Technologies,” an essay about S & M that shifts between first-person and third-person narratives of her own life, Kraus calls it “naïve” to assume that “speaking in the first person necessarily connotes any kind of truth, sincerity.” Kraus questions the sincerity of the first-person—the flip-side of her search for authentic feeling inside performance. S & M is performative, but Kraus finds sincerity in it; first-person _feels _more sincere but is no less a show.
“Torpor,” which was_ _re-released by Semiotext(e) in January, is a third-person narrative about “Sylvie” rather than a first-person narrative about “Chris,” and so it might seem more removed from Kraus’s life than some of her other novels. But Kraus has insisted that it is actually “much more personal.” “I wanted to take something very painful and close,” she said, “and deal with it at some distance—turn the two people into a couple of clowns. I found I could be much more truthful, writing in the third person, because the subject’s approached at some distance.” This “distance” echoes her interest in handling vulnerability at some “remove,” and the idea of turning her characters into “clowns” feels connected to Kraus’s interest in S & M practice: S & M also pushes performance toward absurdity, but the performance isn’t insincere just because it has been exaggerated.
In “Emotional Technologies,” Kraus describes her instructions from a new S & M partner: He told her to undress at 7:30 and kneel by her phone. He promised he’d call within the half hour. He called at 7:59. “I found this pretty fucking witty,” she writes. “How many times have I, has every heterosexual female in this culture, spent evenings mooning around our houses and apartments, psychically stripped bare and on our knees while waiting for ‘his’ call? Why not take the courtship ritual literally?” In S & M, performance is a way of reclaiming a position of vulnerability—acting it out, playing on it like a jungle gym. “I Love Dick” does the same, playing inside the emotional architecture of abjection rather than lying prostrate before it.
“Torpor” is a kind of prequel to “I Love Dick.” We see a version of the same marriage in the years before Dick’s arrival: in “Torpor,”_ _it’s Sylvie and Jerome rather than Chris and Sylvere, but the dynamics are similar. We get episodes from Sylvie and Jerome’s early relationship—its evolution from weekly lunchtime sex dates into an itinerant marriage—interspersed with episodes from their journey across Romania in the summer of 1991. (They are ostensibly seeking an orphan; the retrospective narrator tells us they don’t yet know that adoptions from foreigners have been banned.) When Kraus says that writing “Torpor” allowed her to “deal with” something “very painful and close,” we can imagine what that pain might attach to—wanting a child but not having one, being married to a child-survivor of the Holocaust—but we can’t fully know. It’s the experience that matters, the feelings. “Ahhh, feelings,” Jerome says to Sylvie at one point. “Your feelings are what you really care about. You see? You never really wanted to have a baby. The child is just a symbol that you use.”
One senses that a baby might be more than a symbol to Sylvie, who has already had three abortions. These abortions have become a kind of gynecological metronome, marking the progress of her relationship with Jerome. She gets the first one while they are still seeing each other casually (after they sleep together, he lets her watch him highlight passages for teaching the next day). She gets the second after they are exclusively involved, when she wants a child but he refuses, invoking obligations to his adolescent daughter from a prior marriage. And she gets the third once they are entrenched in their nomadic commuter life. Sylvie longs for this third child (whom she privately names Lewis) but resigns herself to terminating the pregnancy anyway, and afterward she briefly contemplates suicide: “She stopped the car above an icy bank at Deer Leap Point. But then she didn’t.” The novel exquisitely points to but does not explicitly articulate the pain of that moment, or the pain of Sylvie’s secret interior conversations with Lewis (she “finds that she can talk to Lewis better than she’s ever talked to anyone before”), just as it suggests but doesn’t fully explain the pain of that second abortion—“the time, for her, that really counted”—when becoming a mother actually felt possible, before it got surrendered entirely. After this second abortion, she finds herself alone: Jerome gives her money for a cab home from the clinic because he has to go teach a class, then he heads uptown to babysit his daughter for the evening.
We don’t know if these moments ever happened, or how they happened, but we feel the force of them anyway—hovering at some remove from any life, attached to autobiography by tenuous threads, searing into us with feelings whose attachments to reality we can’t decisively delineate.
Near the beginning of “Torpor,” _ _the book offers a description and lineage of its own formal strategy:
Parataxis is a strange literary form, born at the beginning of the Middle Ages … Flashing back and sideways, holding back the outcome of events, these tellers fracture old familiar and heroic tales into contradictory, multiple perspectives. It becomes impossible to move the story forward without returning to the past, and so the past both predicates the future and withholds it.
A story that flashes “back and sideways” keeps its emotional pulse live: “To organize events sequentially is to take away their power,” Kraus writes. “Emotion’s not at all like that. Better to hold onto memories in fragments, better to stop and circle back each time you feel the lump rise in your throat.” Taken together, Kraus’s books summon these “contradictory, multiple perspectives” on an even broader level: they approach a recurring consciousness from different angles, dip into the trajectory of a life at different moments. They preserve a certain electricity by refusing to resolve these life materials into a single, coherent narrative. They are all windows to the same exhibit, all doorways to the same club under the same full moon, all promising and winking and opening their legs at once. They are all committed to the live wire of feeling (Ahhh, feelings), committed to circling back to what makes the lump rise in the throat, what makes the heart beat faster; committed to keeping emotions forceful by refusing to slot their evocations neatly into any genre, refusing the divide between authenticity and artifice, refusing to distinguish between reality and performance. It’s all lumpy. It’s all performed. It’s all real.
