Book reviews
I Love Dick
05/06/17
A book I dare you to read.
3 December 1994. Pasadena, California. Experimental filmmaker Chris Kraus and university professor Sylvère Lotringer, her husband, have dinner with Dick, a cultural critic and friend of Sylvère. While the two men immerse themselves in a discussion on postmodern critical theory, Chris, “who is no intellectual”, spots Dick making overt eye contact with her. The radio predicts snow on the highway so the couple stays for the night at Dick’s, where Chris manages to spend time alone with him. The two ride in his Thunderbird convertible and watch a video piece of his (bad) art. Dick flirts with her. She notices. She dreams about him all night. But when Chris and Sylvère wake up the next morning, Dick is gone.
One single night spent talking is enough for Chris to develop the most intense, unreasoned infatuation. Dick’s attention makes her feel so powerful that she needs to share her feelings with Sylvère. Because they replace the gap left by not having sex anymore with telling each other everything, Chris narrates to him the Conceptual Fuck she experienced the night before. They spend hours, even days, discussing and analysing that single evening and both surprisingly consider that Dick has started a romantic game. They want to respond to him by writing, each of them, a letter, but what started as a single reply that they shared with each other became a pile of 50, 100, 180 pages in which there is always something more to say. As no romantic novel is complete without a decease, Dick ends up metaphorically “killed” and transformed into a blank canvas where the couple’s most repressed feelings and drives are projected creating a volatile and passionate work of art, a manuscript for Dick in which he is actually the least important character – all this happening in the first 10 pages.
I Love Dick is a book that I struggled to find in the library and whose cheeky title I was absurdly too ashamed to ask for, but I did not give up until finding; a book that has turned out to be one of my most powerful sources of inspiration. Blurring the boundaries between fiction, art theory, and memoir, Chris Kraus submerged me in her game of abstract romanticism, which for Sylvère is based on a perverse longing for rejection and for me is just an ardent piece of writing that, as an expressionist painting, places the reader/viewer in the position of psychoanalytic interpreter (Foster 2004). In Part One, an interpreter of a capricious, self-destructive love story risen from the couple’s “crazy distillation of their mental state” projected on Dick, and in Part Two, an interpreter of Chris’ feminist reflections on American artists Eleanor Antin, Hannah Wilke, and R. B. Kitaj, and even activist Jennifer Harbury or long meditations on schizophrenia.
Although it was first published 20 years ago, I Love Dick has attracted an audience the most only during the last couple of years, and even a TV series based on the book was released in May this year. Maybe Dick was just born at the wrong time and has only found its voice now with its current renaissance. And that’s just what it has taught me to do: to find my own voice, my first person, and write to Dick myself. To write like Chris and transform one’s history of failure into passion, to bring my life experiences together and create a piece of work meant to be thrown back to life again. “To fictionalise life a little bit”. To make something out of one’s own narcissism.
I Love Dick is witty from the cover to the very last page. It’s a book that you will want to read again even before finishing it. A book that I dare you to read.