For the love of dick…
An exploration of love and obsession that misses the mark.
Maybe if I was a philosopher, maybe if I hadn’t been reading You by Caroline Kepnes at the same time, maybe if I hadn’t already seen all of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, maybe if I hadn’t also seen (and read) Fleabag... But then again, maybe even then I still wouldn’t like I Love Dick.
I’m big enough to admit it: I bought this book because of the title. But it was a quote from the Guardian on the cover that called it “the most important book about men and women written in the last century,” that made me actually read it.
I Love Dick is critique, theory, epistolary, and fiction all mixed into one giant, interwoven form. When the character Chris Kraus — to be slightly confused with author Chris Kraus — falls passionately in love with the eponymous Dick, a colleague of her husband, she writes letters to Dick that explores these feelings. Topics of conversation range from female artists who display themselves naked in their art, to political activists in Guatemala, to Cowboys, and beyond, all with the objective of trying to understand Chris’s infatuation turned obsession.
It’s hard to follow this train of logic at the best of times. I like to consider myself a fairly well-read person — I read classics for fun, dammit! — but this book takes it to a whole different level. Kraus can go from writing about desire and suddenly relate it to the Kierkegaardian Third Remove. Meanwhile, I’m scratching my head in the corner of the classroom with a dunce cap on.
I don’t want to be talked down to by any means, but a little bit more background information on certain theories would make everything more insightful. As it stand, it was rather than incomprehensible without a PhD. This is the downfall of this epistolary heavy form: by directing the discourse at a specific individual who has prior and extensive knowledge of all these academic theories and texts, it also supposes the reader of the book has that same knowledge. She does not. She just wants to read about feminism and love and obsession and is only an undergrad.
This makes reading the book feel like a chore. If it were a challenge, I could get behind that. Reading a challenging book makes me feel smart, and who doesn’t like feeling smart? But this book is not a challenge. The language is an obstacle that one must overcome in order to reach their desired destination: the end. And it feels like a cross-country road trip despite the fact the book is less than 300 pages long.
There is also the added ethical questions inherent to the premise of the book that I don’t think the text addresses very well, if at all. Yes, this book is technically labeled as a novel, but it’s auto-theory, which basically means it’s real in everything but the precise details.
Kraus has been very open that all of the letters in the book are real and that the events depicted within it are also heavily inspired by her life if they didn’t literally happen. Dick is a real person who was in Kraus’s life; to put things mildly, he wasn’t to keen about this book being written in the first place. He sent her a cease-and-desist letter when it was originally getting published in 1997.
Within the book itself, Dick is not so much a character as a projection for Chris and her husband, Sylvére — but mostly Chris — to display all of their feelings and ideas onto. They are even explicitly aware of the fact they are doing this and comment on it in perhaps the most pretentious way possible:
C: You mean that Dick is God.
S: No, maybe Dick never existed.
I Love Dick by Chris Kraus
But he did — does — exist. It’s one thing to position two explicitly fictional characters in this sort of just-a-stand-in-for-an-idea dynamic — Lord knows men have been writing their female characters this way for centuries — but when it’s two real people, I think the author owes it to the other person to also comment on the act of this abstraction in a way that reckons with the abstracted person’s humanity.
Kraus stops her reckoning with Dick’s full humanity by acknowledging that she’s not reckoning with his full humanity.
I don’t think that just because Kraus is able to deconstruct her desire and, rightfully, calls out that men have been able to have this discourse in academic settings while women are labeled as “hysterical” — God how I hate that word — she gets a free pass to do some of the things she does without also critiquing the actions themselves outside of that gendered context.
All of this is not to say that I didn’t take anything away from the book. There were quite a few passages that struck me and made me underline them, especially when those passages were detailing either how one’s interior life can be just as consuming and real as an exterior life or about how women are portrayed in art and society. If the book has any thesis, it is this:
[…] there’s not enough female irrepressibility written down […] I think the sheer fact of women talking, being, paradoxical, inexplicable, flip, self-destructive but above all else public is the most revolutionary thing in the world.
I Love Dick by Chris Kraus
I couldn’t agree more with this statement. We don’t need every female character depicted — every woman who’s ever existed or will exist — to be confined to the angels of the home or denied the full totality — the messiness and the anger and the sadness and the joy and the wonder — of their lives.
But if you want to see this kind of character better executed, I’d recommend watching Crazy Ex-Girlfriend or Fleabag over reading I Love Dick.
P.S.: If happen to know what a post-modern elegiac form is, could you tell me?
Please and thank you.
