I Love Dick

"She’s an extraordinarily generous writer in terms of her legacy. She smashes the field open. She smashes open what it is possible to do. She smashes open what kind of rules you need to play by. She destroys concepts of originality. She’s original while she’s stealing. All of those things are so intensely liberating, I think, especially for women writers. It feels to me like it’s an invitation to invent, to take what you need, to make whatever it is you want to make. That kind of permissiveness still feels really, really radical to me. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter But what I was going say about Chris is that I find it particularly fascinating, in terms of talking about reactions to autofiction, that when people talk about I Love Dick —particularly critics—it seems as if the book is just somebody talking about their obsession with Dick. But the book isn’t that at all—it’s a totally different book! It’s so interesting to me how much she manages to smuggle into it. She uses this overarching narrative of Chris abjecting herself at the feet of Dick, or Chris trying to seduce Dick. And you get very caught up in that. Then, suddenly, she’s talking about torture in Guatemala, or she’s talking about Hannah Wilke, or she’s talking about all kinds of very complicated ideas about feminism, artistry, selfhood. Also, political situations in other countries, which I don’t think I’ve ever read about in a review. But yet it’s a really key part of it. Yeah. It’s the same thing that I just said about Acker, I think: Chris Kraus is a liberator. She makes something possible. When you read it, you think, I didn’t know I was allowed to do this. I didn’t know that I was allowed to write about these elements of my life. I think she writes about things that we are socialised as women to conceal, as if they will make us smaller and sillier as artists, instead of more powerful. Failure, abjection, not being hot in the right way, fights, illnesses, disappointments. All taboo. And then she shifts genre and tone so much. It’s practically got lectures tucked away inside it, along with letters and gossip and rants. So it has this sort of tonal shiftiness that’s very exciting, and yet it’s a novel. It’s packaged as a novel. It has the feeling of a novel, but it’s doing so much more than that. I just think on a structural, formal level, it’s this incredibly exciting thing. “Chris Kraus is a liberator. She makes something possible” I was just rereading the introduction in the reissue that I’ve got, by Eileen Myles, and they talk about Chris Kraus as somebody who’s opening a door and allowing so many more possibilities to exist. Particularly that she’s seizing female abjection and saying, ‘I’m telling this story, this is not a story being told about me.’ I think that’s probably the thing that’s made it so exciting to people over the last—what is it?—ten years that people have really been rediscovering it. She emerges triumphant. Absolutely. It’s just a magnificent conjuring trick. That you could declare your abasement. Chris is a failure as a filmmaker, and she’s having this disastrous time. Her love affair’s falling apart. She thinks that her marriage to Sylvère is over. But at the same time, she does emerge victorious by virtue of writing this magnificent book. It’s a sort of failure fantasy, isn’t it? That you can convert all of this into such a story, such a gleeful accounting of your own disaster that it might succeed on its own terms. And then the success took a very long time to arrive. I think people like that element of it too, that it exists against the odds in so many different ways. Artists also allow themselves to do these things that you’re not supposed to do, like becoming a stalker, which both Chris Kraus and Sophie Calle do. You can be creepy, or you can be kind of gross, or you can be somewhere that you’ve been told not to be, and you can make art out of that. There’s the artist Hannah Wilke, who Chris Kraus talks about as well, who was very beautiful, but yet made work that challenged what beauty meant, including these great self-portraits in which she sticks spitty little lumps of chewing gum to her face. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The idea that you can be grotesque in these different ways is so much a central lesson of Kathy Acker too. Expanding the field of expression is what feels exciting to me. Whereas, what troubles me about the idea of autofiction is, ‘oh it’s just some narcissist who can’t be bothered to make anything up, writing down their life, and palming it off on us as fiction.’ None of the autofiction that excites me does that."

"Let’s do it. I find Chris Kraus fascinating. Her work is this really interesting combination of fictionalised (or maybe not fictionalised) memoir, theory and criticism. Books like I Love Dick and Aliens & Anorexia jump from correspondence with people to vivid BDSM sex scenes, to discussions of post-modern and contemporary art, to reflections about how women are culturally positioned. I Love Dick has a great line about being accused of abasing herself for writing about the conditions of her own abasement, as a female writer. Obviously these books reflect on their own narrative structure, highlighting their own purpose and the possibility of succeeding in the aims they’ve set for themselves. That, more that anything else, is what I took for the memoir—trying to make my own book do that. I Love Dick was published in 1997, it’s just been reissued in the UK by Serpent’s Tail. The book jumps between styles and perspectives, but a lot of the book is Kraus writing to Dick Hebdige, the cultural critic and writer of Subculture —who I studied at university. With the knowledge of her husband, she pursues this infatuation with Hebdige, who almost never writes back. He’s almost entirely absent in the book. Just occasionally he writes back to say, “Look, I don’t know why you’re doing this, but can you please stop?” She doesn’t. There’s this really interesting sense of transgression, both in the way she’s pursuing this interest, and then writing about it, and then publishing it as a novel—but not really a novel. There are so many ethical lines being crossed here. It reminds me of some of Sophie Calle’s projects—tracking down people from an address book she found. But I think any memoir has to cross the sorts of lines that Kraus crosses. It’s impossible to write a memoir without writing about other people who haven’t necessarily wanted you to write about them, or asked to be involved; people who are not in the literary world. I had lots of issues in the memoir with writing about my parents, and how to handle that, and writing about certain friends: some of whom I’m still friends with, some of whom not. With every person I wrote about, I had to sit and think, “Why am I writing about this person? How am I going to write? What is fair? Or, what do I think is fair, because they will probably disagree. Are they a public figure or not?” All these complicated issues were at play. “It’s impossible to write a memoir without writing about other people, who haven’t necessarily wanted you to write about them.” The other novel I find intriguing in that respect is The Damned United , by David Peace: the novel about Brian Clough managing Leeds United. Just as the critical responses to I Love Dick really weighed in on the ethics of Kraus using Hebdige in the book in this way, the critical responses to Peace’s novel—or the popular responses—looked at the ethics of using Clough as the central character, of trying to get inside Clough’s head and understand his motives in going to Leeds United when for the last ten years all he’d talked about is how much he hates them and hates the players. Taking a true story, and a lot of historical details, but inventing bits that are fictional. It’s up to the reader to ascertain which bits are fiction and which aren’t. Clough’s family were very angry about the way Peace used him. A lot of the Leeds footballers characterised in the book were still alive. Much as I respect a writer’s or artist’s prerogative to use material I thought, “I don’t know if this is fair.” Johnny Giles was not a literary theorist, he doesn’t necessarily agree with Peace that his life and his thoughts and actions and motivations are fair game to throw in a book with a bunch of stuff that may or may not be true. Kraus and Peace throw up a lot of interesting issues. The Kraus book is incredibly confrontational, I love that about it. When I was reading it I was still working at the NHS, not long before they made me redundant, and I went out for a walk over lunch time and I left it at my desk. I came back to see my line manager holding up a book with the huge words ‘I Love Dick’ written across it and saying, “Juliet, what’s this?” Luckily, she found it funny, but I then had to explain what I Love Dick was, and who Dick was, and it was one of the more awkward conversations I’ve had about literature…"