Chris Kraus: I Love Dick

But Sylvère couldn’t help thinking Chris had betrayed the form they’d both invented by excluding him.

[And here Chris picks up the story, hoping to make Sylvère understand—]

Chris thought she was acting valiantly on her and Sylvère’s behalf. Didn’t someone have to bring the story to a close? Driving up North Road this afternoon, Chris felt she understood Emma Bovary’s situation very well. The lonely move from Crestline looming; the drive across America. Three starved coyotes stood along the road. Chris thought about Emma’s sensitive Italian Greyhound running farther from the coach towards certain doom. All is lost.

[Together, they continue—]

Ever since Sylvère’s brave phone call that morning to a justifiably annoyed Dick, they realized they’d be hanging together now. Dick would never answer. The form would never be fulfilled. Sylvère would never be offered a job at Dick’s school.

Sylvère pretended not to mind. Hadn’t he and Chris behaved like true patricians, i.e., reckless lunatics? Would anyone else have dared to put someone in Dick’s position through such a trip? We’re artists, Sylvère said. So we’re allowed.

But Chris was not so sure.

Eventually they would subtitle this Does the Epistolary Genre Mark the Advent of the Bourgeois Novel ? But that was later, after another dinner with some noted academic friends at Dick’s.

Crestline, California

Monday, December 12, 1994

Dear Dick,

I, we’re, writing you this letter that we will never send. Finally we’ve figured out what the problem is: you think we’re dilettantes. Why didn’t we realize it before? I mean, Dick, you’re a simple guy. You don’t have time for the likes of us. You’re like all the other boyfriends, guys, who’d confess proudly after shagging me regularly for six months, a year: “I’ve met someone. I really like her. Karen-Sharon-Heather-Barbara’s not like you. She is a truly nice person.” Well. Are we not Nice People in your eyes?

Is it a class thing? Even though we share your background, you think we’re decadent sophisticates. That we are somehow…insincere.

What now? Were we wrong in trying to be close to you? Here are some events from the background of our lives:

We’re leaving California, moving house for about the hundredth time in the last two years. Anxiety’s become routine.

Chris got a letter today from Berlin: her film will not be in the Festival.

Chris received several faxes full of bad news, hidden costs, delays, from the post-production coordinator in New Zealand.

These events took us off the Dick Track for a while and we were so relieved to get back on it in a house already packed away.

Then Sylvère got a call from Margit Rowell, Drawing Curator at the MOMA. Would he like to edit a catalogue on Antonin Artaud? It’s an important exhibition. The gap between us widens. Then the cleaning women showed up followed by the Carpet Shampoo man. Chris paced between everyone, frantic about your reaction to her fax.

Dick, why are we so bored with our lives? Yesterday we decided not to take this house again next summer. Perhaps we’ll rent one on the other edge of your town?

Do you attract this kind of energy? Are we like the famous burglar who enters people’s homes to steal small talismans—a pack of condoms, a cheese knife?

We can’t bring ourselves to finish this letter.

10:55 p.m.

We’re thinking about calling Dick again to tell him that the video was a half-baked idea. This is how delirium works: we’re laughing and excited and at this moment it makes perfect sense for us to call. After all, Dick’s been “with” us for the past two hours. We’re forgetting Dick never wants to hear from us again. Calling now would be the final straw.

Writing this has been like moving through a kaleidoscope of all our favorite books in history: Swann’s Way and Willam Congreve, Henry James, Gustave Flaubert. Does analogy make emotion less sincere?

Time heals all wounds.

Dick, you’re so intelligent but we live in different cultures. Sylvère and I are like the Ladies of the Heian Court in 5th century Japan. Love challenges us to express ourselves elegantly and ambiguously. But meanwhile you were Back at the Ranch.

Billets Doux; Billets Dick: A Cultural Study.

We put you to the test; we failed.

December 13, 1994

Tuesday dawns in disappointment. Sylvère and Chris spend the day moving things into Locker #26 at the Dart Canyon Storage Bins. For $25 a month they can postpone discarding their broken wicker chair, sagging double beds and thrift store couch forever. Chris hauls the furniture from the truck upstairs to Level 2 alone while Sylvère barks instructions. Because he has a plastic hip he can’t lift anything heavier than a Petit Larousse , but he does consider himself an expert packer/mover. By the third trip it’s completely clear that their stuff won’t fit into Locker #26, a 4x8 enclosure. For 15 dollars more they could’ve had Bin #14, an ample 10x12, but Sylvère won’t hear of it, these unnecessary expenses. I’m very organized! he cries (just as concentration camp survivors boasted about their ability to “organize” a smuggled egg or contraband potato). He keeps re-visioning how to stack the floor lamps, mattresses, 300 pounds of books and Chris is screaming at him, sagging under the weight of all this shit, ( You Cheap Jew! ) as she drags junk out of Bin #26 to the hall and back again. This makes him even more determined. But finally it all fits when they agree to throw away the gilded cage they’d bought in Colton at the Pets’R’Us liquidation sale for 30 bucks, a bargain. The bird had long since flown away. Driving back through Ensenada at the end of their cheap and dusty impromptu vacation in Baja last September, they’d bought a small green conure parrot on the roadside, hiding it under the carseat when they drove across the border. Loulou—they’d named it for Félicité’s pet in Flaubert’s A Simple Heart —had been Sylvère’s Bird Correlative. He fed it lettuce leaves and seeds, confided to it, tried to teach it words. But one sunny autumn day he left the cage door open on the deck so Loulou could get a better view of the freshly snow-capped peaks above Lake Gregory. As he watched, astonished and then quickly broken-hearted, Loulou flew from the birdcage to the railing to the giant pine and finally out of view. They’d bought every bird accessory but the wing-clip. “He chose freedom,” Sylvère repeated sadly.

Because most “serious” fiction, still, involves the fullest possible expression of a single person’s subjectivity, it’s considered crass and amateurish not to “fictionalize” the supporting cast of characters, changing names and insignificant features of their identities. The “serious” contemporary hetero-male novel is a thinly veiled Story of Me, as voraciously consumptive as all of patriarchy. While the hero/anti-hero explicitly is the author, everybody else is reduced to “characters.” Example: the artist Sophie Calle appears in Paul Auster’s book Leviathan in the role of writer’s girlfriend. “Maria was far from beautiful but there was an intensity in her gray eyes that attracted me.” Maria’s work is identical to Calle’s most famous pieces—the address book, hotel photos, etc.—but in Leviathan she’s a waif-like creature relieved of complications like ambition or career.

When women try to pierce this false conceit by naming names because our “I’s” are changing as we meet other “I’s,” we’re called bitches, libellers, pornographers and amateurs. “Why are you so angry?” he said to me.