• Editor's Note: This review was first published in Cups Magazine in New York in June. Because of the incendiary nature of the review, there were a number of hostile replies, including an angry telephone call from Sylvere Lotringer, the publisher of Semiotext(e) to the publisher of Cups. Hope you enjoy reading it. JSJ.

I ' m   A   S p y   i n   t h e   H o u s e   o f   K r a u s

by Jillian St. Jacques

Although it lacks any scrap of literary merit, "I Love Dick" by Chris Kraus (Semiotext(e) Native Agents Series, 1997) remains a book worth skimming, for the most puerile reasons.

The Story:

Following a nasty turn in the weather, filmmaker/editor Chris Kraus and husband/publisher Sylvere Lotringer barge their way into an overnight stay at the Antelope Valley residence of "Dick," a British intellectual of some small celebrity. Although they have only just met, Kraus becomes instantly infatuated with Dick, and begins to horn in on his life by writing him a series of "love letters," which she forces him to read. Because they are a trendycool couple, Lotringer joins wife Kraus in her literary gang-banging - which Kraus suggests is the only way Lotringer can still get into her pants.

Sadly, for Kraus, Dick rebuffs her initial overtures:

"Dear Dick,

Yesterday afternoon I was driving towards Lake Casitas in sheets of grief and rage. I hadn't started crying yet, just a little welling up of tears around the eyes. But shaking, shaken, so much I couldn't see the road in front of me or stay in the right lane ..."

Hackneyed phrasing such as "sheets of grief" and "welling up of tears" notwithstanding, Kraus's letters comprise the mainstay of the book, and do a fair (if tedious) job of conveying her sexual obsession with Dick. Yet, Kraus combines her letters with old art reviews, half-finished accounts of love-affairs among insurgents in Guatemala, and a travelogue of Kraus's self-imposed exodus to New England. This everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach is exacerbated by an account of Kraus's harrowing brush with Crohn's Disease, an inflammatory disease of the bowels. The resulting mishmash might deserve critical leniency, if Kraus herself was a more empathetic character-one might set aside her ineptitude as a wordsmith in favor of regaling themselves with tales of her inflamed intestines, sexual peccadilloes, and intellectual malaise.

It's not as if Kraus' initial premise has no merit, after all: a novel about a washed-up feminist film-maker who tries to absorb the phallic power of a British intellectual by swallowing him alive with her cunt (a form of vaginal osmosis?) does have a certain pestilent attraction. Yet, Kraus' unrelenting narcissism, combined with half-congealed critiques of minor Los Angeles art exhibits and her bruising attacks on Dick are exacerbated by the fact that the book is painfully in need of editing - particularly galling because Kraus herself is the editor of the Native Agents Series of Semiotext(e). To use one's editorship to publicly flog an ex-lover is already odious, but to do it without bothering to proofread is unforgivable. As a case in point, Kraus, who quotes the French philosopher Luce Irigaray on page 251 of "I Love Dick," spells the name "Irgirary"-a far cry from "Irigaray," and particularly noticeable because Kraus painstakingly spells the name of her victim correctly every time. Such unabashed name-dropping only highlights the misanthropic intentions present in the manner Kraus employs the actual names of characters in "I Love Dick"; particularly poor sportsmanship considering the book is a character massacre of a colleague who initially posed Kraus no threat in any way.

Not that "I Love Dick" is without a crescendo here and there. When Kraus and Dick finally hit the hay, for instance, the psychosexual fur really begins to fly, and Kraus begs Dick to screw her like a dog, as evidenced in this tawdry excerpt:

"I want to be your lapdog."

You're floating like you haven't really heard, so I repeat it: "Will you let me be your lapdog?"

"Okay," you say. "C'mere."

And then you ease me, small and Pekinese, 'til my hands are braced above your shoulders. My hair's all over.

"If you want to be my lapdog let me tell you what to do. Don't move," you say. "Be very quiet."

Kraus doesn't prove to be a well-behaved lap dog, however-in fact, she quickly turns and bites the hand that fed her, which she accomplishes by pulling an old S&M trick: "topping from the bottom." By combining her self-inflicted abject status with a role as Native Agents editor, Kraus manages to thoroughly debase Dick, defame her husband Sylvere, and vindicate herself; alternating wretchedly between polarities of viciousness and self-deprecation, condoning the damage with the new-age-old alibi: "I'm a feminist and he pushed me first." The question: Does Kraus consider her intellectual/sexual abjection erotic?

"I watch you feel my tits and we both watch my nipples as they get hard. Later on, you run your index finger across the outside of my cunt, not into it. It's very wet, a Thing Observed, and later still I think about the act of witnessing and the Kierkegaardian third remove. Sex with you is so phenomenally ... sexual ..."

How profound. Yet, one wonders what cold remove was in Kraus's eyes, as she observed Dick fucking her. Did she keep a careful bead on his every move, as if calculating, weighing, anticipating the moment she would write it all down? To my mind, there is only one thing worse than a sexual adventurist, and that's a sexual adventurist who schemes all along to write about the object of his/her carnal and literary desire. Aside from hashing and (re)hashing her ill-fated sexual encounter with Dick, Kraus also performs a similar vivisection on her festering marriage with French intellectual and Semiotext(e) publisher Sylvere Lotringer. In this aspect, the role of Lotringer in the book is interesting, in that Dick is not the only phallic (read: intellectual) figure Kraus seeks to displace. This Lotringer, it seems, is deeply in love with Kris (go figure), yet Lotringer and Dick alike enjoy the heady pleasures of being invested by Kraus with the same phallic power she seeks to destroy.

What it comes down to in terms of narrative is this: Kraus only gives Dick and Sylvere Lotringer marginal representation as characters, squeezed in between paragraphs of unrelenting name-dropping and self-congratulatory memoirs; "the bullying yet masturbatory quality of excessive monologue," as a friend of mine put it.

Furthermore, Kraus' attempt to convince us she is schizophrenic as a justification for her vindictive enterprise just doesn't work (real schizophrenics don't keep day planners and write art reviews). And it's not as if Dick is a truly famous potentate, anyway-in fact, most of the people who will recognize his name in the book are the people who know him best-which only sharpens the hurtful power of Kraus' work. Perhaps, the moral of this post-modern-post-Victorian tragedy is: Be careful of the Editors who want to screw you-they have the power to publish a character assassination about you later, and might not bother to change your name.

A final concession, however: I must admit that "I Love Dick" does rip open some fascinating psychosexual wounds, revealing beckoning panoramas of a seething unconscious. Spelunking down the chasm of Kraus's emotional/intestinal maelstrom feels like Alice falling down the rabbit hole of rationalism, and the reader will glimpse the inner workings of an author's calculated madness; castration, greed, naked ambition, raw ego. Laboring in the intestines of Kraus' literary Crohn's Disease, we see the inflamed bowels of her existence, with its scope of hatred and rage focused on Dick.

"You freaked. 'But that's my NAME!' you howled into the phone. And then you'd told me how, when you were writing your first book, you worked so hard to protect the people who you wrote about by concealing their identities. 'And those were people who I loved,' you'd said. 'You don't even know me.'"

Is it mere coincidence then, at the end of the book, the reader feels as if they never really knew Dick at all? I doubt it. Kraus promised us all along we wouldn't have to.

'Dear Dick,

Well, the "tempest in a teapot" seems to've passed without your entering it, which's fine by me. What is it we've been doing here over the last few days? I've been in limbo since disengaging emotionally from the movie and when this THING - the "crush" - came up, it seemed interesting to try and deal with dumb infatuation in a self-reflexive way. The result: 80 pages of unreadable correspondence in about 2 days.'

Apparently, there was no choice for Kraus but to expand the 80 pages of 'unreadable correspondence' to 274 pages, and use her own leverage as an editor to publish it. It is a sad footnote that Kraus's novel blemishes an otherwise distinctive list of Semiotext(e) works, such as "Hannibal Lecter, My Father," by Kathy Acker, and "Walking Through Clear Water In A Pool Painted Black," by Cookie Mueller.

LETTERS IN RESPONSE TO DICK REVIEW:

Dear Editor:

Jillian St Jacques' review completely misses the point. I Love Dick is hardly a "character massacre" or "literary gang-bang" as the writer asserts. St. Jacques is a poor sport here, passing with pretentious acumen her idle judgments on a novel that she obviously doesn't have the intelligence to understand. Or is she so immersed in her sympathy for Dick, marginally represented character that he is, that she can't see the hatred and rage she accuses Chris Kraus of focusing on Dick, poor fellow, is really her own (St. Jacques') focused for whatever reason on Kraus? How could CUPS mistake such a personal attack on a writer for a book review?

Lena Salazar
Pasadena, California

My Response:

How easy it must be for Salazar to trivialize my critique of "I Love Dick" by saying that I'm "not intelligent enough" to understand it. What's there to understand? If there's anything else, Salazar (and Kraus) neglect to mention it. The real irony of the media hooha surrounding the Kraus novel is the lengths her friends will go through to defend it, accusing critics of "personally attacking" Kraus, as opposed to her novel. I find it revealing that Semiotext(e) publisher and Kraus husband Sylvere Lotringer called the Cups offices recently, ranting about my "personal attack" on Kraus. Since when has Kraus become a martyr? Can't she speak for herself? Kraus is no stranger to criticism, and she certainly made her intentions obvious when she penned "I Love Dick." Nonetheless, Salazar, Lotringer, and all other defenders of the SemioAcademy who are rushing to Kraus' "defense" are begging the question: What is Kraus' novel, if not a personal attack on "Dick", a real-time colleague who failed to return Kraus' turgid affections? I find it humorous that Kraus is being construed as a victim in all this, after she abused her editorship in such a manner. The fact remains: Aside from the incestuous gossip circle "I Love Dick" has spawned, Kraus' novel has negligible literary substance.