Engleberton Crabferry
Reader
This is an old forum. The search function is quite basic, so apologies if it's already here, but I've looked everywhere and I can't find any "dick"!
Since it was published so long ago (in 1997), I find it hard to believe nobody's written anything. It’s a shame because I love dick. Or rather, I love I Love Dick. And I'm only a few pages in.
The Guardian calls Kraus’ book "the most important [book] about men and women in the last century” and I get the feeling by the end I might agree.
The eponymous protagonist is, for the first 20 pages, largely absent. He is referred to only by Chris (that is, Chris Kraus, the book's author, who is also the book's chief protagonist), a struggling arthouse movie-maker, and by Chris's elder lover, Sylvère, a professor of poststructuralist discourse at a New York university.
Dick is also a professor, and a friend of Sylvère's; a cowboy, a rogue, whom Chris and Sylvère encounter one evening, and whose house the two go back to and spend the night, whose presence lends an air of mystique, and who spawns the first hint of sexual arousal for Chris, since she and Sylvère stopped making love, 7 years ago.
Chris is 39. Sylvère is 56. A point worth remembering.
It is impossible to ignore the fact that Dick emerges at the approach of Chris' middle-age, and at the 7 year mark of her and Sylvère's abstinence. It is impossible to ignore the implication that Dick, the character, is thereby a stand-in for dick, the phallus (or rather, to be highfalutin - and in the spirit of the text - a stand-in for "phallocentric discourse", the spectre of the chauvinist impulse still present in the codified pleansantries of finance, politics, cinema, working life, and in this case, the university as an institution).
After their strange night at Dick's, both Chris and Sylvère find themselves writing (and then re-writing) various letters to their antagonist, who now won't return their calls. Imagined or remembered encounters with Dick seem only to be possible (for Chris) by way of reference to film or cultural artefact.
Of their initial meeting, she says: "... the night unfolds like the boozy Christmas Eve in Eric Rhomer's film My Night At Maud’s".
Of the time Dick left early in the morning without saying anything, she recites a poem by Barbara Barg:
What do you do with a Kerouac
But go back and back to the sack
With Jack
How do you know when Jack has come?
You look on your pillow and
Jack has gone...
After Sylvére refers to a love interest of Dick's as a "bimbo", Chris writes a new letter to Dick, stating: "Dear Dick, since Sylvère wrote the first letter, I'm thrown into this weird position. Reactive - like Charlotte Stant to Sylvère's Maggie Verver, if I were living in the Henry James novel The Golden Bowl - The Dumb Cunt, a factory of emotions evoked by all men..."
And whilst Dick is this arousing, thought-provoking, pseudo-empowering animus for Chris and her cultural intellect, he is for Sylvère (inevitably, perhaps) a cause of jealousy.
When Dick refuses to correspond with them, Sylvère becomes angry.
He writes: "Dear Dick... I think you've won. I'm totally obsessed with you [...] What do you think of that Dick? [...] I can't afford to be caught carrying a gun. But it's time to put an end to this craziness. You can't go messing people's lives up like this".
Sylvère's outburst about Dick is, in turn, directly followed by the suggestion that, since Dick's appearance, he has "never been so prolific. After plodding along at a rate of about 5 pages a week on Modernism & The Holocaust he's exhilirated by how fast the words accrue".
Dick is complicated. In a romance of disparate ages (between the younger Chris and the elder Sylvère), he is a momentary glimpse of sexual potency. For the younger female (Chris), he is understandable by way of an array of cultural moments (references to film, philosophy and literature which more often speak of the masculine improprieties inherent to gender imbalance). And for the elder, fading, male lover (Sylvère), he is an image of potency-lost and the mirage of masculine ideals.
On page 16, Chris Kraus describes herself-as-character as a "diehard feminist" and, whilst this (coupled with the books year and place of inception) may conjure images of the likes of Andrea Dworkin, who famously linked all pornography to rape and claimed that "all men are rapists", the feminist of Kraus' text is of another, more enlightening kind. Kraus is greatly sympathetic to men, critical of the phallus as a cultural symbol of inequality; critical of the system, but endearing to all. It is only when Sylvère gives free reign to his anger at Dick, for example, that he is free and prolific in his writerly exegesis of the holocaust (an historical moment that is, if anything, a by-product of militant phallocentric nationalism).
The question the text asks of us, so far, is: "Who's independent?" (borrowing a line from Sauve Qui Peut / Every Man for Himself): "The maid? The bureaucrat? The banker? No!" ... "In late capitalism, was anyone truly free?"
So far (20 pages in), so good.
Since it was published so long ago (in 1997), I find it hard to believe nobody's written anything. It’s a shame because I love dick. Or rather, I love I Love Dick. And I'm only a few pages in.
The Guardian calls Kraus’ book "the most important [book] about men and women in the last century” and I get the feeling by the end I might agree.
The eponymous protagonist is, for the first 20 pages, largely absent. He is referred to only by Chris (that is, Chris Kraus, the book's author, who is also the book's chief protagonist), a struggling arthouse movie-maker, and by Chris's elder lover, Sylvère, a professor of poststructuralist discourse at a New York university.
Dick is also a professor, and a friend of Sylvère's; a cowboy, a rogue, whom Chris and Sylvère encounter one evening, and whose house the two go back to and spend the night, whose presence lends an air of mystique, and who spawns the first hint of sexual arousal for Chris, since she and Sylvère stopped making love, 7 years ago.
Chris is 39. Sylvère is 56. A point worth remembering.
It is impossible to ignore the fact that Dick emerges at the approach of Chris' middle-age, and at the 7 year mark of her and Sylvère's abstinence. It is impossible to ignore the implication that Dick, the character, is thereby a stand-in for dick, the phallus (or rather, to be highfalutin - and in the spirit of the text - a stand-in for "phallocentric discourse", the spectre of the chauvinist impulse still present in the codified pleansantries of finance, politics, cinema, working life, and in this case, the university as an institution).
After their strange night at Dick's, both Chris and Sylvère find themselves writing (and then re-writing) various letters to their antagonist, who now won't return their calls. Imagined or remembered encounters with Dick seem only to be possible (for Chris) by way of reference to film or cultural artefact.
Of their initial meeting, she says: "... the night unfolds like the boozy Christmas Eve in Eric Rhomer's film My Night At Maud’s".
Of the time Dick left early in the morning without saying anything, she recites a poem by Barbara Barg:
What do you do with a Kerouac
But go back and back to the sack
With Jack
How do you know when Jack has come?
You look on your pillow and
Jack has gone...
After Sylvére refers to a love interest of Dick's as a "bimbo", Chris writes a new letter to Dick, stating: "Dear Dick, since Sylvère wrote the first letter, I'm thrown into this weird position. Reactive - like Charlotte Stant to Sylvère's Maggie Verver, if I were living in the Henry James novel The Golden Bowl - The Dumb Cunt, a factory of emotions evoked by all men..."
And whilst Dick is this arousing, thought-provoking, pseudo-empowering animus for Chris and her cultural intellect, he is for Sylvère (inevitably, perhaps) a cause of jealousy.
When Dick refuses to correspond with them, Sylvère becomes angry.
He writes: "Dear Dick... I think you've won. I'm totally obsessed with you [...] What do you think of that Dick? [...] I can't afford to be caught carrying a gun. But it's time to put an end to this craziness. You can't go messing people's lives up like this".
Sylvère's outburst about Dick is, in turn, directly followed by the suggestion that, since Dick's appearance, he has "never been so prolific. After plodding along at a rate of about 5 pages a week on Modernism & The Holocaust he's exhilirated by how fast the words accrue".
Dick is complicated. In a romance of disparate ages (between the younger Chris and the elder Sylvère), he is a momentary glimpse of sexual potency. For the younger female (Chris), he is understandable by way of an array of cultural moments (references to film, philosophy and literature which more often speak of the masculine improprieties inherent to gender imbalance). And for the elder, fading, male lover (Sylvère), he is an image of potency-lost and the mirage of masculine ideals.
On page 16, Chris Kraus describes herself-as-character as a "diehard feminist" and, whilst this (coupled with the books year and place of inception) may conjure images of the likes of Andrea Dworkin, who famously linked all pornography to rape and claimed that "all men are rapists", the feminist of Kraus' text is of another, more enlightening kind. Kraus is greatly sympathetic to men, critical of the phallus as a cultural symbol of inequality; critical of the system, but endearing to all. It is only when Sylvère gives free reign to his anger at Dick, for example, that he is free and prolific in his writerly exegesis of the holocaust (an historical moment that is, if anything, a by-product of militant phallocentric nationalism).
The question the text asks of us, so far, is: "Who's independent?" (borrowing a line from Sauve Qui Peut / Every Man for Himself): "The maid? The bureaucrat? The banker? No!" ... "In late capitalism, was anyone truly free?"
So far (20 pages in), so good.