“Being in love with you and choosing this trip made me feel like I was sixteen, in a leather jacket, huddled in a corner with my friends. A timeless image, damn it. It's about not giving a damn or recognizing the consequences of something and doing it despite everything, says a fragment of “I Love Dick”, the novel that Rosalía recently appeared to be reading on her Instagram.
Every now and then, Chirs Kraus's iconic novel seems to breathe new life. When it was first published in 1997, the novel was ridiculed and reduced to a scandalous novel, but it took almost ten years for the first edition to sell out. It was only years later that Semiotext(e) – one of the most influential independent publishers in the United States, where the author continues to serve as editor – republished it in 2006 and from that moment on a younger generation discovered it and adopted it as Symbol of feminism. Also adapted into an entertaining television series directed by Joey Soloway (available on Amazon Prime) and republished in Spain a little over a year ago by Alpha Decay, its family of readers is now increasingly popular, from the author Gabriela Wiener (the one writes). interesting prologue in this latest edition in Spanish) to the filmmaker Lena Dunham or the famous Catalan singer.
When “I Love Dick” was first published, it was perceived as a kind of veiled autobiography about Chris Kraus' obsession with the British sociologist and cultural critic Dick Hebdige (author of books such as “Subculture: The Meaning of Style”). The novel tells the story of how the author falls in love with the charismatic theorist in the mid-1990s and how she and her then husband, the renowned university professor Sylvère Lotringer, begin an exchange of letters between them, which gives free rein to the romance you imagine Dick and how she later decides to pursue her object of desire across the United States.
While Kraus's biographical details in the book are those of the author herself when she wrote it (she only changed the details about Dick before publication to protect him), it is clear that her intention goes beyond that. She goes beyond the purely personal (as the author herself argues throughout the novel), which, as Annie Ernaux also said about her lover in “Pure Passion,” is not a book about “him,” not even about herself. “You uses Dick for the speech. She uses Dick for release. She uses Dick for revenge. She uses Dick to build theory. And beauty. And what it denounces is many things,” says Wiener in the prologue.
Several decades would pass before Dick was not the focus of the debate, but rather everything that “Dick” represents and triggers for the author. Why I Love Dick (the theme of the original title in English is very revealing) is a novel in which the author's “I” replaces “Dick” as the dominant term, in which he is simply a reason for her to find her own Voice to actually write to yourself. “I suppose that in a way I have killed you…You have become Dear Diary…” the author writes in a passage in the book.
The writer, in 2019.Christine Olsson / ALAMY STOCK / CORDON PRESS
Like the character in the novel, Kraus was a frustrated artist nearing her 40th birthday at the time she wrote it. Her work as a filmmaker could not find distribution in New York. “Gravity and Grace” (the film inspired by the work of Simone Weil, which she repeatedly mentions in the book) was her last film attempt and was rejected several times at important international festivals such as Berlin. As a partner of Sylvère Lotringer, a well-known cultural theorist and professor at Columbia University, Kraus felt truly overwhelmed by his aura and invisible in the circles of intellectuals with whom they interacted. Kraus, also an editor at the label founded by Lotringer, wanted to do something for herself and decided to take a job as a teacher at the Art Center in Pasadena offered to her by a friend and move to Los Angeles. But shortly before this happened, Kraus and her husband had dinner one evening in December 1994 with his professional colleague Dick Hebdige. And this is where Chris Kraus' story begins.
Beyond the scope of the correspondence between reality and fiction in the book (as Joan Hawkins says in the afterword to the latest edition of Alpha Decay, it is difficult to know whether certain things Kraus recounts really happened), this is truly revolutionary , how The author uses Dick in the search for the “I” and that this performative “I” becomes a universal subject. Ultimately, what Kraus tells in the book has almost nothing to do with Dick, whether or not he responds to the letters sent to him, he is merely a vehicle for something that manages to transcend the individual. Above all, “I Love Dick” is a novel about so-called female empowerment (however cliché that may seem today), about a woman who not only tries to find the meaning of her life, but also decides to to give it meaning. Kraus uses Dick to break through schemata – social, literary and academic – and speak freely about the experience of desire, love, sex, female degradation, their connection to madness and relationships. Of all this with power, writing and its transformative ability.
Alpha Decay has released “I Love Dick”.
“If women have failed to make 'universal' art because we are caught up in the 'personal', then why shouldn't we universalize the 'personal' and make it the subject of our art?” To ask this question, to be willing “To live it is still daring,” writes Kraus, quoting the American artist Hannah Wilke. And in this question, in the question of why literature written by women continues to be questioned as if it were a genre in its own right, lies one of the reasons why “I Love Dick” is still worth reading today. deeply insightful.