I Love Dick is divided into two parts. Part One: Scenes from a Marriage lays out the parameters of the love story—the unifying emotional and narrative device of the book. It reads, the late Giovanni Intra writes, “like Madame Bovary as if Emma had written it.” Certainly, Madame Bovary is the literary analogue that Chris and her husband Sylvère use. In one memorable segment, Sylvère writes to “Dick” about his wife, “Emma,” and signs himself “Charles.” “Dear Dick, This is Charles Bovary” (110–112). Chris joins in the conceit when she tells the reader, in an expositional aside, that “sex with Charles did not replace Dick for Emma” (113).
But Madame Bovary isn’t the only literary reference. “I’m thrown into this weird position,” Chris tells Dick in her first letter to him. “Reactive—like Charlotte Stant to Sylvère’s Maggie Verver, if we were living in the Henry James novel—The Golden Bowl” (26–27). And when he’s not thinking of Flaubert, Sylvère refers to Chris’ infatuation with Dick as the ’90s equivalent of a Marivaux comedy. But since much of the plot is driven by letters, written by a couple who are attempting to seduce a third party into some kind of love-art projet, the book also bears a slight resemblance to Liaisons Dangereuses. Like LD, I Love Dick is self-reflexive as hell, as Sylvère and Chris continually critique and comment upon each other’s prose, arguments, and plot-lines. Like LD, I Love Dick establishes a fictional territory where adolescent obsession and middle-aged perversity overlap and intersect, a territory where the relationship between “always for the first time” and a sort of jaded “here we go again” can be explored (in one letter Chris even refers to herself and Sylvère as “libertines,” a term that invokes both Laclos and Sade). And, as in LD where the relationship between Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil is the one that really counts, the most compelling and enduring relationship in I Love Dick is between the two people who initially seem to have grown a little too used to one another. As one perceptive critic observes, the reader-voyeur ultimately cares less about whether Chris sleeps with Dick than whether she stays with Sylvère (Anne-Christine D’Adesky, The Nation, 1998).
For anyone who likes to read literature, I Love Dick is a good read. But the literary references should also cue us to the textual savvy of the people who populate the piece. These are people who dig each other’s references (32), who analyze and critique each other’s prose, who are very aware that the literary form itself “dictate[s] that Chris end up in Dick’s arms” (67). So it’s strange that critics have tended to treat I Love Dick as more of a memoir than fiction, as an old-fashioned text which we could read as though the past twenty years of literary theory about the signifying practices of language had never happened.
“There’s no way of communicating with you in writing,” Sylvère writes to Dick at one point, “because texts, as we all know, feed upon themselves, become a game” (73). And it’s this self-cannibalizing, self-reproducing, viral and ludic quality of language and text that critics seem to have largely ignored in writing about the book.
I Love Dick opens with the account of an evening Chris Kraus, “a 39-year-old experimental filmmaker,” and her husband Sylvère Lotringer, “a 56-year-old college professor from New York,” spend with “Dick…an English cultural critic who’s relocated from Melbourne to Los Angeles” (19). Dick, “a friendly acquaintance of Sylvère’s,” is interested in inviting Sylvère to give a lecture and a couple of seminars at his school (19). Over dinner, Kraus writes, “the two men discuss recent trends in postmodern critical theory and Chris, who is no intellectual, notices Dick making continual eye contact with her” (19). The radio predicts snow on the San Bernadino Highway and Dick generously invites the couple to spend the night at his house. “Back at Dick’s, the night unfolds like the boozy Christmas Eve in Eric Rohmer’s film My Night at Maud’s,” Kraus notes (20). Dick inadvertently plays an embarrassing phone machine message left for him by a young woman, with whom “things didn’t work out” (22). Sylvère and Chris “come out” as a monogamous hetero-married couple. Dick shows them a videotape of himself dressed as Johnny Cash, and Chris notices Dick is flirting with her. Chris and Sylvère spend the night on Dick’s sofabed. When they wake up the next morning, Dick is gone.
Over breakfast at the Antelope IHOP, Chris informs Sylvère that the flirtatious behavior she shared with Dick the previous night amounts to a “Conceptual Fuck” (21). Because Sylvère and Chris are no longer having sex, Kraus tells us, “the two maintain their intimacy via deconstruction: i.e. they tell each other everything” (21). Chris tells Sylvère that Dick’s disappearance invests the flirtation “with a subcultural subtext she and Dick both share: she’s reminded of all the fuzzy one-time fucks she’s had with men who’re out the door before her eyes are open” (21). Sylvère, “a European intellectual, who teaches Proust, is skilled in the analysis of love’s minutiae” (25). He buys Chris’ interpretation of the evening, and for the next four days the two do little else but talk about Dick.
The couple starts collaborating on billets-doux to Dick. At first they just share the letters with each other, but as the pile grows to 50 then 80 then 180 pages, they begin discussing some kind of Sophie Calle-like art piece, in which they would present the manuscript to Dick. Perhaps hang the letters on the cactus and shrubs in front of his house and videotape his reaction. Perhaps Sylvère should read from the letters during his Critical Studies Seminar when he visits Dick’s school in March? “It seems to be a step towards the kind of confrontational performing art that you’re encouraging,” he writes in one of his darker notes to Dick (43). When Chris finally does give the letters to Dick, “things get pretty weird” (162). But by that time, the letters have become an art form in and of themselves, a means to something that has almost nothing to do with Dick.
“Think of language as a signifying chain,” Chris writes, referencing Lacan (233). And here you can literally see the signifying chain at work, as Chris’ letters to Dick open up to include essays on Kitaj, schizophrenia, Hannah Wilke, the Adirondacks, Eleanor Antin, and Guatemalan politics. “Dear Dick,” she writes at one point, “I guess in a sense I’ve killed you. You’ve become Dear Diary…” (90).
If Chris has metaphorically “killed” Dick by turning him into “Dear Diary,” Dick—when he finally writes back—erases Chris. Despite the fact that he appears to have had sex with her at least twice and has shared several lengthy conversations (“long distance bills fill the gaps left in my diaries,” she writes at one point, 230), he continually maintains that he doesn’t know her and that her obsession with him is based solely on “two genial but not particularly intimate or remarkable meetings spread out over a period of years” (260). At the close of the book, as almost every reviewer notes, Dick finally responds by writing directly to Sylvère but not Chris. “In the letter,” Anne-Christine d’Adesky writes,
he misspells her name as Kris, and seems mostly concerned with salvaging his damaged relationship with Sylvère. He expresses regret, discomfort, and anger at being the objet d’amour in their private game and clearly hopes they won’t publish the correspondence as is. ‘I do not share your conviction that my right to privacy has to be sacrificed for the sake of that talent,’ he tells Lotringer. To Chris, he is more curt, sending only a xeroxed copy of the letter he wrote to her husband. It’s a breathtaking act of humiliation, an unambiguous Fuck You.