But it’s also the appropriate literary conclusion to an adventure that was to some degree initiated by Sylvère. The first love letter in the book was written not by Chris but by her husband. And one of the things the “novel” unveils is the degree to which women in the classic Girardian triangle function as a conduit for a homosocial relationship between men as noted by Sedgwick. “Every letter is a love letter,” Lotringer writes at one point, and certainly his first letter to Dick reveals a desire for intimacy that exceeds the usual hetero-friendly-professional correspondence. “It must be the desert wind that went to our heads that night,” he writes, “or maybe the desire to fictionalize life… We’ve met a few times and I’ve felt a lot of sympathy towards you and a desire to be closer…” (26). The homosocial tone of the letter, as well as Sylvère’s fear that he sounds like a love-struck girl sets up “the game” as one of competition and intimacy between men. No wonder Chris—whose crush on Dick supposedly initiates the adventure—feels “reactive…the Dumb Cunt, a factory of emotions evoked by all the men” (27). When Dick finally writes, he reinforces Chris’ peripheral position. Ignoring everything that has passed between Dick and Chris, he responds to Sylvère’s initial letter to him, in language which illustrates—as d’Adesky notes—that he’s “mostly concerned with salvaging his damaged relationship with Sylvère.”
On the simplest level, then, I Love Dick is a more complicated piece of work than the reviews would indicate. Through the use of letters, taped phone conversations, and written exchanges between Chris and her husband, it deconstructs the classic heterosexual love triangle and lays bare the degree to which—even in the most enlightened circles—women continue to function as an object of exchange. By saying this, however, I don’t mean that it’s simply another illustration of Eve Sedgwick’s arguments in Between Men. Sylvère and Chris are too theoretically savvy to unproblematically present text/language as a transparency through which the real might be read. It’s never clear if the style of Sylvère’s letter is dictated by his feelings for Dick or by his awareness that the “form dictates” certain expressions of sentiment (67). What is clear is that “the real” is not exactly what interests Chris. “The game is real,” she tells Dick in her first letter, “or even better than, reality, and better than is what it’s all about” (28). Sylvère thinks Chris’ evocation of the hyper-real here is “too literary, too Baudrillardian.” But Chris insists. “Better than,” she writes, “means stepping out into complete intensity” (28). And it’s that intensity which Chris craves.
“Lived experience,” Félix Guattari writes in Chaosophy, “does not mean sensible qualities. It means intensification” (235). And while Kraus doesn’t quote Guattari until late in the text, his presence is already felt in the first letter. In fact, what’s interesting is Chris’ idea that you can somehow use Baudrillard’s notion of the hyper-real, the simulacrum, to get to Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of intensification. And that perhaps is the theoretical drive behind the entire project, as the letters and the simulacrum of a passion which receives little encouragement emerge as the truest and best way outside the virtual gridlock and into Deleuzian rematerialization of experience.
Given that Sylvère and Chris’ stated goals ARE the desire to fictionalize life and to surpass the real, it’s curious that the aspect of I Love Dick that is most frequently discussed in reviews is its connection to the banal, its status as a roman à clef. New York magazine revealed that the “Dick” of the book is Dick Hebdige, and rumor had it that Hebdige tried to block publication of I Love Dick by threatening to sue Kraus for invasion of privacy. As a result of this publicity entirely too much attention has been focused on Dick, who—as d’Adesky notes—remains “a mystery man” in the text itself. The fact that he doesn’t return messages, Chris points out, turns his answerphone, and to some extent the man himself, “into a blank screen onto which we can project our fantasies” (29). In an interview with Giovanni Intra, she has called Dick “every Dick…Uber Dick…a transitional object.”
Certainly he is Virtual Dick. It’s difficult to know whether certain things that Kraus describes in the book ever really happened. And Dick’s works, which at times are named and quoted in the book, are fictionalized. Real works are given fictitious titles and some quotes attributed to “Dick” appear to have been written by other people. This may have been done to further blur the real Dick’s identity and so avoid a lawsuit. The net effect, though, is curious, since the camouflage of Dick’s work continually refers back to Kraus and Lotringer themselves. In a postscript to one of Sylvère’s letters, Chris asks Dick to send a copy of his 1988 book, The Ministry of Fear (42; the “real” book is Hebdige’s Hiding in the Light). AND THEN THERE IS the reference Kraus makes to “Dick’s” Aliens & Anorexia, A NOVEL SHE WOULD PUBLISH THREE YEARS LATER. “And then in Aliens & Anorexia you wrote about your own physical experience, being slightly anorexic,” she writes. Then she quotes from “Dick’s” work:
If I’m not touched it becomes impossible to eat. Intersubjectivity occurs at the moment of orgasm: when things break down. If I’m not touched my skin feels like the flip side of a magnet. It’s only after sex sometimes that I can eat a little. (136)
Later she quotes again from “Dick’s book.”
Anorexia is an active stance. The creation of an involuted body. How to abstract oneself from food fluxes and the mechanical sign of the meal? Synchronicity shudders faster than the speed of light around the world. Distant memories of food: strawberry shortcake, mashed potatoes… (136) “This’s one of the most incredible things I’ve read in years,” she says. (137)
Dick Hebdige hasn’t written a book called Aliens & Anorexia, but Chris Kraus has. And I don’t know if Hebdige is slightly anorexic, but Kraus has written that she is. In Aliens, she WRITES
anorexia is not evasion of a social-gender role; it’s not regression. It is an active stance: the rejection of the cynicism that this culture hands us through its food, the creation of an involuted body… Synchronicity shudders faster than the speed of light around the world. Strawberry shortcake, mashed potatoes. (163)
The observations about food fluxes and the “mechanical sign of the meal” are a paraphrase of Deleuze—whom she quotes in Aliens (163). BUT the stuff about intersubjectivity appears to have been written specifically for Dick.
“Intersubjectivity occurs at the moment of orgasm,” Kraus writes IN Aliens, “when things break down.” But intersubjectivity in the text occurs through intertextuality, when distinctions between original and citation become blurred. The lines in Aliens & Anorexia aren’t attributed to “Dick.” Given the context, it’s hard to say who is quoting from whom, BUT MY guess is that Kraus attributes her own language to “Dick” in I Love Dick—and in that way acknowledges what she explicitly states elsewhere in the text. It is through her love for Dick that she begins to write, through her passion for him that she finds her own voice. And in that sense he can be seen as an “author” of her work. But this doubling up of language and self-referentiality is also an elaborate part of the “game”—a reminder that even (or perhaps “especially”) critical texts are unstable, are signifying chains which feed off themselves. Even critical texts can be/should be seen as “fiction.”