Like I Love Dick, Torpor is beautifully written. Kraus has a way of ending paragraphs, shifting down into a statement so succinct it causes me to pause every time.
“In the months before she left Jerome,” Kraus writes, “she’d started writing love letters to a man who didn’t love her. In L.A. she continues writing to this man, and then she just continues writing” (280–281). Torpor confirms the promise of I Love Dick in a way that few prequels/sequels manage to do. If, like me, you find you love Chris—keep reading.
—D’Adesky, Anne-Christine. “I Love Dick (Book Reviews).” The Nation. June 1, 1998. —Guattari, Félix. Chaosophy. New York: Semiotext(e), 1995.
—Hebdige, Dick. Hiding in the Light. London, Routledge, 1989.
—Intra, Giovanni. “A Fusion of Gossip and Theory.” artnet.com Magazine. November 13, 1997. Accessed April 30, 2006: http://www.artnet.com/magazine_pre2000/index/intra/intra11–13-97.asp
—Kraus, Chris. Aliens & Anorexia. New York: Semiotext(e), 2000.
—Kraus, Chris. I Love Dick. New York: Semiotext(e), 1997.
—Kraus, Chris. Torpor. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2006.
—Kristeva, Julia. The Kristeva Reader. Ed. Toril Moi. New York: Columbia UP, 1986.
—de Laclos, Pierre. Les Liasons Dangereuse. New York: Doublday, 1998.
—Rosen, Steven J. Samuel Beckett and the Pessimistic Tradition. New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 1976.
—Sartre, Jean Paul. Nausea. Trans. Lloyd Alexander. New York: New Direction, 1964.
—Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men. New York: Columbia UP, 1985.
About the Author
CHRIS KRAUS is the author of the novels Aliens and Anorexia, I Love Dick, and Summer of Hate as well as Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness and Where Art Belongs. A Professor of Writing at the European Graduate School, she writes for various magazines and lives in Los Angeles.
PRAISE FOR I LOVE DICK
“I know there was a time before I read Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick (in fact, that time was only five years ago), but it’s hard to imagine; some works of art do this to you. They tear down so many assumptions about what the form can handle (in this case, what the form of the novel can handle) that there is no way to re-create your mind before your encounter with them”
“For years before I read it, I kept hearing about Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick. I mainly heard about it from smart women who liked to talk about their feelings… Then I read it. I was nearly two decades late to the party—I Love Dick came out in 1997—but I loved the party anyway. I was finally part of it, and it made me feel even more part of it—part of something—to have men making asinine comments on the 4 train, pointing at the cover: Good to know what you like! I knew I was holding white-hot text in my hands, written by a woman who had theorized what these guys were doing—with me, with their dick jokes—even before they’d done it. I Love Dick is a ‘novel’ about a woman named Chris Kraus and her unrequited, increasingly obsessive love for a cultural critic named Dick. (What I could have told those men on the subway: See? Dick is actually a cultural critic!) Kraus keeps writing to Dick, keeps calling Dick, even makes her husband a collaborator in her pursuit of Dick, and all the while keeps getting rebuffed by him. She brings us deep into the folds of her relentless pursuit—‘marching boldly into self-abasement,’ in the words of her friend, the poet Eileen Myles. She gives us female desire without shame or passivity, and follows abjection ‘into something bright and exalted, like presence’”
“Kraus’s I Love Dick is a written in a clear prose capable of theoretical clarity, descriptive delicacy, articulate rage and melancholic longing”
“[I Love Dick] changed my life… It explained the problem of heterosexuality to me in terms that I had never thought about before. I had been attracted to books by and about gay people or at least people with fluid sexuality for a long time, and had not spent much time thinking about why that was. Worlds without straight men appealed to me; I liked the idea that there could be narratives that didn’t operate on the presumption of women’s dependence on men for love, money, and support. I Love Dick was the first work of fiction I’d ever read that acknowledged that women who were attracted to men and wanted to have relationships with them were not going to somehow create relationships that existed outside of all existing economic and social structures; that women who love men are going to have to come to terms with their complicity in their own repression and subjugation, and find ways to address it. This is not all the book’s about, of course, but that was my first and most lasting takeaway”
“I Love Dick detonated something in me, but it’s been a slow demolition. With each quiet, contained blast I grow more sure that by recognizing our own billboards of desire and failure, and perhaps even finding some dignity there, we are also moving the culture towards the ‘subversive utopia’ that so many women, artists or not, hoped and hope for”
“An exploration of desire as something other than passivity or inadequacy and relentless romantic pursuit not as self-degradation but a kind of generative, creative act. Kraus is interested in the dynamics of exposure itself: why we judge acts of self-exposure as self-absorbed or needy, especially if they come from a woman; how any trace of the self can become a kind of shameful stink, the whiff of some failure of imagination or, worse yet, self-pity or self-aggrandizement”
“Chris Kraus’ first novel, I Love Dick, reads like Madame Bovary as if Emma had written it. Kraus spins out the Emma-syndrome of dissatisfied feminine boredom through a chronicle of the ’80s art world. Her book is a damningly intelligent form of ‘confessional’ literature, part love letter and part public document”
“Reading I Love Dick made me laugh—cry—but most importantly it made me think about all the important issues of our time, DESIRE, AGING—Dick is a mere backdrop for this provocative meditation—it’s edgy and deep”