Avery Arlene Wayne

Last Thursday, I showed face at the Connecticut Boygenius concert. Blah blah blah. “Emily I’m Sorry” was good and I cried. I found Phoebe Bridgers’ caterwauling much less arresting than the gaggle of seventeen year olds sitting one aluminum bench behind me. Their muddy Converses grazed my shoulder while they chattered about their eye doctors, and how the nineteen year old seniors at their high school are practically geriatric. 

Nineteen and geriatric in the same sentence would probably alarm some of my most existential friends, the ones who turned twenty this year and went non-verbal during birthday-cake-cutting, the ones prone to panic attacks about the relentless passage of time. And yes, I’ll probably get freaked when I turn twenty-three—shave my head, or get some other call-for-help body modification—but I have no issue with blowing out the candles for the time being. I feel that the further I get from high school the better, especially after eavesdropping on this girl Liz talk over Lucy Dacus about her Snapchat response time woes. For one and a half songs she commiserated about how, after sending a photo of herself, this quote unquote “creative” named Jacob—I think that just means he owns a skateboard—took eleven entire hours to respond. And the boy didn’t even chat her! Half a face!!!!!! (Imagine a picture snapped in a history classroom, some purple-yellow world map with rusty pushpins on all four corners, South America partially obscured by shaggy blonde hair and a fraction of a forehead.)

Yeah, yeah, I’m getting to the book review. Did you ever use Snapchat? Because I deleted it finally, for real, forever a couple of months ago, but after that night I feel tempted to open it and remember the enormous amount of fucks I gave about guys who, instead of counting my Snapchat score and carefully noting whether/how long we had been Best Friends, were busy actually developing hobbies and a life of their own. Nothing has brought me back more viscerally to age fifteen than hearing Liz chat up a storm about the most minute of punctuation choices, hoping that if she analyzes and recalibrates and hypothesizes enough, eventually she will stumble upon the ultimate logic: this guy is actually IN LOVE with her!!!!!!!! YES, her friends chime in, furiously nodding, hunching towards each other in a semicircle: “he’s not responding to your texts because he’s just intimidated by you, you know.” The boy-craziness is a public health crisis. It’s an epidemic.

Am I the only one who identifies a little too intensely? Can you recall all the boys you were obsessed with in high school that never gave you a first glance, let alone a clipped nod in the hallway? Do you—like Liz, in what seemed to be an uncharacteristic spurt of vulnerability—feel like no one really understands how crushing heartbreak is, especially as a teenager who suffers no material consequences from a breakup? So read I Love Dick by Chris Kraus, which argues that tailspin love— infatuation? Obsession?—is worship, and that a shitty breakup (or just him not Snapchatting you back) is comparable to the Nietzschean death of God. Which sounds dramatic, but it is. And there is no solution, and Kraus knows that too— her point being that we’re basically all alone, and we are all human, and women are humans even if they’re wrecks over an unremarkable guy who reads theory, and that through heartbreak we become ourselves. Plus, along the way she manages to establish female emotion as a valid subject of academic inquiry, and to settle the autofiction-as-valid-or-not debate (TLDR: the critique of autofiction is gendered and autofiction as a concept is nonexistent. Read some Deleuze! Life is not personal!)

I’m getting ahead of myself. The premise of I Love Dick, one bombastic experiment of fiction, cultural criticism, and performance art, is that experimental filmmaker Chris meets an academic named Dick, and ruthlessly pursues him for the rest of the book despite his frequent and crushing rejections of her. Much of the book is made up of letters or transcribed conversations, and constantly feints-and-parries between past and present, first and third person (in other words, all the big fiction no-nos!). Kraus uses the word postmodernism enough that she eventually abbreviates it to “po-mo”, liberally sprinkles in fifty cent vocabulary like “apocryphal” and “elegiac”, and is obsessed with quoting Weil’s Gravity and Grace, which also happens to be the inspiration for (and title of) the narrator’s failed experimental film that is half a decade in the making. 

The tone is, if possible, even more unconventional. The narrator expresses crushing heartbreak and abjection with a disarming, pop-culture-saturated film of irony. Raunchy sex jokes (see the title), or diatribes about how wet Chris is on the phone with her love interest, are interspersed with meditations on the Bhagavad Gita and her husband’s fancy French theory on the teleology of narrative. But the tone actually lays the groundwork for the rest of the book, all of the fancy shit I mentioned earlier; Kraus is expertly employing Kierkegaard’s third remove, “using artifice to strip artifice of artifice”, using irony to to validate female emotion in the only way that readers can accept it. Consider: would anyone—not to mention anyone in the art world, all of whom are obsessed with Kraus and her oeuvre—read this book that is basically 200 or so straight pages about how bad a woman wants a man without a deep sense of irony? “We are all more progressive than that,” they chuckle, wearing black turtlenecks. The ultimate effect, though, is that where a completely genuine account of this romantic chase would be annoying and gooey and sentimental and relegated to the chick section of the bookstore (you know, with the cowboy sex books and the medieval sex books), we can take Chris seriously because we know that she doesn’t take herself completely seriously. Artifice stripping artifice of artifice. It’s through this, the tone, joking-or-is-she, that Kraus establishes female emotion as worthy of academic theory, worthy of our time and attention and the $5.50 I spent on this book at Grey Matter… because once she gets us reading, we won’t be able to stop and then suddenly we’re 100 pages in, admitting the genius of this narrator, this author who just LOVES DICK and NEEDS us to know ALL about it! Suddenly, we are slower to laugh at the cowboy sex books. We’re reading a book about dick. And I’m writing a long ass review about it. Where does that leave us?

Hooked. Which is when we start dawning on Chris’s point, fleshed out piecemeal and with nuance (no metaphor beaten like a dead horse): DICK IS GOD. Like yes, he’s a real person within the world of the book, described as having red hair and a pasty face and cowboy boots, but the narrator makes it clear that, as Chris’s crush spirals into obsession, dick—the man, the body part, and dick as synecdoche for men in general—becomes a God figure for her, one that becomes increasingly abstracted the deeper she falls int worship. Consider this conversation that Chris has with her husband, shortly after her first meeting with Dick the academic:

“S: Chris, what sort of strange zone are we entering? To write to him is one thing but now we’re writing to each other. Has Dick been a means of getting us to talk, not to each other but to someTHING?

C: You mean that Dick is God.

S: No, maybe Dick never existed.”

Nietzsche defines God as a psychological salve, allowing us to believe that some huge man in the sky will eventually right the wrongs perpetrated against us and the rest of mankind, that there is a point to loss and suffering, and that no matter how much despair we withstand, there will be some cosmic reward waiting for us in the end. We are trying to escape suffering through belief in an unknowable entity; we want to believe that someone is hearing us. And while the argument that follows—instead of believing in a God, we should believe in our own individual capacity for success and individual goal-setting, that we are not all morally equal, and equality begets mediocrity— is not completely to my liking and way beyond the scope of this itty bitty review, I do think that Nietzsche’s concept of religious belief, and the death of it, is a peculiarly apt framework to place the quintessentially teenage experience of falling head over heels and then getting your skull cracked open on concrete. Like, in your pursuit to establish identity in the early aughts of your life, and as an effort to make sense of the insanely chaotic and messy social reality you have been born into, it makes sense to try to find someone who really hears you and latch on to them. It is easier to tailor/develop yourself in relation to one person than to build an identity in relation to multiple. And inevitably that person becomes your God because no matter what suffering you are experiencing in the rough and tender project of self-invention, there is someone to come home to. (“To be in love with someone means believing that to be in someone else’s presence is the only means of being, completely, yourself.” OUCH!)

Of course, once you begin to think of another human being as static, a constant variable in your world that you can always measure yourself against, you deny their humanity. You put them on a pedestal, and invest your youth, time, and energy into the idea of someone rather than the person themselves. You stall your own self-development in an attempt to maintain their affection, to stay static for them too. You worship love, and the object of your affection slowly becomes Love’s Platonic ideal, not a random guy who sleeps and breathes and shits. THEY BECOME YOUR GOD, and if Nietzsche says that God dies when there is no good reason to believe that God exists, Dick’s brutal denial of Chris  and her subsequent depression can be likened to the Nietzschean death of God, where through her idolatry,she is the one who has killed him. See this quote: “Dick… you are a vehicle of escape… I want to move outside the limits of myself (a quirky failure in the art world), to exercise mobility.” Using a guy to forget yourself, and losing yourself in worship so that you can avoid your own pain, suffering, and shortcomings. 

Or this: “‘Dear Dick,’ she wrote. ‘I guess in a sense I’ve killed you. You’ve become Dear Diary…’ She’d begun to realize something, though she didn’t think much of it at the time.”— She is beginning to realize the disastrous effects of romantic-love-worship, that by establishing Dick as her diary, as nothing more than a vacuum for her deepest personal reflections, as nothing more than the imaginary ANYONE she could be writing a love letter to, SHE IS KILLING THE REAL PERSON. This is a turning point: for the first hundred pages or so, she thinks she is genuinely in love with him. Here she really realizes that she is in love with another only to escape herself. (And recall the earlier part, where Chris’s husband says that maybe Dick never existed. He doesn’t, really, except as a projection of Chris’s desire to be heard, as a projection of an imaginary superhero that can save her from crushing existential ennui.)

Of course, the effects are disastrous— God has died, and Chris has killed him, and she knows that better than anyone. She comes close to committing suicide with grocery store scotch and generic painkillers; she has not been dry-eyed in months. (“For three weeks, I’d been bursting into tears so often it became a phenomenological question: at what point should we still say “crying” or instead describe the moments of “not-crying” as punctuation marks in a constant state of tears?”) 

This is a warning to readers: don’t take the expression “object of your affection” seriously! Don’t philosophize a person into a Platonic God-like ideal of perfection and understanding, because no one person can represent every best thing and no one person can understand/love you all the time! DON’T MAKE DICK YOUR GOD! Like, excuse the “This is Water” reference here—I don’t necessarily agree with the logic behind the speech in its entirety—but it’s helpful here. He says, “anything… you worship will eat you alive,” and while DFW uses the examples of money and beauty (you will never feel like you have enough, or you will always feel ugly), I think romantic love is the most potent false idol there is. Worship love by narrowing it into the puny body of one person and you make them into an idea; build a false god for yourself and he will always forsake you.

The easy way out of heartbreak and abjection is “FICTION” and “ART” in all-caps. And you might think that considering the narrator is an artist, she has been able to channel these deep feelings into mainstream success. WRONG! Kraus—and bravely so, considering this is a novel that we have all bought or at least gone to the effort of checking out from the library—doesn’t take this oh-so-easy escape hatch that reduces and erases for the sake of a happy ending. In this book, there is no easy shortcut. Her film doesn’t succeed as some sort of recompense for her heartbreak, and she is still considered a hack artist, known only for her connection with men she’s slept with. There is no unexpected character that comes out of the woodworks; she doesn’t fall in love again. No, she takes her losses and it SUCKS. And people in my English class love to talk about dogpiling on our characters and putting them through misery, but if that’s wrong than I don’t want to be right, because Kraus is then able to present heartbreak as a unique sort of pressure, not even a pressure that makes you stronger or better—screw that diamond analogy—but one that can allow you to become yourself. In this book, to be female isn’t to never feel pain but to open yourself up to all of its sharp edges, without necessarily coming out stronger on the other side.

In this respect, I Love Dick is ANTI-GIRLBOSS— the idea that women should be breaking glass ceilings all the time, that they can/SHOULD do anything and everything to achieve success. But that’s not a new idea. This book is so important because it is pro-desire. I.e., being a feminist DOESN’T HAVE TO MEAN “refusing to be a co-dependent fuck-up”. For Chris, the author and the narrator, it’s okay if your pretentious experimental film is a fiscal black whole, and you call yourself a feminist but you siphon money out of your husband’s checking account. You can have danced in a topless bar, prostrated yourself for a man’s attention for months and years without getting so much as a text back, and acted like a crazy bitch. Or, less extremely, you could have triple texted him, cried in the school bathroom because you saw him standing too close to a girl on the volleyball team, or spent hours crafting the response to a five word text. In any case, you are a full woman, not only despite these things but for them, and not just a full woman but a person too. In Eileen Myles’ words, “abjection… as the road out from failure. Into something bright and exalted, like presence”; Kraus imagines heartbreak and the death of God not as the end of a life, but a beginning.

(SIDE NOTE: Books like “Females” by Long Chu, which is decidedly anti-girlboss AND anti-desire, just leave you in a vacuum, because we can acknowledge that the girl-boss mentality is EXHAUSTING, duh, but when you add on the idea that all of our desires are related to the desires of other people, you can’t help but throw your hands up in exasperation. I can acknowledge that many of my actions are not truly my own but shaped against other people’s desires, but where does that leave me when I decide to where a miniskirt instead of basketball shorts because I like the way I look? Where does that leave me when I have a crazy stupid crush, and I can’t intellectualize the feeling away?)

This book jokingly sets out to “solve heterosexuality”, and that’s a tall order. But I know that when I look at my ex-boyfriend’s Instagram and get my Target pillowcases wet with crocodile tears, snot, and runny mascara, I think about Chris Kraus, and of the decades and centuries of dick-worship. Our gods die, and the version of us that existed in relation to them dies too. But without an escape route from self-invention, we have no choice but to find better things to worship—and not just ourselves, like Nietzsche encourages, but all of humanity. Near the end of the book, Kraus quotes Fassbinder, the quintessential film bro asshole who, for once, actually has something constructive to say:

“I detest the idea that love between two persons can lead to salvation. All my life I have fought against this oppressive type of relationship. Instead, I believe in searching for a kind of love that somehow involves all of humanity.”