I Love Dick
Ratings9
Average rating3.8
15
Ratings9
Average rating3.8
A self-described failed filmmaker falls obsessively in love with her theorist-husband's colleague: a manifesto for a new kind of feminism and the power of first-person narration. In I Love Dick, published in 1997, Chris Kraus, author of Aliens & Anorexia, Torpor, and Video Green, boldly tore away the veil that separates fiction from reality and privacy from self-expression. It's no wonder that I Love Dick instantly elicited violent controversies and attracted a host of passionate admirers. The story is gripping enough: in 1994 a married, failed independent filmmaker, turning forty, falls in love with a well-known theorist and endeavors to seduce him with the help of her husband. But when the theorist refuses to answer her letters, the husband and wife continue the correspondence for each other instead, imagining the fling the wife wishes to have with Dick. What follows is a breathless pursuit that takes the woman across America and away from her husband and far beyond her original infatuation into a discovery of the transformative power of first person narrative. I Love Dick is a manifesto for a new kind of feminist who isn't afraid to burn through her own narcissism in order to assume responsibility for herself and for all the injustice in world and it's a book you won't put down until the author's final, heroic acts of self-revelation and transformation.
Reviews with the most likes.
This book is phenomenal. It's a story, a memoir, a commentary on art and an unconstrained critique of the patriarchy and the way women are portrayed or reviewed in the art world.
It's also cool to see how far we've come.
“It seemed strange that people would be interested in any conversation between such a homogenous crew: four straight white European men in their 50s, all divorced and now with childless younger women in their early 30s. “ (From the chapter “Add it up”).
The quote from the book here is no longer a very new statement, now it's become the norm to question a panel where the members are all white straight males.
The book is really a sort of reflective spiralling into the mind of Chris. She falls in love with (the idea) of Dick. It's a hell of a ride.
I lost count of the bottles of wine it took me to get through this thing. I probably only finished it because it excused the wine.
I didn't finish this book, but I am finished reading this book. I decided to stop reading because I got bored with it, even though I know that's an unfair response. What does it mean to be bored with a piece of art that changed the world?
Let's take a look at what this book is, for a second. I think it's at least three things: it's a relationship memoir, it's an anti-novel that self-consciously inverts its tropes and standards, and it's a piece of postmodern cultural criticism that argues, for example, that the intellectual/inner life of women is so poorly represented in academia that the thought and critique must be contextualized and grounded in an individual's experience. I Love Dick was one of many pieces of art that was operating on this wavelength: the films of Jane Campion, Liz Phair, Mary Karr, etc. were all part of this zeitgeist. And they kind of won. Not a total victory, the patriarchy is alive and well and coming for your rights. But I think they did successfully expand what was “in bounds” regarding subjectivity, women's narratives, and deep structures of the patriarchy. That's part of why it's a little bit of a slog for me, reading in the present.
For example, the sloppy, confessional, raunchy and intellectual tone that must have been so refreshing when the novel (?) came out in the 90's has become the default tone of the feminist internet. Now that that tone is not as shocking, the callous way that she describes evicting her tenants, the “hicks” she lives around in various rural places across the country, and the mystical encounters she imagines with Guatemalan activists comes across as less savory, and out of step with the feminist conversations that are going on today.
In a similar vein, there are some clearly argued reasons why I Love Dick had to be written with real names and real ideas and real vulnerability. The part that hasn't aged so well is the aspect of it that is a comedy of manners among academics and artists–juice from a goose that's been cooked.
Anyway, if anything you've read about this book calls out to you, definitely go out and read it. But don't be surprised if the ways in which its dated leave you a little cold.
I kept reading for the study of infatuation, self, feminism but all the art world references and analyses went over my head. Women being self destructive while being public is a cool idea. “Performative philosophy.”
