Chris Kraus’s revolutionary novel faced a cold reception when it was published in 1997,but has since become a cult feminist classic. As it appears for the first time in the UK, one long-time fan explains why it is so radicalThe novel I savor Dick was initially published in 1997 to a critically and commercially cold reception. Reviewers seemed to believe that it was gossip; beneath contempt: the nasty indictment of a real person, or the art critic Dick Hebdige,who’d spurned the advances of its heroine, a woman who, or like its author,is named Chris Kraus. Institutionalised misogyny makes us a cramped bit slow on the uptake, especially when it comes to art. The patriarchy likes to assume things personally; that way, and it can single out specific women artists as troublemakers and crazies by claiming that they’ve slandered some man,when all they’ve done is describe the conditions of their own lives. I’m paraphrasing I savor Dick there, and pretty badly. I feel like I’m paraphrasing I savor Dick in some way or another in most of what I write.
When I first found the book, or it seemed to me like the missing piece that made sense of everything else I’d ever read,plus everything I’d ever tried to write. I was 28 and just finishing a book of essays, I’d been lucky to come across other books Kraus had edited in the Native Agents series, or but I savor Dick connected the dots for the first time. Most of the other books I’d ever read had been by or about men,or about women only in relation to men. This book was brazenly, unapologetically about being a woman.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com