Stories of New Narrative

September 16, 2017   •   By Jean-Thomas Tremblay

Writers Who Love Too Much

DODIE BELLAMY

IN CHRIS KRAUS’S I Love Dick, published in 1997 and excerpted at the end of the new anthology Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative 1977-1997, Chris, the protagonist, writes in her diary, “He asked me why I made myself so vulnerable. Was I a masochist? I told him No. ‘’Cause don’t you see? Everything that’s happened here to me has happened only cause I’ve willed it.’” The man to whom Chris refers is the titular Dick. Throughout Kraus’s electrifying semi-autobiographical novel, Chris writes Dick letters bursting with lust after they experience what she describes as a “Conceptual Fuck” (read: they flirt at a dinner party). Thematically and methodologically, I Love Dick emblematizes the late-20th-century avant-garde known as New Narrative. In typical New Narrative fashion, Kraus eroticizes everyday gestures and comportments. She pursues an abjection so overwhelming that it renders her writing restless, discomforting.

I Love Dick has recently transcended its word-of-mouth popularity, thanks in part to its adaptation by Jill Soloway and Sarah Gubbins into a TV series. In the endnotes to Writers Who Love Too Much, the editors, Dodie Bellamy and Kevin Killian, state that the series “marks the triumph of something.” Their statement made sense when they made it — between the series’s announcement and its premiere — but I Love Dick, the TV show, doesn’t hold up to such optimism. Bridget Read observes that the series diffuses the novel’s unbearable intimacy across a town — Marfa, Texas — “peopled by quirky, David Lynch-meets-Portlandiacharacters, who are somewhere between satirical and painfully earnest.” For Alexandra Schwartz, the show contorts the point of the book — that desire exists to be thwarted — into a will-they-or-won’t-they rom-com plot. The series’s creators never move beyond the trope of the “unlikable female protagonist.” They never move beyond what New Narrative takes for granted: that people are complex, flawed, that they hurt those they love. What’s more, Amazon, which produced I Love Dick, is one of the conglomerates responsible for the disappearance of independent establishments like Small Press Traffic, the bookstore that served as New Narrative’s cradle. The TV adaptation of I Love Dick operates as a test case for New Narrative: a probe into how much writing can be tweaked before what makes it New Narrative is wiped out. New Narrative isn’t in any fundamental way antithetical to popular appeal. However, I Love Dick, a show where characters always seem about to break the fourth wall and ask, “Am I not brave?!”, compromises New Narrative’s commitment, otherwise palpable throughout Writers Who Love Too Much, to an excess simply untamable, one that can’t be claimed righteously, one that just is what it is. New Narrative’s commitment is to loving too much.

New Narrative emerged from the San Francisco poetry scene of the 1970s and was fostered through the workshops Robert Glück led in collaboration with Bruce Boone. Part formal experimentation, part critical theory syllabus, and part gossip column, New Narrative borrows from highbrow and lowbrow cultures — from canonical literature and from television, popular music, and pornography. New Narrative writers also appropriate, with or without credit, each other’s work. Anecdotes on this practice abound: Bellamy was praised in a review for a passage lifted off from Gail Scott; Killian published under his name a poem that he didn’t remember David Steinberg had written. New Narrative flaunts its influences, past and present. And it intimates a context of production, a literary network, sometimes to the point of assimilating individual authorship into what Killian calls “the giant hive of activated writers buzzing all around the bookstore.”