Dear Chris Kraus & Ovid & Saul Bellow & Phaedra & Laclos & Moses Herzog & Jacques Derrida & Vicomte de Valmont & Kathy Acker

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‘Quid epistula lecta nocebit? / How could reading a letter harm you?’ Phaedra once put that question to Hippolytus in a letter that declared her forbidden love. Well, not Phaedra exactly. Let us get our facts right. Ovid, via Phaedra, put forward that question in his collection Epistulae Heroidum – poems, presented in the form of addressed letters, from the heroines of Greco-Roman mythology. It is a classical example of epistolary fiction: works that envelope the letter into their wider literary structure. Heroidum takes on the very form of the epistle: the tripartite structure of fictional writer, addressee and the body of the letter. And Phaedra’s question, of the power of the epistle to harm, taps into the central concerns of epistolary fiction: presence and absence, proximity and distance, revelation and secrecy, and the writing of women to men, men to women. How, indeed, can reading harm us?

In 1997, Chris Kraus was accused of ‘epistolary stalking’ in the New York Magazine. An odd term. One that conflates a literary tradition with a criminal accusation. Can one really stalk another through a letter? Perhaps a series of letters? I Love Dick, the book which brought about this charge, was a succès de scandale. Announced as a real, obsessively one-sided correspondence between Chris Kraus and a cultural critic, Dick, it has been feted as autofiction par excellence – blending author and character, autobiography and fiction. David Rimanelli, in an early review, argued ILD was ‘not so much written as secreted’. But this verbal shift, from the written to the secreted, puts weight on the auto rather than the fiction.

Much of ILD is epistolary. It contains the series of letters sent from Chris (and her husband-collaborator Sylvère) to Dick, declaring her tortured, unrequited love – like Phaedra to Hippolytus. When Chris (and this first-name basis is useful in differentiating eponymous character and author) admits her scattered epistles have ‘turned into an epistolary novel’ another character scoffs, ‘that’s so bourgeois’. They then continue, ‘didn’t [Jürgen] Habermas say once that the epistolary genre marked the advent of the bourgeois novel?’ Never mind autofiction, Kraus is aware of an epistolary tradition stretching back to its heyday in the novelistic form during the eighteenth century.

The return to this dusty, eighteenth-century form, the epistolary novel, is not a new way of writing but of speaking. Kraus argues in Aliens & Anorexia (2000) that in literature women have been denied all access to the a-personal. Ironic, then, that ILD has been read as ‘secreted’ autofiction with little weight given to its epistolary structure. Indeed, autofictional readings seem symptomatic of that: the denial of the ‘a-personal’. Autofiction read as autoeroticism. Leslie Jamison has argued that Kraus ‘uses the materials of her life to seek this “a-personal” meaning – something larger, more universal’. The epistolary form does seem to levitate the ‘I’ of the letter-writer above the ‘I’ of the author, and thereby allows for more intricate manoeuvres of self-representation. For Kraus is writing the ‘I’ of her eponymous character, the ‘I’ of her husband and collaborator, Sylvère, and, even, the ‘I’ of Dick too (when he finally writes back at the very end).

If autofiction is the fictionalisation of autobiographical facts, the epistolary novel is the factualisation of the fictitious.

Chris and Sylvère write to Dick early in the book announcing their hope to publish their correspondence so far. They believe ‘these letters will interest the reader as a cultural document. Obviously they manifest the alienation of the post-modern intellectual in its most diseased form.’ They suggest Dick joins the collaboration and writes an academic foreword of sorts. Here Kraus is writing in two different voices, splitting her own obsessive, amatory epistolary act from Sylvère’s more professional, academic offerings of co-publishing. Or should we say fuses the two – erotic and intellectual – within the same epistolary space? There are textual games afoot here. Games inspired by Kathy Acker (subject of a 2017 biography by Kraus) who plagiarised and pasted others’ texts within her own (as a sort of ‘b-track’ played alongside her own ‘a-track’). Kraus has spoken of how Acker realised ‘many possible “I’s”’, seeking a ‘deliberate fragmentation’. Epistolary fiction creates multiplicity by staging an imagined epistolary network of numerous ‘senders’ and ‘receivers’; the very fibre of the epistolary text is fragments penned and perused. And rather than a linear, first-person narrative oozing with solitary whispers, what emerges in ILD is a more daring epistolary exchange – the billet-doux intermixed with cultural criticism. Or the billet-doux as cultural criticism.

When Kraus was asked about the ‘confessional’ nature of her work in an interview she replied curtly with a quote from Deleuze: ‘Life is not personal.’ And then more expansively:

I mean, c’mon: where else but the contemporary art world would the fact of a woman staging an affair with her husband’s colleague be considered controversial? Look at Choderlos de Laclos and Marivaux… things have shut down quite a bit since the eighteenth century. The artist Andrea Fraser recently went through a similar fabricated controversy with her elegant and witty piece, Untitled.

The allusion to Laclos, the author of Dangerous Liaisons (1782), is intriguing. Joan Hawkins, in her afterword to the UK print, also mentions this epistolary masterpiece of ancien régime libertinism. Both works are ‘reflexive as hell’: ‘Sylvère and Chris continually critique and comment upon each other’s prose, arguments and plot-lines.’ They collaborate too, dictating and penning letters together, even proudly reading their epistles aloud to each other. Epistolary fiction had played with the real and fictitious, generating what Kraus neatly terms ‘fabricated controversy’, long before the advent of autofiction. Laclos, in a preface, presents Liaisons as simply a ‘collection of letters’, found and edited (rather than authored). Of course, they are actually fictional. If autofiction is the fictionalisation of autobiographical facts, the epistolary novel is the factualisation of the fictitious. As John Mullan points out, reading epistolary literature produces the effect that the characters, the epistle scribblers, within the story seem also to be the writers of the story. For instance, in Clarissa (1748) by Samuel Richardson, the epistolary heroine seems to be the author (though, of course, it is Richardson); we are reading her letters (though, again, they are Richardson’s). Kraus takes this a step further, like a funambulist on a tightrope. She truly is protagonist (Chris) and writer (Kraus). Autofiction has a trickier history, then, when the epistolary tradition – and its blurring of reality and fiction at the interface of the epistle – is considered. Central is that the epistle sits at the interface between forensic document and cultural artefact. Letters are both of the everyday and of literary art. Just look at the mass copycat suicides following Goethe’s Werther.

Laclos’s authorial fingerprints are still warm on the letters of Liaisons. His epistolary agents draw attention to their textual lives and therefore bring themselves to a pleasurable surface, where text caresses text, and letters compete, swell and shrink. In the tenth letter, the Marquise de Merteuil boasts to the Vicomte de Valmont she has ended up writing ‘a book when I planned to write one line’ after recounting her seduction of the naïve Chevalier Danceny. Laclos exposes these libertines delighting in their own textual prolificness. Merteuil is almost whispering: ‘mine’s bigger than yours!’ The epistolary economy becomes a competitive one; the materiality of the epistle – its length – a battle of the sexes. Will Valmont be able to respond with a grander, more delicious narrative of his own conquest?

In seducing Chevalier Danceny, Merteuil also admits to Valmont she perused various epistolary works – one being Rousseau’s Héloïse – to ‘establish in my mind the various tones I wished to adopt’ in the art of manipulation. Here intertext becomes methodology. In Laclos’ epistolary fiction, letter writing and receiving – intertextuality – is the ultimate erotic thrill. It is the desire to narrate their conquests to each other that Merteuil and Valmont live for – not the conquest itself. The prime example is found in a letter from the innocent Cecile (who Merteuil wishes Valmont to ruin) to her confidant. She kissed her received billet-doux ‘as if…’. The elliptical end seems to enact that loving embrace of the epistle – a lipstick mark on black ink. It also shows, more sinisterly, how desire can become displaced in epistolary exchange – from lover to letter. There is a certain perversity here. The present body of the text replaces the body of the absent beloved.

Kraus feeds into this tradition of exchange, competition and displacement. Her postmodern sleight of hand is to erase the epistolary recipient. She raises her dangerous liaison purely to the textual surface calling it, in a knowing echo, a ‘fictional liaison’. Saul Bellow’s Herzog (1964) is an interesting comparison. Like in ILD, the epistolary act becomes pathologised, a diseased intellectual form. Moses Herzog, once eminent professor of Romanticism, is suffering from hypergraphia – a man of letters gone mad. Herzog begins to pen letters even to the dead. Dear Nietzsche. Dear John F Kennedy. ‘Why shouldn’t he write to the dead?’ Moses asks himself. These ‘letters to nowhere’ seem emblematic of a wider crisis, where writing can find no answer, only able to fall back on its own self-referentiality. As Julie Hayes remarks, considering Derrida’s The Post Card (1980), the epistolary text, while being written, always contains the potential not to arrive. We are told Herzog ‘felt he was going to pieces’. His letter-writing is ‘involuntary’. And so these scattered epistles become the physical manifestation of Herzog being – quite literally – ‘out of mind’ (as we are told in the very first line). Bellow uses italics to separate the epistolary act typographically from the main body of the novel. We slip between Bellow’s third-person narration and Herzog’s direct epistolary ravings that never find a recipient. In this semi epistolary work, the epistle never fully rends itself from the novelistic form.

Where do letters go when they are not read?

Herzog embraces silence in the end, having ‘no messages for anyone. Nothing. Not a single word.’ The curing of his hypergraphia is the closing of (attempted) epistolary exchange – and of narrative. Kraus, informed by French poststructuralist theory – connected to her editorial work at Semiotext(e) – posits another (non)conclusion. It is addressed, of course, to Dick: ‘There’s no way of communicating with you in writing, because texts, as we all know, feed upon themselves, become a game.’ Or should we say unaddressed? The epistles Chris sends are part of a wider network than linear point-a-to-b communication. It is the silence, the erasing of the recipient – to make Dick, as Chris and Sylvère muse, both at once ‘God’ and one who ‘never existed’ – that allows this text, by each intermittent epistle, to be constructed. A highly unstable construction seemingly haphazardly written-in-process as we read-in-time. A text continuously enveloped and never to be read – a ‘game’. Sylvère tells Dick on the phone (and that distinction between epistolary and telephonic communication is an entire discussion in itself) that Chris has inaugurated a ‘new kind of literary form’. Dick hesitates to accept that. Perhaps we should too. Kraus has dramatised that anxiety of the silent addressee. The erasure of the recipient, of the beloved, from the epistolary exchange destabilises the epistolary texts within the novel. This makes ILD not just a work of autofiction, but a postmodern masterpiece of epistolary gameplaying.

Where do letters go when they are not read? They become ‘open’, not in the material sense of the cut envelope, but open to multiple audiences and readers, they inaugurate a game. Again, as Merteuil boasts in Dangerous Liaisons, she ends up writing ‘a book when [she] planned to write one line’. But Kraus’s epistolary stalking is no boast. It really does become a book. ‘The game is real’. As Kraus said in an interview, ILD was not a ‘repeatable experience’. In our era of emailing, it would have been ‘over within two days’ – an out-of-office response, perhaps, being the automated e-epistle to end epistolary exchange, end the game, end the text. ‘Game’ is the central pun throughout this book featuring the ménage à trois. It teeters between the erotic and the intellectual. In an early letter, Chris wonders out loud: ‘Is he game?’ The text, this epistolary project, becomes the thrill. Will he join in this epistolary exchange? Is he up for it? To appropriate a line from Kathy Acker, the text becomes a ‘very sensual, enjoyable surface’. The uncut seal of the envelope still sticky with saliva.

By multiplying the ‘I’ through intertext, Acker sought to ‘destroy meaning’. In that destruction, she sought to ‘increase possibilities’, which were stamped over, Acker believed, by authorial intent. By erasing the recipient, the text is left unread by Dick – the envelope never opened – and, subsequently, the text can only be reread by us in new ways. And in a highly pleasurable way, along the surface, along the envelope, as we only have request and no response, a continued invitation to a ‘game’ – Phaedra’s call. ILD becomes not letters secreted to Dick, but written for us, the ultimate, but never final reader. In this manner, texts are not closed. And so, this text, this epistle, the one you read now, is a response in a way that engages in the ‘game’ – the allusions and intertexts, the caresses and enjoyment of other letters. ‘Every letter is a love letter’, Kraus postulates in ILD. Letters that never fully ‘arrive’ are forever in transit. In that transit, they are extremely pleasurable for the writer and intercepting reader. They are also potentially dangerous as Phaedra and Laclos’ title teasingly warn.

But Dick does write back. And back is the right word, for it does not move the epistolary narrative forward but stalls it. Chris has no satisfaction, and neither does Kraus impart any. Dick sends two letters: one to Sylvère, one to Chris. The damning final realisation is that the letter sent to Chris is but a xerox of Dick’s letter to Sylvère. The answer ends the ‘game’, closes the epistolary network, and, as Joan Hawkins argues, ‘erases Chris’. The xerox is a technological trick of the epistolary that Richardson nor Laclos had access to and sees Chris sidelined in her own epistolary game. The publication (the turn of the epistle from private property to public art) of ILD is her response. And here has been my own.

Yours faithfully,

Tommy Gilhooly

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Tommy Gilhooly is a writer from Northamptonshire and recent English graduate of the University of Cambridge. He was runner-up in the review category of The Orwell Society/NUJ Young Journalist’s Award 2023. His writing has appeared in Literary Review, The Telegraph, The Fence and Engelsberg Ideas.

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