WILL IRVINE in conversation with CHRIS KRAUS
Over the summer, I had the rare pleasure of being able to interview Chris Kraus. Most people will know Kraus for her acclaimed autofictional novels, particularly I Love Dick, which has become an icon of women’s literature and counterculture worldwide. Her novels have inspired it-girls from Alexa Chung to Lena Dunham, and the literary and creative DNA of her work is present in pop culture to this day. What most people don’t know is that Kraus is actually an alumni of Victoria University of Wellington. The American author spent her youth in Aotearoa, and returned here as a filmmaker for her final film before embarking on her literary career. Because of this, Aotearoa, particularly Te-Whanganui-A-Tara, have a particular significance in her work, and you can feel echoes of the great loneliness she feels in New Zealand throughout her work.
Will Irvine: I've got a few questions about New Zealand, well, that sort of stuff. And then I was going to kind of pivot a little bit into talking about your newest book. I've tried to read all the segments I could find online. They were kind of published like chapter by chapter..
Chris Kraus: Sure, yeah – but they’re not even in the book. They were like, little studies for the book.
WI: I mean, I'm 20 years old, I'm Generation Z. Although not many of my cohort have read your novels, particularly I Love Dick remains tremendously popular with millennials and Gen X. And because of that, a lot of people at my age have read and have been influenced by work that's directly downstream, right? I guess my question is, have you read much work that claims to be influenced by yours? Do you like reading that sort of work? How does it feel to kind of be a progenitor of so much different work?
CK: Well, um... That book first came out in 1997 and it was read by a few people but when it came out again in 2006 it was read by a lot more people. A lot of younger women who were writers beginning to write and the book hit a sweet spot at that moment, among that group and generation of women especially. Some of them were wonderful writers like Sheila Heti and Jackie Wang and Arianna Reines. I don't know how much my writing actually influenced theirs, but they said at the time that it did - and that's a wonderful thing because I'm a great fan of their work.
WI: Yeah, cool. It's interesting with the reception and re-evaluation, which is actually coming up on 20 years ago now. Do you feel that your novel was before its time or do you think that you tapped into something that maybe people hadn't quite come to terms with about themselves yet?
CK: Well, I feel like every book that works is both of its time and also outside its time. At the same time. Don't you feel that about books that you really like? They may be written in a way that tells you a lot about that time and yet there's something so relatable that transcends time.
WI: Sure. Yeah, no. Yeah.
CK: And that's what I would hope for. I'm thinking now about some of my favorite New Zealand novels, and that would be true of them.
WI: Yeah, you talk a lot about Katherine Mansfield. I don't know how recently you've been back to Wellington but it's - the council has erected a lot of shrines to Mansfield now all around the place. We have big pieces of her writing - We have a statue here in the middle of town.
CK: Wow, that’s good! But what about all the other writers? What about Frank Sargeson? Did they erect a shrine to the place where the police arrested him? That was on Upper Willis Street, I think. I got ... I really got into Frank Sargeson more recently and read just about everything he wrote.
WI: Oh, did you say Frank Sargeson? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.I had a book about the history of communes and the transition from the 60s, It was mostly set around Auckland but I didn't know that he had so much involvement here. When I read your book, it reminded me more of Janet Frame.
CK: Omg, I love Janet Frame, too. She's such a great writer who was also tremendously influential.
WI: The anecdote that we always get told about Janet Frame is that she was um you know, on the verge of having a lobotomy when she won some sort of award and suddenly it was postponed, which I think is just such an excellent indictment. Yeah, I guess I'd like to hear a little bit more about your time at Vic more broadly. I think you went there quite young, right? You went to university at 16.
CK: Yes, that's right. Because in the process of moving to New Zealand, I got to skip some grades of high school, which was good because I didn't like high school that much. I went to the sixth form at Wellington High – and then I was at university but not completely, because when I got a scholarship from Wellington Publishing Company in the second year, it came with a job on the newspaper. So I was working full-time on the Sunday Times and just walking up Boulcott Street Steps to go to classes. I wasn’t laser focused on what was happening on campus but things like PYM, the Progressive Youth Movement, I really gravitated to that.
WI: Yeah, it was kind of our version of SDS, right?
CK: Well, a cross between SDS and the Yippies. It was a lot less serious, I think, than SDS.
WI: Yeah, I mean, I think maybe that's just the New Zealand element of it.
CK: Right. Not taking yourself too seriously. But the other thing that got me involved at university was going on the China delegation trip. I’ve stayed in touch with a lot of people in New Zealand – both from that time, and again in the mid-90s in Auckland when I came back to make Gravity & Grace - (ED: Chris’s last film, which was released in 1995) – but the people who went on the China trip, most of them really did spend their lives in leftist politics, one way or another. Government, trade union leaders, teachers and social workers. I think that’s really interesting.
WI: I’ve been looking through the Salient archives a lot since I got this job. I was going to ask, I guess, maybe this is a little bit of a narcissistic question, but what do you remember about VUWSA or Salient the magazine?
CK: I read Salient, of course. I don't think I ever wrote for it. Maybe I didn’t know the people in charge very much. It’s interesting you’re looking through archives. It must have gone through a lot of changes and shifts depending on who was involved, right? And what they thought was important ...
WI: Do you find that in America, at least, that universities kind of lack a sort of social cohesion that they're used to?
CK: Everything lacks social cohesion! But, I don’t know, the programs I teach in are usually graduate art or writing – these are people who really want to be there, who’ve competed hard to get in, and they form intense little groups within their cohorts. I haven’t taught at a big public university like UCSD for a while.
WI: Yeah.
CK: But when I did, it’s interesting – it was more like a commuter school. A lot of people were still living at home. And commuting from various places, there wasn’t that social cohesion you would have imagined the campus would have had in earlier years. People seemed focused on getting their degrees and getting a good job. But the grad art and writing programs, well – the people who go to those programs now, if their parents are merely architects or academics, they feel underprivileged! Because the rest are the children of oligarchs. Of course you end up liking everyone in the class, everyone has their problems. But it’s definitely become ... more elite.
WI: You were last here in 2017? Is that correct? For Auckland Writers Festival?
CK: Yes, that was such a weird trip back.
WI: Yeah, I was going to ask about that. I mean, in your novels you kind of describe New Zealand and New Zealanders, as kind of having this like wide-eyed provincial naivete about them. Did you still find that when you came back, especially to Auckland, which has changed quite a lot through the years?.CK: Well, I was in Wellington too. There was some kind of thing in Wellington at the city gallery But I got really sick. I was staying in some Upper Cuba Street. They've sort of tried to gentrify it somewhat. And they put me in some kind of Airbnb on Upper Cuba Street with no heat. And it was freezing cold out, and I got a terrible flu. And then there was the reading. It was such a freaky trip.
In Auckland, I did something at Elam. The head of the school was a distinguished middle-aged man who gave a long welcome address in Maori. Very impressive. He seemed vaguely familiar and then I realized it was Peter Shand, who’d played one of the young cult converts in Gravity & Grace!
And then in Wellington, it was like attending my own funeral. People I hadn’t seen since high school were there.
Since then, I’ve wanted to come back again for an extended time. The novel I’m publishing now includes my family history, something I’ve avoided till now up until the time we emigrated to New Zealand. I’ve been thinking I’d like to write about our first year in New Zealand, what it was like for my parents to cut all ties and leave everything behind. Because there was no coming back at that time. They’d come on the Assisted Passage Scheme. Tickets were so expensive, they’d sold everything that they owned and then the currency got devalued and they were stuck on the other side of the world. They were in their early 40s, not an easy time to make friends. And NZ was really cut off at that time, so backwater and provincial and closed. You had to put yourself on a waiting list for one or two years to buy a used car. The pubs and bars shut at six and they hosed them down with a garden hose.
WI: We went through a series of reforms very rapidly in the 80s, which, I think, were intended to bring us up to speed with the rest of the world but possibly might have lost some of the kind of unique weirdness.
CK: Right, I remember that - the neoliberalization of New Zealand. I was still coming back quite a lot and I really felt it then. It was really disturbing.
WI: I think within our culture there’s been kind of a reinvigorated interest in that, after not talking about it for maybe years. We just didn't talk about it at all and... I don't know. I think there's some sort of similar precipice that we're on at the moment that suddenly we've decided to start talking about the 80s again.
CK: Yeah, yeah. It's a weird moment. After Jacinda, you have a National government, right? And – I don’t know if it was disproportionately covered or not, but the people who camped out on Parliament grounds, the anti-vax thing – that seemed very disturbing.
WI: You talk about in your books you kind of talk about New Zealand as being crazy-making because of how enclosed and backwater and strange it is. And you've touched on, I guess, some of the economic aspects. I particularly noticed when I did my second reading of I Love Dick this week, you talked about the schizophrenics that you knew in New Zealand. And that's two out of the five schizophrenics were from Wellington. I was very interested in that. You mentioned that the entire city is delusional, right?
I just thought that was so remarkable because a lot of what you talk about seems to have changed quite a lot, but that absolutely hasn't changed. We still try to compare ourselves to London or Paris.
CK: I know that's so funny, isn't it?
WI: What do you think it is that that's so, I think it's so crazy-making?
CK: Well no matter how much everything changes It still takes a long, long time to get there on the plane. Thirteen hours from LA – it is isolated. And the people who choose to stay – well there’s not a lot of people who can maintain international careers from there, and that’s what the art world is now. You know how in the art world, no one asks where you live anymore, it’s “where are you based?” You’re not really going to be commuting between Wellington, Mexico City, London, New York – you’re stuck, and it’s small, and it has this kind of amphitheater geography that turns the city in on itself. It gets very incestuous. And people who do have the cultural power and clout there seem kind of delusional about their significance in the big scheme of things.
WI: Sure. That much hasn't changed.
I'll talk a little bit about your book, your upcoming novel. When I was reading about it, a lot of the promotions described it as a true crime novel. And I was interested in that. I don't know if you use that phrase yourself, but true crime is kind of the essential pop genre of the last decade or so. I just wanted to get your thoughts on that really.
Firstly, about why true crime has become so rooted in the minds of everyday people, and secondly about why you chose to go into a true crime novel?
CK: The kind of novel I wanted to write wasn’t the mass market thing that tends to pathologize the perpetrators of the crime, leaving the audience completely outside that world. The point there might be to affirm the distance between the audience and the world of the crime. But I wanted to get very close. My models were Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song – I wanted to enter the worlds of the kids who killed someone for no reason while they were all high on meth. You don’t want to exonerate that – but at least reach some kind of understanding of where these people are coming from, who they are and what leads up to a situation like that. I researched this for over two years – visiting the kids in prison and corresponding with them.
Yeah, I'm still emailing with the accomplice. We’ve become friends and I send him a little money each month and we talk on the phone. The girl and I have become friendly, I’ve sent her some books and things. But I also got to know the victim's family, the police, the teachers, the friends of the kids and their classmates, the public defenders. I did dozens of interviews. It’s a very small place.
WI: What was that like? What did you think of that?
CK: The region might be familiar to some people in New Zealand because Nikki Caro made a movie there. In Virginia on the Iron Range of northern Minnesota – I remember reading an interview with her where she talks about how drawn she was to the northern landscape, the natural beauty and light reminded her so much of New Zealand. And I think that’s probably what drew me there too. On a certain level I’ll always be chasing that dragon, the intense blue-and-green natural beauty of New Zealand. It's what drew me there to begin with. My then-partner and I bought a cabin nearby where I’d go to write in the summers. It’s how I learned about the crime to begin with.
WI: When I was reading the little snippets again, they reminded me a lot of the South Island and the rural mining towns in New Zealand, Westport, Buller, places like that. I think you're right in that it was very, very easy to empathize with these people, especially for a New Zealander.
CK: Yeah. Well, that's interesting. I haven't visited those places in the South Island for years. Is it like that there? Is there a lot of meth in New Zealand? Is that a big drug there?
WI: Yeah. It's really bad. I mean, we don't really have many other drugs, right? It's very hard to get them across the borders but meth you can make anywhere, right? You can make meth out of relatively simple ingredients in the back of your shed. Anyway, meth has really become the big problem for New Zealand.
CK: Oh, that's interesting. Meth is such a crazy drug. One of the homicide detectives I talked to had been at his job for two decades, and said he never investigated a murder that didn’t involve meth.
WI: Yeah, that sounds about right for parts of New Zealand as well. I was going to ask about those kinds of small mining towns... These kinds of towns, I guess, had a real moment of fetishism within like the literary vogue and the political vogue and maybe 2017 post-Trump election, you know, people suddenly really wanted to know about the white working class in America…
And... That seems to have completely dropped off now. So I'm interested in why - I guess maybe you started researching this closer to that time - but why you've chosen to return to them now when it feels like a lot of the literary and artistic world is no longer interested there.
CK: Well, I don't really follow the literary and artistic world as much as my own life and interests. And I was there! It was a moment when I felt kind of stuck and lost. The victory of Trump, social media, being semi-cancelled.
And my partner – his name in the book is Paul Garcia – had moved up there full-time, working as a therapist in a juvenile detention center. When the crime popped up in the newspaper I was intrigued. Our cabin was out in the woods, which was mostly a whole different world of summer houses set on the lakes. But the towns are all old wood frame mining houses and trailers.
I got interested in the case and thought, Somebody needs to write about this. And if not me, who would that be? That journalism instinct took over that excitement you get when you discover a story and feel like, This is a great story, and one only I can do! – it’s so exciting.
WI: Sure, yeah. Yeah, it's like chasing a high, isn't it? It's that sort of obsessive drive that really comes when you're chronicling something real, maybe. I guess a lot of your work is around the real, right? Like it's all very honest.
CK: Yes it is. I love that you use the word chronicling because I feel like that describes what I do. If I had to say what my writing is, I'd say it's a chronicle that extends not just to current events, but to interior states too.
WI: Yeah. Which, you know, I'm sure interact fairly often right?. I'll ask you one more question before our time runs out. I can't remember the quote. It's from I Love Dick. Maybe it's from Aliens and Anorexia. I'm not sure. But it was something about women just being and being, I guess, loud, expressive everywhere and that being the most radical thing that someone can do.
I guess I'm interested in your thoughts on the younger generation of women and the ability to blog one's life or to you know, chronicle one's own life in a way that maybe wasn't possible years ago. Do you think that those sorts of radical actions are easier now or do you think that there are still social constraints?
CK: Oh, much easier. Yeah. No, I don't... I think gender isn't really a big constraint. Anymore. I think that's, you know, that battle has been more or less won.
WI: Right. Interesting. You want to elaborate on that?
CK: Yeah, yeah. It's other things, other things - class and culture now are much more ...
WI: Much more what?
CK: Um... much more determinant. And also absent from what the mainstream culture wants to talk about. Just as female experience was, in the past. But now it’s more - class and local indigenous culture – and really, all kinds of indigeneity. That’s something about white underclass experience in the US that hit me really hard. Was it Robert Reich in the Obama Administration who said, All these [rust belt] people need is a moving van! That struck me as so arrogant. Assuming everyone has the same values as you. That blue collar workers should “base” themselves wherever the career opportunities are. But these people go back generations in these towns, their relatives are all buried there. To some people, family means more than career and the neoliberal ethos is so disrespectful of that.