Right on the heels of I Love Dick, a devastating, uncategorizable book described as a "highly composed and strategically confessional... performance of hetero romance," Kraus stuns readers -- again, with life as performance -- in Aliens & Anorexia. In I Love Dick, Kraus found an effective form to explore and explode myths about female art and theory, evoking the terror of beholding oneself through a series of increasingly obsessed letters, faxes, and voice mail messages directed at the vague, nearly abstracted figure of Dick. While Aliens & Anorexia does not have the same quick-and-dirty voyeuristic appeal of Dick's letters format, it tackles an ambitious array of monsters and gives 'em a good wrassle.
Aliens & Anorexia, read in conjunction with I Love Dick, comes apart in a rhapsody of longing; themes and characters are introduced, then altered by association and reappearance. The unraveling escalates toward a form that resembles a knife wound: scalpel-sharp, female, radical, emotional, and completely original. Kraus weaves passages from various sources, including the writings of Simone Weil, "the first radical philosopher of sadness," who died of self-starvation, self-exiled after a rigorous life lived according to her ideals; descriptions from Paul Thek's Wonderful World That Almost Was, that most extreme form of performance art, the artists' commune as exhibit/installation; and Kraus' correspondence dictating the failure of her own experimental film.
As she struggles with eating, she pulls passages from everywhere and everyone on the subject of anorexia, the attempt to leave the body altogether. "The panic of altruism, tripping out on content, anorexia: All three are states of heightened consciousness, described as female psychological disorders. Does it matter how you get there?... The panic of altruism is something like the panic of starvation.... No one considers that eating might be more or less than what it seems... deny[ing] the possibility of a psychic-intellectual equation between a culture's food and the entire social order. Anorexia is a malady experienced by girls, and it's still impossible to imagine girls moving outside themselves and acting through the culture. All these texts are based on the belief that a well-adjusted, boundaried sense of self is the only worthy female goal."
Via her self-mocking, bewildered examination, Kraus coaxes out the story of female mystics and anorexics. Most of the book slices along at a terrifying pitch of intelligence and anger, packing each passage with gunpowder, splashing gasoline around, and then leaving a box of matches nearby. Tension builds through this amazing anti-plot. Just as the reader teeters on the edge of sane consumption of pain, the book swollen like a bloated belly, Kraus shifts into the last section -- a sweet, sad, and hilarious narrative piece. This is where the aliens come in. Suddenly two sassy, ass-kicking college girls graduate from picking up dates at seedy hotel lounges to robbing and humiliating johns with their small-scale performance art, and finally to hanging out with a bunch of pseudo-spiritual outcasts who wait in fields to be caressed by friendly aliens. The ending is brilliantly captured in a quote from an Anne Waldman poem: "4 o'clock in the morning/A motor idling despondently/outside a chicken takeout joint across the street/I hate it, girls/I hate that motor." Kraus' intense diary-style questioning ceases momentarily, but the final story serves as the silk scarf a master might use to gag his slave with, rather than the soft flutter of a tear-soaked handkerchief conclusion.
Kraus refuses to neatly tie up the live wire ends of electrified ideas snapping throughout the book. That is her point. She leaves questions dangling, their razor edges rasping.
