Abstract
This essay argues that, although he is often characterized as aristocratic and defiant, the literary dandy fundamentally is the object of the types of violence identified by Galtung: direct, structural, and cultural. These three kinds can be traced throughout dandyism’s history, from the historical rise of “Beau” Brummell to more contemporary literary theorizing, as matters of acknowledging direct violence’s common proximity to the dandy, noting the dandy’s strong structural connection to his modern celebrity analogue, and understanding how the dandy transforms the economic and cultural relations of the commodity. Each of these aspects serve to reduce the literary dandy to a state of abjection. As a result of this antagonism, author and literary dandy Crisp adopts a form of life-writing in his memoir The Naked Civil Servant that can be identified as the literary self-portrait, a confessional and contrarian sub-genre theorized by Beaujour. The authorship of the self-portrait, then, serves as a defensive tactic that rewrites and reinterprets the violence of the dandy’s opponents.
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Notes
Both Glick and Miller's recent surveys of Dandyism shift their focus to the visual arts as they approach their late twentieth and twenty first century material; the Rhode Island School of Design's exhibition catalogue, Artist/Rebel/Dandy: Men of Fashion, provides a similar attentive focus (Irvin and Brewer 2013).
For Pratt, the role of Crisp would be the performance of his lifetime (Kelly 2011, p. 9).
Amann (2015, p. 6), in her slightly mistitled study of fashion during the French Revolutionary period, observes this correspondence between autobiography and dandyism: "just as the diarist is both subject and object, so the dandy is at once the fashioner and the fashion plate".
Žižek (2008, pp. 1–2) assimilates much of this paradigm, without citation, as the "triumvirate" of subjective, symbolic, and systemic violence, the latter two being defined as "objective".
Tuite (2014, p. 83) believes that Napoleon "dramatized the contrast between revolutionary and monarchical forms of power by ironizing it" and provided "Byron with a model for transforming the associations that attach the narrative of the rise to virtue and that of the fall to vice". See also Eisner 2009, p. 35. Byron's reported preference to be Brummell sets, according to Agamben (1993, p. 53), "the spirit of the world of the boudoir" against "the spirit of the world on horseback: it is no small compliment". See also Kelly (2006, pp. 202–203).
Bronfen (2002, p. 181) similarly notes how "the intensity of our gaze upon celebrity not only transforms the famous but […] ends up destroying them".
In contrast, Wicke (2011, p. 1137) favors a "potlatch model of celebrity" modeled on the Native American tribal rituals of the Pacific Northwest. The ceremonial practice of gifting or destroying a pile of precious goods and objects as a tribe or people resembles, she writes, "the mass-authored and mass-mediated rituals of celebrity" (2011, p. 1135). But for Wicke (2011, p. 1137), the destructive, degrading power enacted against the celebrity is less a matter of targeted violence than society's cyclical return to the "ceremonies of value" during which the individual celebrity "has to pass over, evanesce, surrender almost immediately to time's passage". See the discussion of Agamben (1993) below.
Conversely, Barthes (2006, p. 69) sees the dandy vanquished by the commodity. He argues that the commodification of fashion, through ready-to-wear's necessary homogenization of style and the luxury market's superimposition of commerce over construction, "deprives dandyism of both its limits and its main source of inspiration" which "has killed dandyism".
For a different model of a literature of dandyism, see Connolly (1938, pp. 41–49).
Of course, Crisp was only five at the time (Kelly 2011, p. 13).
Sullivan (1990, p. 208) reads Crisp's advocacy of abjection as reaffirming the worst "stereotype of a homosexual" that is "an eminently pathetic and tragic figure".
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Harrison, B. Violence, dandyism and the literary self-portraiture of Quentin Crisp. Neohelicon 44, 199–215 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-016-0361-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-016-0361-x