Idolizing Authorship: Literary Celebrity and the Construction of Identity, 1800 to the Present 9789048528677

Table of contents :
Table of contents
List Of Figures
Acknowledgements
Idolizing Authorship
Part 1.The Rise Of Literary Celebrity
1.The Olympian Writer
2.The Dutch Byron
3.Enemy Of Society, Hero Of The Nation
Part 2.The Golden Age Of Literary Celebrity
4.From Bard To Brand
5.In The Future, When I Will Be More Of A Celebrity
6.À La Recherche De La Gloire
7.The National Skeleton
Part 3.The Popularization Of Literary Celebrity
8.Playing God
9.Literary Stardom And Heavenly Gifts
10.Sincere E-Self-Fashioning
11.The Fame And Blame Of An Intellectual Goth
Notes On The Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Idolizing Authorship

Idolizing Authorship Literary Celebrity and the Construction of Identity, 1800 to the Present

Edited by Gaston Franssen and Rick Honings

Amsterdam University Press

Cover design: Gijs Mathijs Ontwerpers, Amsterdam Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout Amsterdam University Press English-language titles are distributed in the US and Canada by the University of Chicago Press. isbn 978 90 8964 963 8 e-isbn 978 90 4852 867 7 (pdf) doi 10.5117/9789089649638 nur 610 © Gaston Franssen & Rick Honings / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2017 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.



Table of Contents

List of Figures

7

Acknowledgements 9 Idolizing Authorship

An introduction Gaston Franssen & Rick Honings

11

Part 1  The Rise of Literary Celebrity 1 The Olympian Writer

31

2 The Dutch Byron

59

3 Enemy of Society, Hero of the Nation

81

Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749‑1832) Silke Hoffmann

Nicolaas Beets (1814‑1903) Rick Honings

Henrik Ibsen (1828‑1906) Suze van der Poll

Part 2  The Golden Age of Literary Celebrity 4 From Bard to Brand

105

5 In the Future, When I Will Be More of a Celebrity

133

6 À la Recherche de la Gloire

153

Holger Drachmann (1846‑1908) Henk van der Liet

Louis Couperus (1863‑1923) Mary Kemperink

Marcel Proust (1871‑1922) Sjef Houppermans

7 The National Skeleton Ezra Pound (1885‑1972) Peter Liebregts

175

Part 3  The Popularization of Literary Celebrity 8 Playing God

193

9 Literary Stardom and Heavenly Gifts

217

10 Sincere e-Self-Fashioning

239

11 The Fame and Blame of an Intellectual Goth

257

Notes on the Contributors

275

Harry Mulisch (1927‑2010) Sander Bax

Haruki Murakami (1949) Gaston Franssen

Dmitrii Vodennikov (1968) Ellen Rutten

Sofi Oksanen (1977) Sanna Lehtonen

Index 279



List of Figures

Figure 1 Figure 2 Figure 3 Figure 4 Figure 5 Figure 6 Figure 7 Figure 8 Figure 9 Figure 10 Figure 11 Figure 12 Figure 13 Figure 14 Figure 15 Figure 16 Figure 17 Figure 18 Figure 19 Figure 20

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, engraved by A.H. Payne, circa 1840 30 Werther porcelain. Lotte and Werther images in sepia, after Daniel Chodowiecki, circa 1778 33 Marble Goethe bust, by Alexander Trippel, 1790 34 Terracotta Goethe bust, by Martin Gottlieb Klauer, circa 1790 37 J.W. Goethe by Johann Heinrich Lips, 1791 40 Lord Byron, engraving by Edward Finden after G. Sanders, without year 58 Nicolaas Beets, engraved by J.P. Lange after W. Grebner, without date 61 Henrik Ibsen, without year 80 Cartoon by A.B. Olsen, ‘Henrik Ibsen’s Juleklap’, in: Vikingen, December 31, 1881 88 Cartoon by Olaf Krohn, ‘Ibsen og de engelske Turister’, in: Vikingen, 6 August 1898 96 Anonymous cartoon, ‘Henrik Ibsen som Tugtemester’, in: Vikingen, 9 December 1882 97 Cartoon by C. Ravn, ‘Henrik Ibsen bragte i Dag Kl. 11.35 sit Manuskript paa Posten’, in: Blæksprutten, December, 1892 99 Cartoon by E. Nielsen, ‘Henrik Ibsen som Politiker’, in: Vikingen, 27 January 1894 100 Holger Drachmann, without year 104 Commercial newspaper ad for so-called Drachmann cigars, without year 114 Postcard with Holger Drachmann’s grave, without year 119 Painting by Aksel Jørgensen, SS Kong Haakon arriving at Frederikshavn with Drachmann’s urn on 26 January 1908, 1908 120 Postcard of Drachmann and his wife Soffi in front of Villa Pax, produced by Einer Nielsen’s Bookstore, Skagen, circa 1906 121 Postcard of Drachmann at his desk, produced by Laurits Scheldes Bookstore, Skagen, circa 1906 121 Statue of Holger Drachmann in Frederiksberg 123

Figure 21 Caricature by Per Marquart Otzen with a haiku by Klaus Rifbjerg, 2002 Figure 22 Louis Couperus at his desk, without year Figure 23 Louis Couperus, photographed by E.O. Hoppé, published in his book Eastward (1924) Figure 24 Marcel Proust, without year Figure 25 Ezra Pound at the Home of William Carlos Williams, Rutherford, New Jersey, 1958 Figure 26 ‘Harry Mulisch Comes Home’. Mulisch: ‘Thanks, old boy, for keeping my seat warm.’ Figure 27 Harry Mulisch and the Discovery of Heaven. Mulisch: ‘I think the book was better.’ Figure 28 Haruki Murakami at the ceremony for the Franz Kafka International Literary Award, 2006 Figure 29 ‘Murakami Bingo’ Figure 30 Dmitrii Vodennikov, 2015 Figure 31 Sofi Oksanen, without year

127 132 140 152 174 192 197 216 227 238 256

Acknowledgements The editors are grateful to all the contributors for their patience, enthusiasm and committed work: Sander Bax, Silke Hoffmann, Sjef Houppermans, Mary Kemperink, Sanna Lehtonen, Peter Liebregts, Henk van der Liet, Suze van der Poll and Ellen Rutten. Furthermore, we would like to thank the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) for the sponsoring of the projects that led to this book, in particular the Veni-grant that Rick Honings received in 2012 for his project The Poet as Pop Star: Literary Celebrity in the Netherlands, 1780‑1900. We are indebted to Saskia Gieling for her support at Amsterdam University Press. Finally, we are grateful to Nina Bresser and Sophie Chapple of Bresser-Chapple Copy, Proofing and Translation for their excellent editorial assistance, and to Dr Eli ten Lohuis for the translation of the introduction.



Idolizing Authorship An introduction Gaston Franssen & Rick Honings

‘Love it or hate it, celebrity is one of the dominant features of modern life’, says Fred Inglis in A Short History of Celebrity (2010).1 His statement is undoubtedly true: we are endlessly confronted with celebrities in the press, on television and on the Internet. Even animals can become celebrities. What are we to make of Keiko, the killer whale in the film Free Willy (1993)? Or of little Knut, the polar bear cub that was born in Berlin Zoo in 2006, around which a whole merchandising industry sprang up, replete with T-shirts and coffee mugs? But it is especially people who become celebrities, behave accordingly and who are accepted as such by the audience. Those without fame dream about becoming famous because for many people, fame is a desirable asset. Hollywood in particular has produced a well-nigh endless string of stars. Gossip magazines about celebrities are read avidly the world over. Thus, it is not too far-fetched to dub the Western world, with Robert van Krieken, a Celebrity Society: our entire economic, political and social existence has been organized around celebrities.2 The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘famous’ thus: ‘Celebrated in fame or public report; much talked about, renowned’. This definition encompasses two aspects: to become a celebrity, one needs to be widely known, and one needs to do something that is valued positively. This definition is not satisfactory, however. Fame is a commodity that cannot be achieved independently: it requires an act of attribution, by audiences, cultural institutions or ‘intermediaries’.3 In this regard the celebrity phenomenon can be understood in the light of what Pierre Bourdieu terms the attribution of ‘symbolic capital’. 4 Twentieth-century artists like Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol have demonstrated that the value of a work does not lie in the object itself but in the attention it manages to garner. Art has no intrinsic quality, as Bourdieu concludes form these and other examples: its symbolic

1 2 3 4

Inglis 2010, blurb. Van Krieken 2012. Rojek 2001, 10. Cf. Driessens 2013.

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value is attributed by institutions.5 A similar argument could be made for celebrity. Max Weber defines charisma, an important element of celebrity culture, as ‘a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities’.6 Bourdieu prefers the term symbolic capital over charisma, a form of value which institutions can attribute to specific writers. Whether we conceptualize celebrity as charisma or symbolic capital, however, this much is certain: it is allocated by an audience. Thus, fame does not necessarily have to do with merit, as the example of Paris Hilton shows so well. It is tempting to say that she is primarily ‘known for being well-known’, after Daniel J. Boorstin’s famous definition of celebrity.7 Hilton is certainly not received positively everywhere. Her exorbitant lifestyle and affaires leave many with an impression of superficiality, which evokes aversion. But even so, it is precisely this lifestyle that we somehow admire. The audience appears to enjoy any act of hers that sets the world alight: apparently, celebrities are also figures that we love to hate.8 Thus, Hilton is a celebrity on account of her acknowledgment as such by the audience and of the value placed on her, however contested that value might be. This is why Chris Rojek’s definition of celebrity is preferable to Boorstin’s: celebrity is ‘the attribution of glamorous or notorious status to an individual within the public sphere’.9 For Van Krieken, who has also attempted a definition of celebrity, the notion holds a double meaning. In the first place, he argues, it denotes a quality or status with which specific individuals attract attention, and from which they – since they are ‘well known’ and ‘highly visible’ – derive value, in at least a particular sector of the public domain. Van Krieken notes here that this attention may be positive as well as negative. Secondly, a celebrity enjoys a higher status than do ‘ordinary’ people. This status can be reinforced in the case of a ‘distinctive narrative’, which construes an attention-grabbing image, where the public and private person merge.10 There are plenty of examples of celebrities cultivating such an image. For years, Madonna has captured the attention of her audiences with her striking looks and extravagant behaviour. And Michael Jackson, too, was a master at creating an eccentric image. More recently, Lady Gaga drew 5 6 7 8 9 10

Bourdieu 1980. Weber in Marshall (ed.) 2006, 61. Van Krieken 2012, 10. Van Krieken 2012, 1. Rojek 2001, 10. Van Krieken 2012, 10; Rojek 2001, 10‑11.

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attention to herself with outlandish performances. In 2010, for example, she appeared in a dress made of raw meat. Celebrities, in short, appear to be well aware of the need to distinguish themselves.

Celebrity and celebrity culture Celebrity and celebrity culture are relatively new areas of research. Although Boorstin discussed the celebrity phenomenon as early as 1962 in his work The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, the field of celebrity studies has been developing particularly rapidly over the past decade, especially so in the English-speaking world. Monographs have appeared, there is the Celebrity Studies Journal and large international conferences have been devoted to the subject. It is not just sociologists but also media researchers, historians and literary scholars who are actively engaged in it. The past few years have seen a spate of studies on both the theory and the history of celebrity.11 The phenomenon is often linked to ever-increasing individualization and globalization, with the argument that celebrities serve important functions within these developments. In Understanding Celebrity (2004) Graeme Turner, for instance, explains that celebrity fulfils, firstly, a ‘parasocial’ function in the modern world. Celebrities serve to compensate for the loss of ‘real’ contacts due to the rise of individualism and social atomization. Famous individuals offer, Turner argues, ‘the illusion of intimacy’: the feeling that one ‘knows’ celebrities and is emotionally involved with them.12 This parasocial connectedness is made manifest in, for example, the emotional mass reactions to the deaths of celebrities like Elvis Presley, John Lennon, Lady Di or David Bowie. Secondly, celebrities play an important role in how individuals construct their social and cultural identity. They serve as ‘a source of gossip, which is itself understood as an important social process through which relationships, identity, and social and cultural norms are debated, evaluated, modified and shared’.13 And, thirdly, the fascination for celebrities can be related to the human need for meaning. They provide us with mattering maps and affective formats: they are, as it were, the reference points with which we can impose order on the world around us. In this sense, celebrity is akin to religion: ‘The gap left by the decline in the cultural purchase of organized 11 Turner 2014; Inglis 2010; Rojek 2011; Van Krieken 2012. 12 Turner 2014, 26. 13 Turner 2014, 27.

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religion has at least partly been filled by celebrity’, as Turner observes, leading him to introduce the term ‘post-God celebrity’.14 Celebrity culture may seem a modern phenomenon; it is by no means new. Opinions greatly differ on the question when the phenomenon actually arose. Some historians link it to processes of democratization in the early modern period, others to the advent of modernity and mass culture in the second half of the nineteenth century, while film historians see the phenomenon emerge at the start of the twentieth century.15 Film historian Richard Schickel is of the opinion that while previous centuries must have seen talented individuals who enjoyed a sort of fame, celebrity does not occur until the twentieth century.16 Turner similarly holds ‘that the growth of celebrity is historically linked to the spread of the mass media (particularly the visual media)’.17 Van Krieken argues, however, that the phenomenon of celebrity was not so much invented by Hollywood and its film industry as developed during a long historical process. Here he concurs with Leo Braudy who exhaustively examines the historical roots of fame in his now classical study The Frenzy of Renown: Fame & Its History (1986).18 In Braudy’s view, celebrity is timeless. It has always been about – albeit in varying forms – even in classical antiquity. Robert Garland confirmed as much in Celebrity in Antiquity: From Media Tarts to Tabloid Queens (2006).19 In line with Braudy, Van Krieken argues that, indeed, celebrities can also be found in the past. He outlines how the fame that Jean-Jacques Rousseau found was comparable to Princess Diana’s, even if they belonged to different eras. Neither set great store by the abundant attention they received. Rousseau complained about visitors who came to look at him as if at a curiosity, not because of his ideas but because he was famous. Lady Di was hunted by paparazzi. What they shared, was ‘the experience of celebrity: of being highly visible to a broader public and possessing the capacity to attract relatively large amounts of attention’.20 Van Krieken here pinpoints a crucial feature of celebrity. Although many celebrities have certain merits, they owe their status first and foremost to the fact that they know how to generate attention: ‘Layered on top of whatever talents, skills and moral virtues they may have – which is what 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Turner 2014, 27, 29. Mole 2007, 6‑7. Cf. Turner 2014, 12. Turner 2014, 11. Braudy 1986. Garland 2006. Van Krieken 2012, 4‑5; cf. Braudy 1986, 372‑373.

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constitutes their identity as a superhuman football player, an incredibly beautiful and moving actress, or an inspiring singer – is their social function as larger or smaller bundles of attention-capital, and this is what constitutes them as a celebrity’.21 Obviously, this attention took different shapes in earlier centuries than in the 21st century’s medialized television and Internet era – where fame can be measured by the number of friends and followers one has on Facebook or Twitter and where one can become famous overnight. Some researchers have seized upon this historical development and intensif ication of celebrity culture to distinguish between fame and celebrity. Fame, they reason, may be of all times, yet it is with the advent of the mass media and a globalized culture industry that celebrity has really come into its own.22 Others argue that the difference between fame and celebrity is not so much of a historical nature as a matter of scale or a measure of intensity. Arnoud Visser, for one, distinguishes between fame and celebrity defining the former as widespread, public renown, which exceeds a person’s direct social network. The latter concept, by contrast, denotes more specifically an intensive public attention to a celebrity’s personality, independent of position or ability. 23 By that reasoning, the Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte is well known: everyone knows who he is, but a celebrity he is not. Again others link the distinction between fame and celebrity with a difference in attitude. Among these is Braudy, who in 2011, in a reconsideration of his views put forward in The Frenzy of Renown, couples fame with ‘reticence and the sanction of neglect’, while celebrity, by contrast, is allegedly attention crazy: fame, he reiterates, includes ‘an element of turning away from us’ whereas ‘celebrity stares us straight in the face, flaunting its performance and trying desperately to keep our attention’.24 Such distinctions may be very useful, yet what they ultimately illustrate, perhaps, is that fame and celebrity are and will continue to be slippery notions. It is shown below how the domain of literature also witnesses various forms of success and renown that are sometimes almost irreconcilable yet at other times inextricably interwoven.

21 22 23 24

Van Krieken 2012, 61. Cf. Boorstin 1962; Giles 2000. Visser 2013, 6. Braudy 2011, 1072.

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The curious case of literary celebrity Celebrity may primarily bear on film stars, pop idols, and sports heroes, the phenomenon is by no means reserved for the world of entertainment and popular culture. Numerous celebrities are also found in literary history. A special form of celebrity is thus the literary celebrity – a subject that has meanwhile also become an area of study. Throughout the centuries, readers have idolized writers, be it for their extraordinary lifestyles, their shocking opinions or their enigmatic personalities. Far from being the stereotypical solitary, worldly detached geniuses, ‘star authors’ – as Joe Moran calls them25 – often turn out to be professional, transnational cultural entrepreneurs, quite aware of the tastes of their target audiences and the laws of the art market in general.26 Scholars have successfully explored the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sources of literary celebrity,27 its close yet tense relation with modernism,28 and its fusion with postmodern popular culture.29 Such research amply demonstrates that at issue here is a most intriguing form of renown, which seems to be as widespread as it is intangible. It is not hard to find examples of contemporary authors who have undeniably acquired the status of international celebrity – complete with fan clubs, merchandising and constant media attention. Writers such as Bret Easton Ellis, Haruki Murakami and J.K. Rowling have been styled today’s literary celebrities. Historical examples are equally in evidence since literary stardom is not confined to the present day. Among those authors often associated with celebrity are Lord Byron, Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein or Ernest Hemingway. Yet literary celebrity is by no means obvious: comparing these examples, one is confronted with a number of complex tension fields, three of which we discuss here. Firstly, it is debatable whether the allure of a nineteenth-century author was actually comparable with the media hype that surrounded authors like Stein or Hemingway in the 1930s. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the literary market did not as yet constitute an international multibillion-euro business, literary fame had a different meaning than it has in these times of marketing and social media. William Shakespeare was famous, as much is certain, yet it is obviously difficult to maintain that he 25 26 27 28 29

Moran 2000. Graw 2009. Donoghue 1996; Wanko 2011; Wilson 1999; Eisner 2009; Mole 2007; Mole (ed.) 2009. Rainey 1998; Rosenquist 2009; Jaffe 2005; Goldman 2011. Glass 2004; Collins 2010.

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was also a celebrity in the way contemporary authors are. In other words, there seems to be a difference between modern forms of renown and more traditional forms of fame. A second tension field lies between, on the one hand, what could be termed the official culture – of the experts, the critics, and the connoisseurs – and, on the other hand, celebrity culture. One can even question whether we can actually speak of celebrity with respect to literary authors. After all, a long-established tradition, both in public perception and in academic literary scholarship, associates literary prestige with intellectual pleasures, cultural capital, and elitist refinement (high culture), while celebrity is sooner linked to popular entertainment, commerciality, and mass production (mass culture). In this view, literature and celebrity are two different, irreconcilable phenomena. This dichotomy becomes the stronger as it resounds with widespread gender views: for instance, ‘women’s literature’ is often associated with entertainment, commerce, and hypes, whereas authentic literature is often alleged to be a male domain.30 Such dichotomies have been rightly criticized, but the fact remains that with literary fame, different forms of success frequently intermingle that we somehow find hard to reconcile with each other. Do we label someone a literary celebrity because of his or her sales figures and media attention or, rather, because of the official recognition they have achieved – and what about authors who owe their status in part to a solid fan base? Closely intertwined with the two tension fields just mentioned, a third tension field where literary celebrity and the star author can be positioned concerns that between self-fashioning and public perception. An author’s stature is created within a complex tension field of power relations where different parties claim authority: the writers themselves, obviously, but also their critics, readers, fans, the media, literary agents, journalists, publishers, translators, theatres, and film studios. All these parties have a share – as well as interests – in determining the values and meaning of the work and the public image of literary authors. Within this tension field, authors themselves are forced to adopt a position: some reject their success in an endeavour to retain a certain measure of agency, whereas others embrace their popularity and all the media attention. In brief, strategies to assume and retain authority differ widely. Some authors become masters at selfcelebrification, others, in contrast, shy away from the celebrity industry in an attempt to retain a form of control over their authorship. Yet whichever position authors adopt, it is certain that they have anything but the last 30 Huyssens 1986, 44‑62.

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word. Readers, critics, admirers, and other actors appropriate the author’s work and image: they reframe, reinterpret and revisualize the author’s words, looks, body, and life. In doing so, they ensure the prolonged success of the author, even long after the death of their idol, but at the same time they re-author, in a sense, the author’s image and oeuvre. It is in particular this interaction between authorial self-presentation and public appropriation that we focus on in Idolizing Authorship, whereby we have placed some special emphases. International research into literary celebrity primarily focuses on English-language literature and renowned canonical authors from Great Britain and the United States. Two periods have particularly received a great deal of international attention, as said: the nineteenth century and the modernist era. Furthermore, quite a few publications on the relation between celebrity and gender have already seen the light.31 Yet even though celebrity authorship has received a great deal of critical attention so far, there has been no overview of literary celebrity that combines authors from different nationalities, eras and statures. Idolizing Authorship provides this: it brings together insights from scholars with expertise in a variety of national literatures and offers new perspectives on the history of literary celebrity. The volume consists of eleven chapters, in each of which a literary celebrity takes centre stage. Emphasis here is on literary celebrities from Europe, more specifically from Denmark (Holger Drachmann), Germany (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe), England (Ezra Pound), Finland (Sofi Oksanen), France (Marcel Proust), the Netherlands (Nicolaas Beets, Louis Couperus, Harry Mulisch) and Norway (Henrik Ibsen). In addition, two chapters have been included on authors from outside Europe: from Russia (Dmitrii Vodennikov) and from Japan (Haruki Murakami). The authors analysed here do not all enjoy the same status of celebrity: some are internationally famous authors who rank among the literary canon, others are merely renowned in their country of origin. We have chosen the year 1800 to be our starting point for this history of literary celebrity. There are several reasons to choose this year: around 1800 the fascination for famous individuals increased and changed in nature. Although art remained something to be enjoyed by the elite, the social position of the artists changed: they were suddenly also recognized as such by lower classes. Furthermore, the realization grew that the artist, and this was also true of the writer, was an extraordinary person, ‘a highly spiritual

31 Cf. Easley 2011; Weber 2012.

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being who is completely separate from the debased everyday world’.32 And finally, this realization was tied up with changes in the artist’s position in the media landscape in the second half of the eighteenth century. The author was no longer someone who led the secluded life of the saint in the desert, but became a recognizable public figure with a specific personality.33 International studies tend to draw a parallel between the growing fascination for celebrities and the rise of the Romantic movement around 1800.34 The latter brought about a fundamental change that has impacted our thinking about art and literature to this very day. The emphasis placed on reason by the Enlightenment was replaced with the dominance of feeling and imagination. Other features of Romanticism included: the artistic inspiration, the importance of originality and authenticity, a desire for freedom (combined with a rejection of hindering artistic rules), nonconformism and the genius of the artist. A shift occurred from mimesis towards expression: true art no longer meant an imitation of reality, but an outpouring of feeling. M.H. Abrams used the famous metaphor of the mirror and the lamp to characterize this shift.35 From the end of the eighteenth century, then, the poet was increasingly regarded as a genius whose talents are not so much acquired as they are innate and who was capable of producing unprecedented performances.36 From Germany, where Romanticism, according to Rüdiger Safranski, evolved as eine deutsche Affäre, the cult of the genius and stardom also spread to other countries.37 In the early nineteenth century the idea became widespread that the true artist, superior to other (‘ordinary’) people, should also distinguish himself socially and culturally, with an unusual lifestyle and a distinctive image. As Tom Mole puts it: ‘By the end of the Romantic period, one could meaningfully speak of a celebrity or a star as a special kind of person with a distinct kind of public profile’.38 Mole is of the opinion that earlier times had also seen famous people but that celebrity culture does not manifest itself until the nineteenth century. Three requisites had to be in place for this: an individual, an industry, and an audience. One author is generally considered to be the first literary celebrity: Lord Byron.39 One 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

Higgins 2005, 5. Braudy 1986, 390. Cf. Mole (ed.) 2009. Abrams 1953. Cf. Braudy 1986, 418. Safranski 2007. Mole 2007, xii. Mole 2007; McDayter 2009.

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could even argue, as Inglis does, ‘that it is during Byron’s brief lifetime – he died at thirty-six in 1824 – that charm and its distorted and magnified echo, glamour, become public values, and what is more, values looked for as attributes of celebrity’. 40 Thus, Byron succeeded in creating a branded identity. Such branding of identity is, in fact, equally characteristic of all the authors that are highlighted in this volume, from Goethe towards the end of the eighteenth century to Oksanen, the Finnish Goth author who takes centre stage in the last chapter – and of all the case studies in-between. Obviously, the fields in which they operated were totally different, having undergone an enormous development in the course of over two centuries. At the time that Goethe was an up-and-coming author, medialization as we know it did not exist as yet. All this was to change in the course of the nineteenth and, in particular, the twentieth century. The introduction of trains, steam ships, telegraphy, and new printing techniques increased the dissemination of information and news. The number of newspapers and magazines rose. The advent of photography around 1840 boosted the democratization of celebrity culture. The medium offered celebrities the opportunity to manifest themselves, while the audience could now see what a celebrity really looked like. Then, at the beginning of the twentieth century, film added its share – a medium that brought celebrities into the audience’s living rooms. The last decade saw the additional arrival of the Internet, which offered individuals – including authors – new opportunities to present themselves to their audiences. Since this book centres on the period from 1800 to the present day, it offers the reader a glimpse of this evolving field of celebrity. The diachronic perspective characterizing this volume shows how more classical forms of fame gradually morphed into contemporary celebrity culture. With this setup, we have aimed to map the first tension field – between celebrity culture and the official culture of the canon, the critic, and the connoisseurs. This tension has been addressed through the inclusion, in this volume, of both canonical and lesser-known authors – from Goethe and Proust to Drachmann and Voddenikov. The interplay between authorial self-fashioning and public perception, finally, features in all articles, as each of the chapters has been given a similar approach, despite the historical and geographical differences between the case studies. Attention is, firstly, given to the ways in which the authors shaped their image. Here, insights with regard to self-fashioning (Stephen Greenblatt, Erving Goffman) and 40 Inglis 2010, 67.

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posture (Jérôme Meizoz) are drawn upon. Secondly, the role of the audience is examined: the way in which admirers contribute(d) to an author’s celebrity status, both during his or her life and posthumously. Reception analysis and fan studies research offer useful tools with which to analyse how readers, or fans, highlight or downplay particular characteristics of their admired authors, intensifying or modifying the author’s image in doing so.

About this volume Idolizing Authorship is composed of three chronologically successive parts, which each take two subjects as their starting point, as stated above: the selffashioning on the part of the author himself and the role of critics, admirers, and fans in the construction of an authorial identity. The first part, ‘The Rise of Literary Celebrity’, focuses on the roots of literary celebrity culture. Three literary celebrities are focused on here, a German, a Dutch, and a Norwegian author: Goethe, Beets and Ibsen. All three acquired celebrity status in the nineteenth century, Goethe even earlier. In none of these cases did medialization in the modern sense play a role, yet all three were, even in their lifetime, revered by admirers. Silke Hoffmann demonstrates how the writer, who in 1774 acquired great fame with Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, moulded his image in the shape of a contemporary Jupiter, exalted above ordinary people: he resided in Weimar like an Olympian. Visitors travelling to the little German town felt, as they mounted the stairs to his Haus am Frauenplan, as if they were climbing Mount Olympus. Hoffmann shows how Goethe adopted an ‘Olympian posture’, for which he was inspired by such mythological heroes as Jupiter, Apollo, and Prometheus. In a time before the invention of photography, Goethe exploited other means to disseminate this self-image: through busts of himself, whereby he assumed a godlike status. He thus rose to become ‘the Divine Leader of German Literature’, admired by all and sundry. Rick Honings demonstrates how, in the 1830s, the Dutch poet Nicolaas Beets was influenced for his self-fashioning by a contemporary literary celebrity: Lord Byron. This English author acquired great fame upon the publication of his work Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812). Numerous authors were to imitate his work and rebellious image. In the Netherlands, it was the theology student Beets who contributed most to the Byromania, by copying Byron’s image and publishing works written in his spirit. Much like Byron, he became famous overnight, albeit that this fame remained limited to

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the Netherlands. Similar manifestations of a fan culture sprang up around Beets as around Byron. Female readers in particular were impressed by the young Byronian, who outwardly presented himself as a melancholy genius. Other than Byron, however, he did not distance himself from Christianity: nowhere do his characters renounce their faith. Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen, born in 1828, also acquired the status of a superstar. Suze van der Poll investigates how he managed to achieve this status and offers three explanations. First, there is the resonance between his work and the sociopolitical and literary context that it was embedded in. Had it not been for the Norwegian nationalism that flourished in the nineteenth century, Ibsen would never have been able to achieve the status of a national icon. His plays shocked his audiences because he levelled criticism at the state, the church, and the education system. As it was especially in the second half of the nineteenth century that Ibsen was active as an author, he was able to utilize the possibilities offered him by new technologies – in contrast to Goethe and Beets. News spread more rapidly, and with it, Ibsen’s fame. Reviews and framing by critics played a major role in this process. As a result, the audience became fascinated with Ibsen as a person and with his private life. Moreover, a visual culture developed around the author. Besides on paintings, Ibsen was also depicted by cartoonists on several occasions. These images not only illustrated his fame, they also helped to augment it. The second part of this volume focuses on what could be termed ‘The Golden Age of Literary Celebrity’: a period in literary history when the conventions of the media and the laws of the market became inextricably interwoven with the rules of literary production. Where Ibsen already made greater use of modern media in the construction of his fame, the authors after him did so even more. As much comes to the fore in the four chapters that together constitute the centrepiece of this volume. The Danish poet Holger Drachmann, who was especially famous in his own country, had one foot in the nineteenth century, the other in the twentieth century. He actively moulded his image as an author, thus communicating that he was a great artist, according to Henk van der Liet. Following his debut in 1872, Drachmann was accorded the status of the Danish Ibsen. His fame stemmed in part from his visibility in the public domain; his bohemian lifestyle was a major contribution to his renown. But he also conducted a PR campaign through his work. Writing about maritime subjects, he acquired great popularity among labourers. In addition, he presented himself as a benefactor, whose work helped collect money for the benefit of widows and the poor. After his death a ‘Drachmann Industry’ developed: his house

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became a tourist attraction, postcards with his picture were brought on the market, streets were named after him, and a statue was erected in his honour. It was thus that Drachmann retained his celebrity status. Dutch novelist Louis Couperus also became a celebrity at the beginning of the twentieth century, as Mary Kemperink argues. His status was foremost of a national nature. He became a sort of attraction in the Netherlands, whose public performances excited general attention. Newspaper reports devoted more attention to his performances and his striking, aristocratic image than to the texts he read. His weekly columns made him a constant presence in the media. While touring in the Dutch East Indies he was received as a star author wherever he went. Couperus had meanwhile also come to expect to be treated as a celebrity, replete with the concomitant luxury. The occasion of his 60th birthday was widely celebrated in the Netherlands, and he was given a knighthood. His funeral in 1923 was a grand event. Thereafter, however, his work quickly fell into oblivion. Now that his person was no longer there to command attention, the audience lost interest, although the second half of the twentieth century saw a Couperus revival. Marcel Proust, author of the seven-volume novel À la recherche du temps perdu (1913‑1927), set himself the aim of becoming a latter-day Victor Hugo, yet acquired his biggest fame after his death. It is interesting to note that Proust amply reflects on the phenomenon of celebrity in his work, as Sjef Houppermans shows in his article. Some elements from À la recherche, such as the Madeleine cake, which – dipped in jasmine tea – evokes the world of the narrator’s youth in Combray, were to become iconic. Since Proust’s death, numerous authors, including Samuel Beckett, Claude Simon, and J.M.G. Le Clézio, have implicitly as well as explicitly drawn inspiration from his work – for the portrayal of the workings of memory, for instance. It is thus that Proust’s fame lives on indirectly in the second half of the twentieth century. The fourth author to take centre stage in this part is the American poet Ezra Pound, whose anti-Semitic and racist views and statements made him notorious rather than famous. Pound’s fascist image does not alter the fact, however, that he is considered a great author, an important representative of modernism. Pound deployed his work to communicate an image of himself: the ‘autofabricated image of a man who seemed to have no other options’, according to Peter Liebregts. Still, it was foremost his eccentric and theatrical lifestyle that commanded attention. During the Second World War he chose the side of the Italian fascists; he was accused of treason and arrested in 1945. This stain on his reputation would come to overshadow his fame. Not until the decades after the war was he gradually rehabilitated, which

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was reflected in the academic attention directed to his work. Yet what, to this very day, prevails for the general public is his fascist image. The third, and last, part of this volume, titled ‘The Popularization of Literary Celebrity’, sheds light on how literary celebrity has changed under the influence of such modern mass media as the radio, television, and the Internet, the rise of post-structuralist ideas about authorship, and the globalization of cultural production. Central to this part are authors who benefited greatly – or still do, in some cases – from the opportunities offered by marketing techniques and modern media. The first article here is by Sander Bax and has the Dutch writer Harry Mulisch for its subject. Much like Goethe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Mulisch – in both his works and his public performances – carried the mythical self-image of a great author, akin to (or perhaps even more important than) God: a genius, an Olympian. Numerous drawings and cartoons have conveyed this image, in particular after Mulisch’s death in 2010. The author’s image assumed mythical proportions, with Mulisch becoming a kind of human deity, an ‘Author-God’. Bax shows that, curiously, Mulisch had in his early work shown himself critical of the power of the author. This could be explained, Bax argues, by the fact that authors are required to move within two domains in the modern age of celebrity: mass culture (for the general public) and high culture (of connoisseurs). That contemporary literary celebrity can be a global phenomenon is demonstrated by the example of Haruki Murakami. Globalization of literary production, Gaston Franssen reasons, has had major consequences for this author’s image: for instance, Murakami is frequently attacked in Japan by literary critics on account of the allegedly Westernized style and atmosphere that characterize his work, whereas he is frequently framed in Europe and the United States as an author who presents a penetrating analysis of Japanese culture. Intriguingly, Murakami boasts a broad fan base of loyal readers in both the West and in Japan, who will stand in line at bookstores for hours to buy his latest novel and who gather to share experiences at Murakami festivals. Franssen demonstrates that the author pits different forms of literary authorship against each other in his work, expressing apparent criticism of the commercialization and mediatization of literature. More so than any other author in this volume, the Russian poet and essayist Dmitrii Vodennikov makes enthusiastic use of the possibilities offered him by 21st-century media, as Ellen Rutten claims in her article. Just as nineteenth-century authors had their portraits made to publicize their image, Vodennikov publicizes his by means of blogs, Twitter and Facebook,

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thereby constantly balancing between sincere autobiographical confessions and artistic performances. Rutten thus speaks of ‘e-self-fashioning’. Not only does he know how to command attraction in the popular Internet culture with his performances, he also manages to be well liked by critics and academics. In this sense he operates, as a modern author, in the same two domains that were discussed in the chapter on Mulisch: mass culture and high culture. Vodennikov deploys the social media to provide his readers with information about his private life, but he sometimes does so in such exaggerated ways that he creates a fascinating atmosphere ‘in which readers continually wonder how upright this virtual intimacy really is’. Is Vodennikov ‘real’ or ‘fake’, a ‘(post-)postmodern fraud’, or isn’t he? This uncertainty ensures that this author will continue to fascinate. Finally, Sanna Lehtonen shows that, at first sight, Finnish bestseller author Sof i Oksanen stands out in the public domain because of her gothic appearance, although Oksanen herself would maintain this is not so much a pose as an authentic image, which she has carried since her youth. In addition, Oksanen presents herself as a sexually conscious feminist, who communicates her bisexuality actively. At the same time, she stresses that she could not but become a writer and presents herself as a devoted artist. She constantly engages in public and social debates through both her works and her public performances. Although her work and performances have met with appreciation, criticisms have also been voiced online by people who accuse her with her PR machine of being overly intent on seeking commercial gain. The literary f ield has meanwhile embraced Oksanen as an important author, given the distinctions she has so far received. The Oksanen case study shows that in these modern times a star author moves in quite different domains, yet that presenting oneself as both a celebrity and a public intellectual is not necessarily problematic. Taken together, the three parts offer a sampling of literary celebrities from various historical periods and against varying national backgrounds. Obviously, they provide, to some extent, mere snapshots from a history of literary celebrity that can hardly be described as complete, but all the same, they do conjure up an image of how this phenomenon has evolved and will continue to do so, over the centuries and from context to context. Due to the variety of historical and geographical backgrounds, the various articles make clear how the construction of writerly and readerly identities – be it local, national, gender, class or ethnic identity – time and again takes shape within the intriguing tension field between then and now, between high and low culture, and between author and audience.

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Bibliography M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953). D.J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (New York: Atheneum, 1962). P. Bourdieu, ‘The Production of Belief: Contribution to an Economy of Symbolic Goods’, trans. R. Nice, Media, Culture & Society 2 (1980), no. 3, 261‑293. L. Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and its History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). L. Braudy, ‘Knowing the Performer from the Performance: Fame, Celebrity, and Literary Studies’, PMLA 126 (2011), no. 4, 1070‑1075. J. Collins, Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). F. Donoghue, The Fame Machine: Book Reviewing and Eighteenth-Century Literary Careers (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). O. Driessens, ‘Celebrity Capital: Redefining Celebrity Using Field Theory’, Theory and Society 42 (2013), no. 5, 543‑560. A. Easley, Literary Celebrity, Gender, and Victorian Authorship, 1850‑1914 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2011). E. Eisner, Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Literary Celebrity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). R. Garland, Celebrity in Antiquity: From Media Tarts to Tabloid Queens (London: Duckworth, 2006). D. Giles, Illusions of Immortality: a Psychology of Fame and Celebrity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000). L. Glass, Authors Inc.: Literary Celebrity in the Modern United States, 1880‑1980 (New York: New York University Press, 2004). J. Goldman, Modernism is the Literature of Celebrity (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011). I. Graw, High Price: Art Between the Market and Celebrity Culture (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2009). D. Higgins, Romantic Genius and the Literary Magazine: Biography, Celebrity, and Politics (London: Routledge, 2005). F. Inglis, A Short History of Celebrity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). A. Jaffe, Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). R. van Krieken, Celebrity Society (London: Routledge, 2012). P.D. Marshall (ed.), The Celebrity Culture Reader (London: Routledge, 2006).

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G. McDayter, Byromania and the Birth of Celebrity Culture (Albany: SUNY press, 2009). J. Moran, Star Authors: Literary Celebrity in America (London: Pluto Press, 2000). T. Mole, Byron’s Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). T. Mole (ed.), Romanticism and Celebrity Culture, 1750‑1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). L. Rainey, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). C. Rojek, Celebrity (London: Reaktion Books, 2001). R. Rosenquist, Modernism, the Market and the Institution of the New (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). R. Safranski, Romantik: einde deutsche Affäre (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2007). G. Turner, Understanding Celebrity (Los Angeles: Sage, 2014). A. Visser, In de gloria: Literaire roem in de Renaissance (Den Haag: AlgemeenNederlands Verbond, 2013). C. Wanko, ‘Celebrity Studies in the Long Eighteenth Century: An Interdisciplinary Overview’, Literature Compass 8 (2011), no. 6, 351‑362. B.R. Weber, Women and Literary Celebrity in the Nineteenth Century: The Transat‑ lantic Production of Fame and Gender (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012). F. Wilson (ed.), Byromania: Portraits of the Artist in Nineteenth- and TwentiethCentury Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999).

Part 1 The Rise of Literary Celebrity

Figure 1 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, engraved by A.H. Payne, circa 1840

Private collection

1

The Olympian Writer Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749‑1832) Silke Hoffmann

Throughout his literary career, from the publication of the immensely popular novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1774) – a text which found fans all over Europe – to his monumental autobiographical work, Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit (From My Life: Poetry and Truth, 1811‑1833), an account in which he fashioned himself as a singular personality, the famous classic author Johann Wolfgang Goethe was worshipped – in a most literal, religious sense. He was considered to be a supreme being, a true idol, a god. Indeed, a pilgrimage to Goethe’s house on Weimar’s Frauenplan Square was an indispensable rite de passage for any young man with cultural interests during the first half of the nineteenth century. Looking back on his first meeting with Goethe, the poet and critic Heinrich Heine wrote: Verily, when I visited him in Weimar and stood face to face with him, I involuntarily took a side glance to see beside him the eagle with lightning in his beak. I was on the point of addressing him in Greek, but when I noticed that he understood German, I told him in German that the plums along the road between Jena and Weimar tasted very good. […] And Goethe smiled. He smiled with the very lips with which he had once kissed the beautiful Leda, Europa, Danaë, Semele, and so many other princesses or even ordinary nymphs.1

An eagle, lightning, Greek as his mother tongue – here, Heine obviously suggests that Goethe is another Jupiter, the god of the sky and thunder in ancient mythology, generally regarded as the Roman equivalent of the Greek god Zeus, ruler of Mount Olympus. 1 DHA 8.1, 162‑163: ‘Wahrlich, als ich ihn in Weimar besuchte und ihm gegenüber stand, blickte ich unwillkürlich zur Seite, ob ich nicht auch neben ihm den Adler sähe mit den Blitzen im Schnabel. Ich war nahe dran ihn griechisch anzureden; da ich aber merkte, dass er deutsch verstand, so erzählte ich ihm auf deutsch: dass die Pflaumen auf dem Wege zwischen Jena und Weimar sehr gut schmeckten. […] Und Goethe lächelte. Er lächelte mit denselben Lip­pen, womit er einst die schöne Leda, die Europa, die Danae, die Semele und so manche andere Prinzessinnen oder auch gewöhnliche Nymphen geküßt hatte’.

32 Silke Hoffmann

The association of Goethe with ‘great Jupiter’, which Heine also notes explicitly in the sentence that precedes the comparison quoted above, is far from coincidental.2 Since the early 1800s, the epithet ‘Olympian’, applied by Homer to Zeus in the epic Iliad, was used to evoke the classical author in contemporary letters, diary entries, prologues, poetry, festivals (‘Festspielen’), and journal articles. Goethe also made sure himself that he was associated with Jupiter and Zeus. In fact, as I argue throughout this chapter, the iconic image of Jupiter shaped Goethe’s celebrity persona. My analysis focuses on two dimensions of the fashioning of Goethe’s authorial image through the ‘medium’ of myth.3 Firstly the author’s Olympian posture and secondly, the public construction of his image refracted through the figures of Apollo and Zeus/Jupiter.4 In this chapter, I will touch upon several related aspects of Goethe’s mythologically charged authorship: the author’s sculptural self-fashioning; descriptions of his physical traits; the association with naturalness and wholeness; his image as divine leader and supreme judge; his ‘fandom’; and lastly, his transformation into a national icon after the founding of the German Empire in 1871.

Pop Star or Olympian Idol? Before Goethe became known for his ‘Olympian classicism’, as associated with later works such as the play Iphigenie auf Tauris (Iphigenia in Tauris, 1779), he had been idolized as the author of The Sorrows of Young Werther.5 It is hard not to give in to the temptation to describe Goethe’s fame in terms of the contemporary culture industry. The popularity of the novel, for example, even led to forms of merchandising: items span from perfume (Eau de Werther) and clothes (the blue frock coat that Werther wears in the novel) to porcelain tea and coffee sets, painted with scenes from the novel. In his poetry cycle Venezianische Epigramme (Venetian Epigrams, 1790) the author himself seems to question this sort of popularity when he alludes to glass paintings inspired by his work: ‘But how furthers it me, that e’en the Chinese at a distance / Paints, with anxious hand, Charlotte and Werther

2 DHA 8.1, 162‑163. 3 Pietzcker 1985, 59. 4 This essay is a revised version of various chapters of Heckenbücker 2008, my dissertation at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. 5 Robinson 2002, 222.

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Figure 2 Werther porcelain. Lotte and Werther images in sepia, after Daniel Chodowiecki, circa 1778

Goethe-Museum Düsseldorf / Anton-und-Katharina-Kippenberg-Stiftung

on glass?’6 Even in our own time the author’s rapid rise to fame continues to spark the imagination. A case in point is Philipp Stölzl’s film Goethe! (2010), which portrays Goethe’s celebrity through the imagery of popular culture. One of the final scenes depicts the author signing autographs on the roof of a carriage, while fans flock around him. Such a scene, a critic of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung remarks, presents ‘the birth of the poet as a pop star from the spirit of Storm and Stress’.7 However, during his lifetime the authorial persona of Goethe was modelled on very different, markedly classic examples: mythological characters such as Jupiter, Apollo, and Prometheus – the creator of mankind. Already at an early stage, Goethe reflects on his ‘authorship’ in a series of letters from 1773‑1774 that revolve around the figure of Prometheus.8 Indeed, in the 6 Dwight 1838, 171: ‘Doch was hilft es mir, daß auch sogar der Chinese / Malt, mit geschäftiger Hand, Werthern und Lotten auf Glas?’ See also FA 1.1, 477. 7 Spiegel 2010: ‘Geburt des Dichters als Popstar aus dem Geist des Sturm und Drang’. 8 Fischer-Lamberg 1963‑1973, vol. 3, 47: ‘Autorschafft’. See also Fischer-Lamberg 1963‑1973, vol. 3, 41.

34 Silke Hoffmann Figure 3 Marble Goethe bust, by Alexander Trippel, 1790

Klassik Stiftung Weimar

Prometheus hymn (1773‑1775), the figure of the ardent maker – a reference to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where Prometheus makes man from earth and rainwater – recalls the image of the author sitting at his desk.9 The poems’ final stanza opens: ‘Here I sit, forming people’. As with Prometheus, the poet is thought to be a creator of mankind.10 Yet beyond Goethe’s textual self-presentation, the most crucial roles in shaping and subsequently disseminating the image of the author as an Olympian writer fall to portrait busts, paintings, drawings, and engravings alluding to Apollo or Zeus/ Jupiter. Specifically, a marble bust of Goethe carved by Alexander Trippel in 1787, along with the subsequent copies and casts taken from it, featured heavily in building the public persona of the classical author. The figures of Apollo and Zeus/Jupiter, all deeply rooted in the classicist aesthetics in the German ‘Age of Art’, were obvious candidates for this role in the construction of Goethe’s reputation.11 Images of the Pythian Apollo and 9 See Eibl in FA I.1, 924‑925. 10 Reinhardt 1991, 148: ‘Hier sitz ich, forme Menschen’. See also FA I.1, 204. 11 DHA 12.1, 47: ‘Kunstperiode’.

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grand Zeus had long been ingrained in the collective pictorial memory since the publication of Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (History of Ancient Art, 1764) by the influential historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann, as well as Johann Heinrich Voss’ 1793 translation of Homer’s Iliad. In fact, the image of the two mythological figures merge in Winckelmann’s description of the marble statue of the Apollo Belvedere. The historian describes Apollo as one who, having killed the serpent Python with his arrows, ‘looks down upon the monster from the heights of his contentedness, as if from the Olympus’ – a serene figure, calm, unshaken, exactly like Zeus in the Iliad.12 Winckelmann’s description also contains references to Homer’s epic. Through the ‘ambrosial locks’ mentioned in the Iliad, both the Olympia statue of Zeus made by the sculptor Phidias and the bust of Zeus Otricoli are linked to the figure of Zeus in the epic.13 These strong connections between mythological sources and well-known sculptures explain why the images of Goethe as an Olympian author mostly involved allusions to sculpture. Heine, for example, in alluding to Zeus, also hints at smiles on the faces of archaic statues.14 The link between classical topoi and sculptures was further bolstered, as we will see, by the well-known fact that casts of ancient busts filled Goethe’s house on Frauenplan Square, triggering obvious associations with Mount Olympus.

Sculptural Self-Mirroring With its invocations of figures, gestures, places, and ‘idols’ from mythological narratives, Goethe’s ‘image world’ stems from the works of Homer, Ovid, Horace, Catullus, Propertius, and Tibullus, as well as mythological handbooks.15 For example, Benjamin Hederich’s Gründliches mythologisches Lexicon (Complete Mythological Lexicon, 1770) was one of the sources for Goethe’s Prometheus hymn.16 When Goethe stayed in Rome from 1786 to 1788, his viewing of the sculptures of Jove and of the Python Slayer impressed the images of Jupiter and Apollo firmly in the writer’s mind.17 The impact of 12 Pfotenhauer, Bernauer & Miller 1995, 155‑156: ‘Siehet auf das Ungeheuer von der Höhe seiner Genugsamkeit wie vom Olympus, herab’. 13 Kirk 1985, vol. 1, 109; Strabo 1988, vol. 8, 354. 14 Homer 1821, 14. 319‑323; Seeba 1976, 184. See also Janko 1992, 201‑202 on Zeus’ ‘catalogue’ of loves in the Iliad that includes Danaë, Europe, and Semele. 15 FA I.25, 826: ‘Idole’; Hederich 1770, 444: ‘Bilderwelt’. 16 FA I, 4, 839. 17 Miller 2002, 516.

36 Silke Hoffmann

the sculptures, enhanced through Winckelmann’s description of the Apollo statue housed in the Vatican Museums, is also apparent from the fact that Goethe had casts of both Apollo’s head and the Jupiter bust from Otricoli in his Rome apartment.18 Goethe held Jupiter up as an example – a mirror in which he could reflect and sculpt his own sense of self. The Jupiter bust that he had in his apartment can be regarded as a key to the author’s self-design from 1786 onwards. The bust’s position in the room ‘right opposite’ his bed recalls Lacan’s ‘mirror stage’, as noted by Alfred Opitz, especially when one considers that Goethe in his autobiographical work constructs a self-narrative based on an Italian ‘rebirth’.19 The motif of the mirror or double figure is also associated with the previously mentioned portrait bust by Trippel. It was modelled after the Apollo Pourtalès, a marble head from the collection of the Giustiniani Palace, and invokes the figure of a long-haired Apollo.20 As noted by Trippel: ‘The hair is long and hangs down very loosely, making from the front the shape of an Apollo head’.21 Goethe alludes to Trippel’s bust from 1790 (Trippel’s second bust) in a sonnet cycle of 1807‑1808, where a girl addresses the poet with these words: ‘Thy marble image seems a type of thee’.22 And in his autobiographical text Italienische Reise (Italian Journey, 1829), the author affirms the ‘stylizing simulation’ of the bust as he writes: ‘I have no objection to the impression being left on the world that I looked like it’.23 This remark is open to interpretation, for whilst Goethe may claim that he has ‘no objection’ to leaving this self-image for posterity, it is clear that – in Lacanian terms – he was ‘captured by the specular double’ of the sculpture.24 Ultimately the bust came to stand, as editor Erich Trunz observes, for the ‘mythologized’ figure of the author.25 Trippel’s bust was not the only sculpture that played a part in the construction of Goethe’s mythological persona. In 1780, Martin Gottlieb Klauer portrayed the writer with a taenia in his hair. Klauer depicted him wearing this traditional Greek headband because Goethe had played the 18 Mandelkow 1968, vol. 2, 43. 19 FA I.15/1, 162: ‘meinem Bette gegenüber’; FA I.15/1, 158‑161: ‘Wiedergeburt’. 20 Maaz 1995, 283; FA I.15/1, 419. 21 Jonas 1875, 968: ‘Die Harre sind lang und hangen gantz locker herunder, und machen von fornnen die Form eines Apollo Kopff’. 22 FA I.2, 252; Wallenborn 2006, 304‑305; Waddington 1888, 162‑163: ‘Deinem Bilde / Von Marmor hier möcht’ ich dich wohl vergleichen…’. 23 Anz 1999, 105‑106: ‘stilisierende Simulation’; FA I.15/1, 425: ‘Ich habe nichts dagegen, daß die Idee, als hätte ich so ausgesehen, in der Welt bleibt’. 24 Grosz 1990, 37. 25 HA 1, 671: ‘Mythos gewordene’.

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Figure 4 Terracotta Goethe bust, by Martin Gottlieb Klauer, circa 1790

Goethe-Museum Düsseldorf / Anton-und-Katharina-Kippenberg-Stiftung

part of Orestes in the staging of the early prose version of Iphigenia in 1779. Although the bust is supposed to invoke the rather grim figure of Orestes, who, being haunted by the furies, suffers the curse of the Atrides, the Greek details led spectators to liken the author to Apollo.26 The bust thus presents its observers with a doubly refracted image, ‘through Klauer’s classical lens’, which received a wider circulation when plaster casts of Klauer’s sculpture began to hit the market.27 One can thus safely surmise that Trippel’s and Klauer’s portraits must have been deeply etched into the collective pictorial memory. Goethe’s mythological self-fashioning through sculptural means was further elaborated in his house on Frauenplan Square. After the rebuilding of the front part in 1792, the building prompted visitors to associate Goethe’s residence with Mount Olympus. A sequence of sculptures extends from the statue of ‘Ganymede’ at the foot of the stairs to the bust of Zeus in the

26 Vogel 1961, 30. 27 MacLeod 2000, 77.

38 Silke Hoffmann

Yellow Room.28 The particular position of the statue can be seen in the light of Goethe’s poem on Ganymede – the young man who serves as Zeus’s cupbearer on Mount Olympus. The statue’s arms are stretched upwards, as if in expression of the repeated cries in the poem: ‘Upwards, upwards the drive’.29 They steer the viewer’s eyes toward the first floor. Over the door to the Yellow Room is Martin Gottlieb Klauer’s plaster relief, which carries the emblems of the eagle and the lightning bolt, indicating the ‘lightning thrower’ Zeus.30 The ten etchings Cupid and Psyche, hanging in a frieze-like band in the Yellow Room, allude to the figure of Jupiter and the locale of Mount Olympus as well.31 Next to the supraporte relief and the etchings, the Zeus bust in the corner – yet another plaster cast of the ‘head of Jupiter’ Goethe had bought in 1786 – marks the room once again as ‘the realm of Jupiter’.32 The sequence of objects – the statue at the foot of the stairs, the relief, etchings, and the bust of Zeus – demonstrates how not only Goethe’s work, but also his house can be understood as an intertextual layering of images taken from mythical stories. Understandably, when climbing the stairs, many viewers associated their visit to the house with an ascent to Mount Olympus. In 1790, two years before the new flight of stairs in his house was installed, the author similarly charges the site of the Capitoline Hill with the aura of the ancient epics in his seventh Roman Elegy: ‘Am I now in / Your ambrosial house, Jupiter Father, your guest?’33 In the elegy, the lyrical self pictures the steep ‘Hill of the Capitol’ behind the Roman Forum as ‘a second’ Mount Olympus.34

Performing the Posture Having now touched on the specifics of Goethe’s house, which serve as the background for the construction of his public persona, I now focus on 28 Klauer’s catalogue of casts lists the statue at the bottom of the stairs as ‘Ganymed. Antik. 4 Fuß, 3 Zoll’. See Lichtenstern 1995, 344. 29 Boyle 2000, vol. 1, 160; FA I.1, 205: ‘Hinauf hinauf strebts!’ 30 Homer 1821, 5.36. 31 Maul & Oppel 1996, 36. 32 Lichtenstern 1995, 347: ‘Jupiter Kopf’, ‘Jupiters Reich’. 33 FA I.1, 1108: ‘Empfänget/ Dein ambrosisches Haus, Jupiter Vater, den Gast?’. See also FA I.1, 411; the English translation of Goethe 1998, 59. 34 FA I.1, 410: ‘[Der] Capitolinische Berg ist dir ein zweiter Olymp’. See also the address to the poet – ‘Dichter!’ (‘Poet!’) – in the elegy. FA I.1, 411. See also Miller 2002, 512‑513.

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Goethe’s posture by looking at several ‘signals’ that were used to ‘mark’ it.35 Since Jerôme Meizoz’s elaborations on the ‘notion of authorial posture’, in the footsteps of scholars such as Alain Viala and Pierre Bourdieu, a number of studies have pointed to the relation between an author’s ‘textual self-image’ and non-discursive clues such as ‘clothes, hairstyle, certain gestures’, which contribute significantly to a writer’s posture.36 In the case of Goethe, traits such as his hairstyle, pose, and gestures, are often noted in contemporary records of conversations with the author. In line with Trippel’s and Klauer’s iconic portrait busts, a number of drawings and paintings depict Goethe with curly hair. Trippel’s bust clearly invokes the ‘unshorn locks’ reminiscent of Apollo’s long hair that Horace comments on in his Iambi.37 This detail returns in the comments of many contemporaries on the author’s hair. Friedrich Wilhelm Riemer, his secretary, describes in his Mitteilungen über Goethe (Information about Goethe, 1841) how Goethe’s hair rose over the middle of his high forehead, falling down in waves along both sides of his face.38 With his attention for Goethe’s ‘Jupiter’s hair’, one could argue that Riemer attempts to read the author’s ‘Gestalt’ as if it were a text, as can be inferred from a sentence about portraits he quotes from Goethe’s play Stella: ‘I always think a person’s image is the best text for anything one can feel or say about him’39 Like Riemer, many observers associated Goethe’s head with sculptures based on Phidias’s statue of Zeus, particularly with the Otricoli Zeus: the massive locks of hair above the forehead were linked to ‘the lion’s manes on Jupiter’s brow’. 40 An engraving by Johann Heinrich Lips, after a drawing from 1791, relies similarly on this particular element in Zeus’ iconography. The hair, as suggested by Gudrun Körner in her commentary on the chalk drawing, calls forth the ancient ‘topos of the lion’s physiognomy’. 41 Much later, the famous anthropologist James George Frazer would characterize the bust of Zeus Otricoli in comparable terms: ‘The type of head is leonine, with a high pointed forehead’ and ‘great masses of matted hair, like a lion’s mane’. 42

35 Korthals Altes 2014, 53. 36 Meizoz 2010, 83‑85; Korthals Altes 2014, 53. 37 Nisbet & Hubbard 1970, 255. 38 Pollmer 1921, 138. 39 FA I.6, 537: ‘O mich dünkt immer, die Gestalt des Menschen ist der Text zu Allem was sich über ihn empfinden und sagen läßt’. See also the English translation of Goethe 1994, 201. 40 Hahn 1980, vol. 1, 117: ‘Jupiters Löwen bemähnte Stirn’. 41 Körner 1994, 165: ‘Topos der Löwenphysiognomie’. 42 Frazer 2012, 531.

40 Silke Hoffmann Figure 5 J.W. Goethe by Johann Heinrich Lips, 1791

Goethe-Museum Düsseldorf / Anton-und-Katharina-Kippenberg-Stiftung

Goethe’s posture caught the eye of his contemporaries as well. Several reports mention the writer’s stiff pose, pointing out his habit of sitting very erectly. A chalk drawing by Friedrich Bury, a sketch for a painting from 1800 – sadly now lost – captures this rigid pose that others likened to the ‘static pose’ of seated Zeus sculptures. 43 Aside from his sitting habit, observers noted solemn gestures such as Goethe’s way to nod gravely, which invited comparisons to Zeus’s famous nod in the first canto of the Iliad.44 This comparison was strengthened by reports of visitors who noted that when they saw Goethe in his house on Frauenplan Square, he often stood next to the massive Zeus bust or sat with his back to the cast.45 In their letters and diaries the sculpture and the writer’s head, ‘Jupiter without a beard’, 43 Dowden 2006, 26. 44 For a commentary on the canto (I.528‑30), see Latacz 2000, vol. 1, 168. 45 The beholder, as a visitor to the house noted, could not help but compare the writer’s head to the Zeus bust behind it. See Amelung 1925, vol. 3, 65.

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merge into a single image. 46 As the bust, in Wilhelm Heinrich Roscher’s Ausführliches Lexikon der griechischen und römischen Mythologie (Detailed Dictionary of Greek and Roman Mythology, 1884‑1937) among other sources, is connected to the figure of Zeus in the Iliad when he nods his head after Thetis’s request on behalf of Achilles, visitors were bound to recall the Zeus figure from Homer’s epic as they strolled over Frauenplan Square. 47 Not only hair and posture, but also other physical details, such as Goethe’s ‘wink of Jupiter’, were mythologically framed. 48 Comments on the author’s appearance may be read as variations on the topos of the ‘Olympian pose’, which had long become the author’s hallmark by 1830. 49 Those who saw him consistently confirmed the public image of Zeus/Jupiter: they almost automatically noticed the ‘head of Jupiter’ and promptly heard an ‘immortal stride’ when Goethe entered the room.50 In his diary, the Austrian playwright Franz Grillparzer puts this into verse. After having just met the author, he concludes that Goethe ‘appeared to stride like a Zeus’.51 Against the background of Goethe’s antechamber, a true ‘Jupiter world’, the public image of the ‘German Jupiter’ had something artificial about it.52 Commenting on Goethe’s ‘bearing and motion about the room’, contemporaries could not help but refer to the idea of ‘life imitating art’, registering ‘something unreal and stagey about the encounter, some role-playing or selffashioning’.53 The writer’s calm, immobile pose appeared to imitate, almost like a tableau vivant, the full frontal posture one finds in the engraving by Lips and the drawing by Bury.54 Furthermore, beholders often outlined how the writer, when sitting down, adopted the posture of the seated statues of Zeus. Finally, some sources even explicitly describe the house on Frauenplan Square as a theatrical set. After paying a visit to the author, Hermann von Pückler-Muskau for instance suspected that Goethe used the dim lighting to make his ‘Jupiter-head’ stand out.55 The sculptural image of Goethe, construed by paintings, drawings, and busts, was further circulated by means of printing techniques and hearsay. 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

Fischer 1958, 26: ‘Jupiter ohne Bart’. Roscher 1965, 735. Dietze & Dietze 1987, vol. 2, 219‑220: ‘Jupiterwink’. Weisinger 1998, 2‑3. Gregor-Dellin & Bülow 2002, 159; Bode 1982, vol. 3, 282: ‘Jupiterkopf’. Grillparzer 1960‑1965, vol. 4, 429: ‘Schien er wie ein Zeus zu schreiten’. MA 3.2, 420; Biedermann & Herwig 1965‑1987, vol. 3, 37: ‘Jupiter-Welt’. Guthke 2002, 130. See Schlaffer 1994 on the tableau vivant as a parlour game. Pückler-Muskau 1986, 415.

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For example, Angelika Kauffmann’s drawing of 1788 – based upon Trippel’s sculpture – shows a bust on a pedestal surrounded by muses, in an allusion to the ‘leader of the muses’. In 1789, an etching after this particular drawing was used as the frontispiece of volume eight of the Göschen edition of his works, thereby ensuring a wider distribution.56 Simple hearsay played a role in the reproduction of the Olympian image as well: when the English diarist Henry Crabb Robinson compared Goethe to Jove in 1801, he indirectly cited ‘Herder’s humorous comment’ on Bury’s painting, stating that Bury only had to ‘clap a few flashes of Lightning into [Goethe’s] Hand & transform him into a Jupiter at once’.57 Clearly, Goethe had been successful in his self-fashioning as the Olympian writer, playing the part well of the cold, stately ‘Jupiter’, annoyed at being interrupted in his work and trying to shield himself from the ‘fans’ who flocked to the house on Frauenplan, sometimes only to look at him.58 However, as Timo Müller (citing Meizoz) points out, authorial posturing also involves an active, ‘performative dimension’: ‘A posture comes into existence only in its performance, which makes it “the locus of artifice, of staging, even of ruse”’.59 On this note, we may want to keep in mind that Goethe, as he admits in a letter from 1808, always liked ‘to play hide and seek’.60 This game of hide and seek, then, may not only be revealed in Goethe’s use of pseudonyms and disguises, or in ‘the carefully crafted obliqueness of his writing’, the ‘embedded secrets’, ‘riddles’, and ‘codes’ that are inscribed in his works, but also in his consistent Olympian posture.61

Natural Genius, Fully Formed Works From the early 1800s onwards the epithet ‘Olympian’ involved a very specific form of authorship as it alluded to an author ‘from whom great writing seemed simply and naturally to flow’.62 The myth of the serene, natural Olympian writer sprang most notably from Schiller’s depiction of the ‘naïve 56 See Maierhofer 2012, 33 on circulation and sales figures. 57 Grumach & Grumach 1965‑1999, vol. 5, 1801: ‘I will repeat what I heard Herder say’. See also Biedermann & Herwig 1965‑1987, vol. 1, 819. 58 Bertaux 1986, 11‑12. See also Mole 2009, 6. 59 See Müller 2010, 54, referring to Erving Goffman’s study The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959). 60 FA II.6, 324: ‘Versteckens zu spielen’. 61 Vincent 2001, 129‑130. 62 Pizer 2011, 14.

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genius’ in his Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung (On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, 1795).63 In this essay, Schiller outlines the ‘naïve grace’ of the poetry produced by writers who ‘are nature’, unlike those seeking ‘the lost nature’.64 Schiller paints a picture of the naïve poet looming over his work: ‘like the deity behind the world edifice, so does he stand behind his work; he is the work, and the work is he’, comparing the ‘naïve genius’ with the divine maker.65 Although he does not mention his name when sketching the naïve genius, it is very likely that Schiller was thinking of Goethe.66 The naïve is closely tied to Homer’s imagery and thus ‘becomes indelibly associated with the Classical’.67 Furthermore, Schiller’s description of the ‘naïve genius’ also resonates with his depiction of the ‘fortune-favoured’ in his poem Das Glück (Fortune). The hymn, printed in the Musen­almanach für das Jahr 1799 (Muses’ Almanac for the Year 1799), starts off with the lines: Blest, whom the gods – the gracious – ere his birth Already lov’d; whom Venus as a child, Upon her bosom cradled. He, for whom Phœbus the eyes, the lips has Hermes open’d, And on whose brow the seal of power has been By Jove himself impress’d.68

Whilst referring to the phrase ‘Beatus ille’ from Horace’s Iambi, the verses may also allude to Goethe, as the commentary of the Schiller National‑ ausgabe (Schiller National Edition, 1963) suggests.69 Consequently, the verses transfer the Homeric epithets ‘blessed’ and ‘happy’ to Goethe in an appraisal of the ‘beloved of the Gods’ to whom ‘the Gods permit [...] an easy victory’.70 This image of Goethe as a natural genius proved to be influential, for as 63 Kruckis 1995, 73. 64 NA 20, 432: ‘Sie [die Dichter] werden entweder Natur seyn, oder sie werden die verlorene suchen’. See also NA 20, 425‑426, 348. 65 NA 20, 433: ‘Wie die Gottheit hinter dem Weltgebäude, [...] Er ist das Werk und das Werk ist Er’. 66 See the commentary in NA 21.2, 281. 67 Hewitt 2003, 199. 68 NA 1, 409: ‘Selig, welchen die Götter, die gnädigen, vor der Geburt schon / Liebten, welchen als Kind Venus im Arme gewiegt, / Welchem Phöbus die Augen, die Lippen Hermes gelöset, / Und das Siegel der Macht Zeus auf die Stirne gedrückt!’ See also the English translation of Schiller 1844, 137‑138. 69 NA 21, 299. 70 NA 1, 409: ‘Göttergeliebten’, ‘den leichten Sieg [...] schenken’. See also the English translation of Schiller 1844, 139.

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late as 1905, in the short story Schwere Stunde (Difficult Hour), the novelist Thomas Mann ‘invoked’ the figure of Goethe ‘through the image’ of Schiller.71 Mann, in line with Schiller’s view, presents Goethe as the author ‘who with immediacy and divine mouth named the glowing things by name’.72 Aside from the untroubled ease of his writing, the myth of the ‘Jupiter of Weimar’ foregrounded another feature which marked Goethe’s authorship for his contemporaries: the classical wholeness of his works.73 This feature was often associated with the mythical story of Zeus fathering the fullgrown Pallas Minerva or Athena, goddess of wisdom, as related by Homer and Euripides.74 Ralf Bogner points to a series of obituaries about Goethe that characteristically describe how his works had sprung from the author’s head, like Pallas Minerva springing forth, sublimely shaped and fully armed, from the head of Jove.75 Such texts echo the closing lines of the 1804 version of Schiller’s Fortune where this work of the godlike poet merges with the image of Minerva, born from the Thunderer’s forehead.76

The Divine Leader of German Literature The divine aura of Goethe contributed to his status as a literary leader and supreme aesthetic judge. Around 1800, he established the posture of promoter of the visual arts both through his texts examining works of art – published in the periodical Propyläen (1798‑1800) – and through the ‘prize contests’ (‘Preisaufgaben’) of 1799‑1805, an annual art contest he set up. Artists were called upon to submit drawings for the contest – the topics were mostly taken from Homer’s epics. Goethe himself reviewed the drawings in Propyläen. A pen and ink drawing by Johann Gottfried Schadow depicts the judge sitting on his throne. The stiff posture stirs up the association of the frontal Zeus sculptures. Moreover, as Andreas Beyer notes, the drawing resembles Bury’s sketch, depicting Goethe in an imperial pose, as the man who ran the theatre in Weimar from a throne-like chair.77 In his Regeln für Schauspieler (Rules for Actors, 1803) Goethe had laid down very strict rules 71 Although the figure does not have a name, it is ‘obviously modelled after Schiller’. Bartle 1999, 198. 72 Pizer 2011, 14. 73 Mann 2002, 390: ‘Jupiter von Weimar’. 74 Homer 2002, 25; Euripides 1997, 77. 75 Bogner 1998, 155. 76 NA 2.1, 301. 77 Beyer 2002, 271.

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that actors had to adhere to. The classical style of acting implied that the actor ‘should not only imitate nature but present it in idealized form’.78 From his chair ‘in the centre of the stalls’, Goethe could ‘direct the audience as well as the actors’, and even, as local gossip suggests, signal to the audience when to applaud.79 Despite this level of control, the staging of Friedrich Schlegel’s play Alarcos in 1802 was a flop, setting off a quarrel between the Jena Romantics and anti-Romantic writers in Berlin. As a result, the play was a hot topic in the salon circuit, for example in the Berlin circle of Countess Julie von Voss. Discussions on this topic even induced one of the members of the circle to quote the Iliad in a letter about the quarrel:80 All however blamed the cloud-collecting son of Saturn, because he wished to show glory to the Trojans. But the father in truce regarded them not, and retiring by himself, sat down apart from the others exulting in glory, looking both at the city of the Trojans, and the ships of the Greeks, and the flash of armour, and the slaying, and the dying.81

The letter, much like Bury’s chalk drawing, depicts the writer as a detached figure, keeping his distance from the quarrel about the play. In this way Goethe is again likened to Zeus, who ‘watches the battle’ in the eleventh canto of the Iliad ‘as if it were a theatrical performance’, as Hainsworth stresses in his commentary.82 Through the prize contests and the Propyläen, Goethe self-confidently claimed a major position in the German literary field. Schadow’s drawing of the author sitting on a throne from 1802‑1803 indicates, in a caricatured form, that Goethe had claimed a pivotal position by then: the large sitting figure dominates the drawing, while small figures, the two brothers August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel, stand in the foreground, at Goethe’s feet, in a ‘paraphrase’ of the Ildefonso group.83 These Jena Romantics who endorsed ‘old-German’ paintings based upon Biblical stories found no favour with Goethe.84 Indeed, in the second issue of the journal Über Kunst und Alterthum (On Art and Antiquity, 1817), Goethe severely judged such mixing 78 Kelly 2004, 100; Fischer-Lichte 2005, 11. 79 Boyle 2000, vol. 2, 725. 80 Mandelkow 1965‑1969, vol. 1, 392‑393. 81 Homer 1821, 327. 82 Hainsworth 1993, 230. 83 Beyer 2002, 271. Incidentally, a copy of this group is placed on the half landing of the house on the Frauenplan Square. 84 Schlegel 1959, vol. 4, 92: ‘altdeutsche’.

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of visual art, poetry, and religion within Romantic works.85 Heine reports in The Romantic School (1835) how Goethe criticized the Schlegels for their ‘Catholic follies’ in this text from 1817.86 Unlike Johann Heinrich Voss, whose interventions in the debate Heine compares to the violent hammering force of Odin/Thor, Goethe had prevailed without using brute force.87 Rather than throwing thunderbolts, he ‘had only to shake his head with its ambrosial locks indignantly, and the Schlegels trembled and crept away’.88 Here, Heine ironically alludes to the first canto of the Iliad wherein Zeus ‘nodded his head with the dark brows’ and his hair ‘swept from his divine head, and all Olympus was shaken’.89 According to Heine’s comparison, then, Goethe had secured his position with a strategic move, ‘for by so rudely driving the Schlegels out of the temple’, he had affirmed his status in the German literary field of the ‘Age of Art’.90 Such a display of power was part and parcel of the author’s godlike public image. Since the Xenia, the set of polemic epigrams that appeared in Schiller’s Musen­almanach für das Jahr 1797 (Muses’ Almanac for the Year 1797), he had more than once rebuked other writers, thereby both defending and reaffirming his own position. In the Xenia, Goethe harshly attacked several authors of trivial literature as well as writers of the Enlightenment period. Consequently, he was increasingly regarded as the sublime Jupiter of German literature – a label that was used either in praise of Goethe or in a more sarcastic manner.91 The Young German writers (‘Jungdeutschen’), for instance, referring to the struggle in the German literary field, used the formula of Zeus/Jupiter ironically: they compared the battle to the Titanomachy, with the ‘Jupiter of Weimar’ holding down the ‘epigones’.92 The comparison invokes a form of literary fandom as well, for the Young Germans stress that Goethe allowed idolatry as Zeus accepted the smoke of sacrifice.93 In Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland (Concerning the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany, 1834), Heine, too, suggests that Goethe was celebrated like a god: ‘The German Jupiter 85 FA I.20, 115. 86 DHA 8.1, 149: ‘das dumpfig katholische Treiben’. 87 Aeschylus 1991, 8: ‘Zeus hurls men to ruin, / yet […] his force is all ease’. 88 DHA 8.1, 149: ‘brauchte nur das Haupt mit den ambrosischen Locken unwillig zu schütteln, und die Schlegel zitterten und krochen davon’. 89 Homer 1821, 1.529‑530. 90 DHA 8.1, 149: ‘indem er so barsch die Schlegel aus dem Tempel jagte’. See also DHA 12.1, 47. 91 DHA 8.1, 149. 92 Berghahn & Hermand 2001, 57: ‘Weimarean Jupiter’. 93 Wienbarg 1964, 188.

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remained calmly seated and allowed himself to be worshipped in peace and perfumed with incense’.94

Goethe’s Correspondence with a Fan The notion of Goethe, drenched in sacrif icial pagan imagery, reflects how the author’s fame was ‘entangled [...] with a religious vocabulary’, a central feature of stardom, as John Frow stated.95 Since the early 1770s, Goethe had his share of fans who praised him fervently as a genius: fans following him, gathering around the author to listen to him, crowds of ‘onlookers’, captured by the author’s ‘aura’.96 A cult was taking shape. Rituals ranged from panegyrics on Goethe and trips to the author’s home to sacrificial gestures. Items were rapturously dedicated to him or placed in front of sculptures of the author as votive gifts. The adoring tone that marks many of the letters to the author, can also be found in Bettine von Arnim’s writing, particularly in her ‘image of lying at Goethe’s feet’.97 Von Arnim, whose correspondence with Goethe extends from 1807 to 1811, stands out among the many devout fans of the author. After his death, she published the letters as Goethes Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde (Goethe’s Correspondence with a Child, 1835), in a heavily revised and partly fictitious edition.98 Von Arnim expresses her admiration for the author in the by now familiar mythological topoi. While Goethe figures as Zeus/Jupiter in her text, she fancies herself lying at the author’s feet as Psyche, goddess of the soul.99 In another scene she drifts toward her idol as if she were ‘in a cloud’, hinting at the figure of Io whom, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Jupiter seduces after enveloping her in a cloud.100 Other mythological references include classical scenes of embrace such as the sea nymph Thetis, clasping Zeus’s knee and Jupiter embracing Io, such as in Antonio da Correggio’s painting of Jupiter

94 DHA 8.1, 102: ‘Der deutsche Jupiter blieb ruhig sitzen, und ließ sich ruhig anbeten und beräuchern’. 95 Frow 1998, 197. 96 Grumach & Grumach 1965‑1999, vol. 1, 207; ‘Schaulustige’, ‘aura’. See also Safranski 2015, 146‑147. 97 Gooze 1990, 41. 98 McAlpin 2005, 295. 99 Von Arnim 1992, vol. 2, 576. 100 Gajek 2001, 70: ‘wie in einer Wolke’.

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and Io (circa 1530).101 In fact, a copy of this painting hung on the wall of von Arnim’s Berlin flat on In den Zelten 5. In a very interesting passage Von Arnim remembers a scene from 1807 in which she attempted to kiss the Trippel bust in the Weimar library, with an unwilling Goethe himself standing next to ‘the pillar fronting thy bust’.102 Here, as noted by Catherine Grimm, Von Arnims’ text ‘juxtaposes a supposedly “real-life” Goethe with an aestheticized one’.103 ‘Stay! like this image’, Von Arnim says to Goethe: ‘Then I will woo thee calm again! – wilt thou not? – well! Then I forsake the living one, and kiss the stone so long, till grudgingly thou hast snatched me from it’.104 The embrace of the bust and the kiss she presses on ‘these marble lips’ introduces a Pygmalionic twist to the story, since she falls for the image carved from marble – ‘nearly I had abandoned me to the stone’.105 Von Arnim repeatedly refers to the myth of Pygmalion as she hopes the statuesque, stone-cold figure of the author may come to life.106 The Pygmalion motif turns up again in Von Arnim’s sketch for a commissioned statue of Goethe. The beloved author is shown ‘as Jupiter seated on a throne’.107 Goethe himself later described the statue as a ‘rigid, dry figure’.108 The figure is styled in the scheme of frontal Zeus sculptures and enlivened by a small figure of Psyche at Goethe’s feet, ensuring a link between the statue and Von Arnim’s image of herself as Psyche in Goethe’s Correspond‑ ence with a Child.109 A plaster model was made after her drawing, which she placed in her Berlin flat. Portraits of its interior show how the statue and the larger than life cast of the statue’s head dominated the rooms.110 As from the late 1830s, the In den Zelten apartment became the location for a literary salon hosted by Von Arnim.111 No doubt, those frequenting the salon circuit were familiar with the widespread cult of Goethe, as Berlin salons such as 101 Homer 1821, 1.500‑501. 102 Von Arnim 1992, vol. 2, 560: ‘Deiner Büste gegenüber’. 103 Grimm 2001‑2002, 95‑96. 104 Von Arnim 1839, 297: ‘Halte Stand wie dies Bild, rief ich, so will ich Dich wieder sanft schmeicheln, willst Du nicht? – nun so laß ich den Lebenden und küsse den Stein so lange, bis Du eifersüchtig wirst’. See also Von Arnim 1992, vol. 2, 560. 105 Von Arnim 1839, 297: ‘diese Marmorlippen’. 106 Von Arnim 1992, vol. 2, 581: ‘Umarme mich, weißer Cararischer Stein’. See also Wallenborn 2006, 305. 107 Hock 2001, 22. 108 ‘FA II.10, 179: ‘starre trockne Figur’. 109 Holm 2001‑2002, 84. 110 Lukatis 1994, 18‑20. 111 Bäumer 1987, 42.

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Henriette Herz’s, Amalie von Helvig’s, and Rahel Varnhagen’s all fuelled the Goethe ‘mania’, but the centrally placed plaster statue in Von Arnim’s flat must have overwhelmed her visitors nonetheless.112

Conclusion: From a Distant Zeus to a National Icon Despite the cult of personality surrounding him, his later works conveyed the authorial image of Goethe as a remote Zeus figure. Due to the complicated compositions, ranging from the montage-like narrative structure of the novel Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Wandering Years, 1821) to the ‘circular and spiral’ structure of the West-östlicher Divan (West-Eastern Divan, 1819), readers were puzzled by his later works.113 In Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe (1836), Goethe himself comments on the issue as follows: ‘My work simply cannot be popular. Anyone who thinks it can be – and who tries to win popularity for it – is making a mistake. I haven’t written for people in general, people en masse’, but, Goethe adds, only ‘for individuals’.114 In the end, his need for exclusivity even led him to put a seal on the manuscript of Faust II.115 Goethe’s West-Eastern Divan, his last great cycle of poems, contributed to the image of the distant deity, the author being berated for his political detachment during the unrest after 1806. In the wake of the defeat of the Prussian army by the French in the Battle of Jena and the plunder of Weimar, Goethe appeared to worry mostly about his unprinted manuscripts.116 Further, whilst the Battles of Lützen, Bautzen, and Leipzig were being fought, Goethe preferred to work on his autobiography rather than to write patriotic poetry, as other German writers did at the time. With the West-Eastern Divan the author poetically fled from the present ‘to the untroubled East’, an escape that the first poem Hegire of the cycle links to Muhammad’s hegira, his flight from Mecca to Medina.117

112 Ledanff 2000, 23. 113 FA II.9, 52: ‘kreis- und spiralartig’. 114 FA II.12, 287: ‘Meine Sachen können nicht popular werden; wer daran denkt und dafür strebt, ist in einem Irrtum. Sie sind nicht für die Masse geschrieben, sondern nur für einzelne Menschen’. 115 After his death, the second part of the tragedy was published as the first volume of the Nachgelassene Werke (Posthumous Works, 1832). 116 FA I.14, 995. 117 FA I.3/1, 12: ‘im reinen Osten’.

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By the time the late autobiographical work From My Life: Poetry and Truth appeared, Goethe’s ‘Olympian stance’ had become more important than his actual works.118 Sources such as Riemer’s Information about Goethe, Eckermann’s Conversations, and other records of Goethe’s ‘house friends’ all revolve around the image of the Olympian author as they describe conversations with Goethe and episodes from the author’s last years.119 Eckermann’s records in particular shift ‘from chronicle to myth’, conjuring up the image of ‘lofty Olympian height’ from where the classical author glances ‘[down] upon the small busy world at his feet with either benevolence or disdain’.120 In Eckermann’s description even the author’s corpse lay like a statue.121 After the author’s death, admirers continued to pay visits to the house on Frauenplan Square, ‘where the stately Jupiter walked’, and reflected on their impression of the site in diaries, letters, and travelogues.122 Although the Weimar house was closed to the public after 1840, at times selected visitors were allowed entrance to the rooms, often guided by Theodor Kräuter – custodian of Goethe’s vast collections for a period after his death. Visitors often invoked the house with elegiac pathos as the seat of Jove.123 Characteristically, the German writer Karl Immermann uses the Latin phrase ‘Ab Jove principium, in Jove finis’ as a motto to his description of the Goethe House in his Memorabilien (1843).124 Other memorial places included the Weimar Ducal Library (in 1991 renamed the Duchess Anna Amalia Library) and the Goethe Room in the Weimar Castle. In the oval hall of the library the visitors encounter a series of busts standing on pedestals along the walls, among them the huge bust of Goethe by David d’Angers. The hall, as Fahrner points out, serves a necrological function. With the historical collection of books and the room’s elliptical shape, suggestive of a sacral structure, the casts in the hall almost appear like relics.125 As the nineteenth century progressed, the Goethe industry started to pick up pace. Memorabilia increasingly became available, in the form of plaster casts, portrait medallions, and coins depicting the author. Magazines 118 Sax 1987, 106. 119 FA II.9, 293: ‘Hausfreunde’. 120 Grumach 1982, 218: ‘Chronik zu Mythos’. See also Kelling 1970, 58‑59. 121 Hess 1983, 887; FA II.12, 495‑496. Much later, in his 1982 play In Goethes Hand (In Goethe’s Hand, 63-64), the novelist Martin Walser would take aim at this Jupiter-like figure of Goethe in Eckermann’s book. 122 Röder-Bolton 2000, 44. 123 Maltitz 1873, 90. 124 Immermann 1843, 151; Rossi 1989, 8‑9. 125 Steierwald 1999, 64; Fahrner 1999, 106‑107.

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such as Die Gartenlaube (The Summer House, founded in 1853) further fed nostalgia for the past ‘age of Goethe’ (‘Goethezeit’) by publishing stories and homely drawings of visits to the ‘Zeus’ of Weimar in his residence. Visitors could purchase Weimar albums and Weimar diaries that pictured the ‘classical sites’ and explained everything about the famous sculptures by Trippel and David in the ‘Hall of Sculptures’, often providing detailed information about the iconographies of Apollo and Zeus/Jupiter.126 In 1867, the Goethe Gallerie displays cosy, Biedermeier-like idyllic scenes, like Goethe ice-skating: the figure in the copper engraving, after a drawing of Wilhelm von Kaulbach, is styled in ‘the posture of a latter-day Apollo Belvedere’.127 Recounting episodes from Goethe’s life, the texts nostalgically borrow the cliché of the writer as an Apollo figure, ‘Wolfgang Apollo’.128 Lavish gilt-edged volumes illustrate the coupling of kitsch and nationalist pathos around 1870.129 After 1871, with the creation of the Second Reich, the nationalist appropriation of Goethe’s celebrity became dominant. In line with the new national self-image, the writer was placed on a pedestal as the hero of the German Empire.130 As if they were taking their lead from a refrain in Goethe’s Epilog zu Schillers Glocke (Epilogue to Schiller’s Song of the Bell, 1805) – ‘For he was ours!’ – Germans made the writer an icon of the newly founded ‘Kaiserreich’.131 The mythological framing of Goethe now received a political and militant edge: contemporary biographical works and literary historical volumes invoke the author as the high-seated Zeus ‘overlooking the world’.132 Along with the allusion to high Olympus, the author’s image is marked in this period by a ‘Höhenmetapher’, an unsettling metaphor of height, and with heroic pathos, linking Prussian Germany to the age of Goethe.133 Accordingly, a competition for the design of a Goethe statue in Berlin, the capital of the new empire, was launched in 1872. Drawing on Zeus iconography, a signif icant number of the designs for the Berlin statue followed the scheme of the Zeus sculpture at Olympia, as Max Schasler notes in Deutsche Kunst-Zeitung, whilst also borrowing from Von Arnim’s 126 Schuster and Gille 1999, 23: ‘klassische Stätten’, ‘Bilderhalle’. 127 Varty 1991, 214‑215. 128 Spielhagen 1867, 83‑84. 129 Rehrl 1996, 209. 130 Elias 2005, 200. 131 FA I.6, 890: ‘Denn er war unser!’ 132 Grimm 1887, 5: ‘über der Welt’. 133 Homer 1821, 15.79; Lämmert 1971, 443.

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sketch for a statue.134 Another example is a massive sculpture created by Karl Steinhäuser, after Von Arnim’s design, which was placed over the landing of the newly opened Grand Ducal Museum in Weimar in 1869. The statue depicts the author seated, towering over the viewer, and reflects the public image of the ‘Olympian’ writer. Yet whilst the national author Goethe was celebrated, his works appeared to be reduced to snippets inscribed on the bases of the statues. It seems almost as if the fascination for Goethe’s Olympian stance had finally eclipsed the attention for his works.

Bibliography Aeschylus, The Suppliants, trans. by P. Burian (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). H. Amelung, Goethe als Persönlichkeit: Berichte und Briefe von Zeitgenossen, 3 vols. (Berlin: Propyläen, 1925). T. Anz, ‘Körper als Zeichen: Dokumente über Goethes äußere Erscheinung’, http://www.literatur kritik.de/ public/rezension.php?rez_id=430, last accessed 1 December 2015. B. von Arnim, Goethe’s Correspondence with a Child, 3 vols. (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1839), III. B. von Arnim, Werke und Briefe, 4 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker, 1992), II. G. Bartle, ‘Displacing Goethe: Tribute and Exorcism in Thomas Mann’s The Beloved Returns’, in The Author as Character: Representing Historical Writers in Western Literature, ed. by P. Franssen & T. Hoenselaars (London: Associated University Presses, 1999). K. Bäumer, ‘Die Rezeption Bettina von Arnims in der Berliner Kultur- und Literaturgeschichte’, Internationales Jahrbuch der Bettina-von-Arnim-Gesellschaft 1 (1987), 39‑52. K.L. Berghahn & J. Hermand, Goethe in German-Jewish Culture (Rochester Camden House, 2001). P. Bertaux, Gar schöne Spiele spiel’ ich mit dir! Zu Goethes Spieltrieb (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1986). A. Beyer, ‘Prosa versus Poesie: Schadow und Goethe’, in Wechselwirkungen: Kunst und Wissenschaft in Berlin und Weimar im Zeichen Goethes, ed. by E. Osterkamp (Bern: Lang, 2002).

134 Selbmann 1988, 119.

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F. von Biedermann & W. Herwig, Goethes Gespräche: Eine Sammlung zeitgenös‑ sischer Berichte aus seinem Umgang, 5 vols. (Zürich: Artemis, 1965‑1987). W. Bode, Goethe in vertraulichen Briefen seiner Zeitgenossen, 3 vols. (München: Beck, 1982). R.G. Bogner (ed.), Goethes Aufstieg ins Elysium: Nachrufe auf einen deutschen Klassiker. Dokumente 1832‑1835 (Heidelberg: Palatina, 1998). N. Boyle, Goethe: The Poet and the Age, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). DHA = H. Heine, Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe der Werke, 16 vols. (Hamburg: Hoffman und Campe, 1973‑1997). A. Dietze & W. Dietze (eds.), Treffliche Wirkungen: Anekdoten von und über Goethe, 2 vols. (München: Beck, 1987). K. Dowden, Gods and Heroes of the Ancient World (London: Routledge, 2006). J.S. Dwight (ed.), Select Minor Poems: Translated from the German of Goethe and Schiller (Boston: Hilliard, Gray & Co., 1838). N. Elias, Studien über die Deutschen: Machtkämpfe und Habitusentwicklung im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005). Euripides, Ion, trans. by K.H. Lee (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1997). FA = J.W. Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche, 40 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1987‑1999). K. Fahrner, ‘Reliquien: Zwei Schillerporträts aus der Kunstsammlung der Weimarer Bibliothek’, in Herzogin-Anna-Amalia-Bibliothek: Kulturgeschichte einer Sammlung. ed. by M. Knoche & I. Arnhold (München: Stiftung Weimarer Klassik bei Hanser, 1999), 104‑106. R. Fischer (ed.), Fahrten nach Weimar: Slawische Gäste bei Goethe (Weimar: Arion, 1958). H. Fischer-Lamberg (ed.), Der junge Goethe, 5 vols. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1963‑1973). E. Fischer-Lichte, Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual: Exploring Forms of Political Theatre (London: Routledge, 2005). J.G. Frazer (ed.), Pausanias’s Description of Greece, 6 vols. (London: Kessinger, 2012), III. J. Frow ‘Is Elvis a God? Cult, Culture, Questions of Method’, International Journal of Cultural Studies 1, (1998) no. 2, 197‑210. E. Gajek (ed.), Die Leidenschaft ist der Schlüssel zur Welt: Briefwechsel Bettine von Arnim – Hermann von Pückler-Muskau, 1832‑1844 (Stuttgart: Cotta’sche Buchhandlung, 2001). J.W. Goethe, Early Verse Drama and Prose Plays, trans. by R.M. Browning et al. (New York: Princeton University Press, 1994). J.W. Goethe, Goethes Werke, 14 vols. (München: Beck, 1993). J.W. Goethe, Selected Poems, trans. by J. Whaley (London: Everyman, 1998).

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M. Gooze, ‘Jaja, ich bet’ ihn an: Nineteenth-Century Women Writers and Goethe’, in The Age of Goethe Today, ed. by G.B. Pickar & S. Cramer (München: W. Fink, 1990), 39‑49. M. Gregor-Dellin & U. von Bülow, Gustav Parthey: Ein verfehlter und ein gelungener Besuch bei Goethe 1819 und 1827 (Marbach: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, 2002). F. Grillparzer, Sämtliche Werke: Ausgewählte Briefe, Gespräche, Berichte, 4 vols. (München: Carl Hanser, 1960‑1965). C. Grimm, ‘Von Kopf bis Fuß auf Liebe eingestellt: An Exploration of (Feminine) Subjectivity in Bettine von Arnim’s Goethes Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde’, Internationales Jahrbuch der Bettina-von-Arnim-Gesellschaft 13‑14 (2001‑2002), 89‑98. H. Grimm, Goethe (Berlin: Hertz, 1887). E.A. Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (London: Routledge, 1990). E. Grumach & R. Grumach (eds.), Goethe: Begegnungen und Gespräche, 6 vols. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1965‑1999). R. Grumach (ed.), Kanzler Friedrich von Müller: Unterhaltungen mit Goethe (München: C.H. Beck, 1982). K.S. Guthke, ‘Destination Goethe: Travelling Englishmen in Weimar’, in Goethe and the English-Speaking World: Essays from the Cambridge Symposium for His 250th Anniversary, ed. by N. Boyle & J. Guthrie (Rochester: Camden House, 2002), 111‑142. K.-H. Hahn (ed.), Briefe an Goethe: Gesamtausgabe in Regestform, 1764‑1795 (Weimar: H. Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1980). B. Hainsworth, The Iliad: A Commentary. Volume 3: Books 9‑12 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). S. Heckenbücker, Prometheus, Apollo, Zeus/Jupiter: Goethe-Bilder von 1773 bis 1885 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2008). H. Heine, The Romantic School and Other Essays, trans. by H. Mustard et al. (New York: Continuum, 2002). G. Hess, ‘Goethe in München: Literarische Aspekte der Geschichte und Wirkung von Stielers Dichter-Porträt’, in Klassik und Moderne: Die Weimarer Klassik als historisches Ereignis und Herausforderung im kulturgeschichtlichen Prozeß, ed. by K. Richter & J. Schönert (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1983), 289‑317. M.A. Hewitt, ‘(Re)zoning the Naïve: Schiller’s Construction of Auto-historiography’, European Romantic Review 14 (2003), no. 2, 197‑203. L.M. Hock, Replicas of a Female Prometheus: The Textual Personae of Bettina von Arnim (New York: Peter Lang, 2001). C. Holm, ‘Papierne Paare: Zu Achim und Bettine von Arnims literarischem Dialog zu Kunst und Geschlecht’, Internationales Jahrbuch der Bettina-von-ArnimGesellschaft 13‑14 (2001‑2002), 65‑88.

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Homer, Homerische Hymnen, trans. by K.A. Pfeiff (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2002). Homer, The Iliad of Homer, trans. by [s.n.] (Oxford: [s.n.], 1821). K.L. Immermann, Memorabilien (Hamburg: Hoffmann & Campe, 1843). R. Janko, The Iliad: A Commentary. Vol. 4: Books 21‑24. Gen. ed. G.S. Kirk (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). F. Jonas, ‘Zur Geschichte von Trippels Goethebüste’, in Im neuen Reich: Wochen‑ schrift für das Leben des deutschen Volkes 5 (1875), no. 1, 966‑971. H.-W. Kelling, The Idolatry of Poetic Genius in German Goethe Criticism (Berne: Lang, 1970). T.F. Kelly, First Nights at the Opera (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). G.S. Kirk, The Iliad: A Commentary. Vol. 1: Books 1‑4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). G. Körner, ‘Goethe im Porträt’, in Goethe und die Kunst, ed. by S. Schulze (Stuttgart: Hatje, 1994), 149‑191. L. Korthals Altes, Ethos and Narrative Interpretation: The Negotiation of Values in Fiction (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014). H.-M. Kruckis, Ein potenziertes Abbild der Menschheit: Biographischer Diskurs und Etablierung der Neugermanistik in der Goethe-Biographik bis Gundolf (Heidelberg: Winter, 1995). T. Mann, Essays II. 1914‑1926 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2002). E. Lämmert, ‘Der Dichterfürst’, Beihefte zum Jahrbuch für Internationale German‑ istik 1 (1971), 439‑455. J. Latacz, Homers Ilias: Gesamtkommentar (München: K.G. Saur, 2000). S. Ledanff, ‘Die “Goethomanie” zu Berlin: 1800‑1832’, in Mitwelt – Nachwelt – In‑ ternet: Vorträge und Materialien zur Rezeption Goethes zwischen 1800 und 2000, ed. by J. Drews (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2000). C. Lichtenstern, ‘Jupiter – Dionysos – Eros/Thanatos: Goethes symbolische Bildprogramme im Haus am Frauenplan’, Goethe-Jahrbuch 112 (1995), 343‑360. C. Lukatis, ‘Die Interieurs von Moritz Hoffmann: Zu Besuch bei Bettina von Arnim und den Gebrüdern Grimm’, Kunst und Antiquitäten 5 (1994), 18‑23. MA = J.W. Goethe, Sämtliche Werke nach Epochen seines Schaffens (München: C. Hanser, 1985‑1998). A. Maaz, ‘Dass die Idee, als hätte ich so ausgesehen, in der Welt bleibt. Alexander Trippels Goethe-Büste: Werk und Wirkung’, Zeitschrift für Schweizerische Archäologie und Kunstgeschichte 52 (1995), 281‑292. C. MacLeod, ‘Floating Heads: Weimar Portrait Busts’, in Unwrapping Goethe’s Weimar: Essays in Cultural Studies and Local Knowledge, ed. by B. Henke et al. (Rochester: Camden House, 2000), 65‑84. W. Maierhofer, ‘Angelica Kauffmann Reads Goethe: Illustration and Symbolic Representation in the Göschen Edition’, The Sophie Journal 2 (2012), no. 1, 1‑34.

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A. von Maltitz, Ausgewählte Gedichte (Weimar: [s.n.], 1873). K.R. Mandelkow (ed.), Briefe an Goethe, 2 vols. (Hamburg: C. Wegner, 1965‑1969). K.R. Mandelkow (ed.), Goethes Briefe, 4 vols. (Hamburg: C. Wegner, 1968). G .Maul & M. Oppel, Goethes Wohnhaus (München: Carl Hanser, 1996). M. McAlpin, ‘Goethe’s Number-One Fan: A Neo-Feminist Reading of Bettina Brentano-von Arnim’, Comparative Literature 57 (2005), 294‑311. J. Meizoz, ‘Modern Posterities of Posture. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’, in Authorship Revisited: Conceptions of Authorship around 1900 and 2000, ed. by G.J. Dorleijn et al. (Leuven: Peeters, 2010), 81‑94. N. Miller, Der Wanderer: Goethe in Italien (München: C. Hanser, 2002). T. Mole (ed.), Romanticism and Celebrity Culture, 1750‑1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). T. Müller, The Self as Object in Modernist Fiction: James, Joyce, Hemingway (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2010). NA = F. Schiller, Schillers Werke: Nationalausgabe, 46 vols. (Weimar: Böhlau, 1943). R.G.M. Nisbet & M. Hubbard. A Commentary on Horace: Odes, book 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970). H. von Pückler-Muskau, Briefe eines Verstorbenen (Berlin: Kupfergraben, 1986). A. Opitz, ‘Erfahrung und Tradition: Italien und Frankreich im biographischen Projekt Goethes’, lecture (Goethe-Museum Düsseldorf, June 22, 1999). H. Pfotenhauer, M. Bernauer & N. Miller (eds.), Frühklassizismus: Position und Opposition: Winckelmann, Mengs, Heinse (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker, 1995). C. Pietzcker, Trauma, Wunsch und Abwehr: Psychoanalytische Studien zu Goethe, Jean Paul, Brecht, zur Atomliteratur und zur literarischen Form (Würzburg: Köningshausen & Neumann, 1985). J.D. Pizer, Imagining the Age of Goethe in German Literature, 1970‑2010 (Rochester: Camden House, 2011). A. Rehrl, Illustrierte Ausgaben von Goethes Lyrik 1800‑1933 (Stuttgart: M&P, 1996). H. Reinhardt, ‘Prometheus und die Folgen’, Goethe-Jahrbuch 108 (1991), 137‑168. F.W. Riemer, Mitteilungen über Goethe (Leipzig: Insel, 1921). D. Robinson, Western Translation Theory from Herodotus to Nietzsche (Manchester: St Jerome, 2002). G. Röder-Bolton, ‘Where the Stately Jupiter Walked: George Eliot and G.H. Lewes in Goethe’s Weimar’, George Eliot – George Henry Lewes Studies 38‑39 (2000), 44‑60. W.H. Roscher, Ausführliches Lexikon der griechischen und römischen Mythologie, 6 vols. (Hildesheim: Olms, 1965), VI. M.A. Rossi, Theocritus’ Idyll XVII: A Stylistic Commentary (Amsterdam: A.M. Hakkert, 1989). R. Safranski, Goethe: Kunstwerk des Lebens (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2015).

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B.C. Sax, Images of Identity: Goethe and the Problem of Self-Conception in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Peter Lang, 1987). M. Schasler, ‘Die Ausstellung der Konkurrenz-Skizzen zum Goethe-Denkmal in Berlin’, Deutsche Kunst Zeitung: Die Dioskuren 17 (1872), 22‑26. F. Schiller, The Minor Poems of Friedrich Schiller, trans. by J.H. Merivale (London: Pickering, 1844). H. Schlaffer, ‘Antike als Gesellschaftsspiel: Die Nachwirkungen von Goethes Italienreise im Norden’, in Analogon Rationis: Festschrift für Gerwin Marahrens, ed. by M. Henn (Edmonton: Henn & Lorey, 1994), 193‑207. F. Schlegel, ‘Zweiter Nachtrag alter Gemälde’, in Ansichten und Ideen von der christ‑ lichen Kunst, ed. by H. Eichner, 4 vols. (München: F. Schöningh, 1959), IV, 116‑152. G. Schuster & C. Gille, Weimarer Klassik (München: C. Hanser, 1999). H.C. Seeba, ‘Die Kinder des Pygmalion: Die Bildlichkeit des Kunstbegriffs bei Heine: Beobachtungen zur Tendenzwende der Ästhetik’, Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift 50 (1976), 158‑202. R. Selbmann, Dichterdenkmäler in Deutschland: Literaturgeschichte aus Erz und Stein (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1988). H. Spiegel, ‘Goethe rennt’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (13 October 2010), http:// www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/kino/im-kino-goethe-rennt-1580394.html, last accessed 20 November 2015. F. Spielhagen, Goethe-Galerie: Nach Original-Kartons von Wilhelm von Kaulbach: Mit erläuterndem Text von Friedrich Spielhagen (München: Bruckmann, 1867). U. Steierwald, ‘Zentrum des Weimarer Musenhofes: Die Herzogliche Bibliothek 1758‑1832’, in Herzogin-Anna-Amalia-Bibliothek. Kulturgeschichte einer Sammlung, ed. by M. Knoche & I. Arnhold (München: Hanser, 1999), 62‑97. Strabo, Erdbeschreibung (Hildesheim: Olms, 1988). A. Varty, ‘The Crystal Man: A Study of “Diaphaneite”’, in Pater in the 1990s, ed. by L. Brake Jagger & I. Small Hlavenkova (Greensboro: ELT Press, 1991), 205‑215. D. Vincent, ‘Text as Image and Self-Image: The Contextualization of Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit (1810‑1813)’, Goethe Yearbook: Publications of the Goethe Society of North America 10 (2001), 125‑153. C. Vogel, Die letzte Krankheit Goethes (Darmstadt: [s.n.] 1961). S. Waddington, The Sonnets of Europe: A Volume of Translations (London: Walter Scott, 1888). M. Wallenborn, Frauen, Dichten, Goethe: Untersuchungen zur deutschen Literatur‑ geschichte (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2006). K.D. Weisinger, The Classical Façade: A Non-Classical Reading of Goethe’s Classicism (Pennsylvania: University Park, 1988). L. Wienbarg, Ästhetische Feldzüge (Berlin: Aufbau, 1964).

Figure 6 Lord Byron, engraving by Edward Finden after G. Sanders, without year

Private collection

2

The Dutch Byron Nicolaas Beets (1814‑1903) Rick Honings

In late 2014, a lock of Lord Byron’s hair came up for sale on eBay. The asking price was 3500 pounds – a telling sign, if any were needed, that enchantment still surrounds the English poet today, as indeed it did in his own time. A Byronic spirit visited 1820s Europe, and everywhere there arose an interest in George Gordon Byron (1788‑1824). His rebellious, revolutionary personality appealed to the imagination, as did his personal history, one marked by scandal and restiveness, culminating in his self-imposed exile and illustrious end at Missolonghi on 19 April 1824, during the Greek War of Independence. Internationally, it is often suggested that Byron is history’s first true literary celebrity.1 In the words of Fred Inglis: ‘Perhaps we can say […] that it is during Byron’s brief lifetime […] that charm and its distorted and magnified echo, glamour, become public values, and what is more, values looked for as attributes of celebrity’.2 Leo Braudy considers Byron to be the first author to fall victim to ‘the new machinery of celebrity’, and Tom Mole sees in him the emergence of a new type of celebrity.3 Some eighteenth-century authors may have been widely known during their own lifetimes, such as Laurence Sterne, author of A Sentimental Journey (1768), but as they lived in the pre-industrial age, they cannot be termed celebrities, according to Mole: ‘It required the growth of a modern industry of production, promotion and distribution, and a modern audience – massive, anonymous, socially diverse and geographically distributed – before these elements combined to form a celebrity culture in the modern sense’. 4 The fact that Byron did become a celebrity is heavily invested in his successful creation of a personal ‘branded identity’: he developed into a brand that brought all sorts of associations to mind. His influence was undoubtedly far-reaching. Throughout Europe poets began to imitate his style, dress, and attitude toward life. As Fiona MacCarthy put it: ‘Almost 1 2 3 4

Mole 2007; McDayter 2009. Inglis 2010, 62‑70. Braudy 1986, 408. Mole 2007, 8‑10.

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immediately after his death the phenomenon of “being Byron” began to manifest itself’.5 Richard Holmes worded it thus: Byron’s incarnation of this image [of the romantic genius] – the dark curly locks, the mocking aristocratic eyes, the voluptuous almost feminine mouth, the chin with its famous dimple and the implicit radiation of sexual danger – became famous throughout Britain after the publication of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812). By the time of his death in Greece twelve years later, it had launched an international style. The dark clothes, the white open-necked shirt exposing the masculine throat, the aggressive display of disarray and devilry, these were the visual symbols of one archetype of Romantic genius: the Fallen Angel in rebellion.6

For some decades now, scholars have been turning their attention to celebrity culture, both to its theory and history.7 Many contemporary secondary sources investigate the birth of the ‘celebrity’ phenomenon. Robert Garland suggests that the culture of fame is a timeless phenomenon that can be traced back into antiquity.8 However, against the backdrop of Romanticism in the nineteenth century it attained new heights.9 Celebrity culture was not confined to writers, but also, for example, to opera singers, painters, and composers. A well-known example is the Hungarian composer and virtuoso pianist Franz Liszt, who became the vortex of a veritable ‘Lisztomania’.10 In the nineteenth century, the realization grew that an artist was someone exceptional, a genius; ‘a highly spiritual being who is completely separate from the debased everyday world’. 11 This idea was thought to apply to authors as well. The writer became a figure of public consequence within the autonomous literary field.12 Research on one specific form of celebrity culture – literary celebrity – is also in the ascendant. In general, the accent here lies with Anglo-Saxon literature (Great Britain and the United States) and the renowned canonical authors from these areas. Two periods in particular have already received much international attention, namely the nineteenth century and the 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

MacCarthy 2003, 558. Holmes 2013, 5‑6. Rojek 2001; Turner 2004; Inglis 2010; Van Krieken 2012. Garland 2006. See Mole 2009. Van Krieken 2012, 42. Higgins 2005, 4‑5. Braudy 1986, 390.

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Figure 7 Nicolaas Beets, engraved by J.P. Lange after W. Grebner, without date

Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

period of modernism.13 The relationship between celebrity and gender has also been explored in a number of publications.14 In the Netherlands, literary celebrity has in recent years also received great attention.15 Two avenues of inquiry are generally pursued in celebrity culture research. One explores the ways in which authors themselves have shaped their public image (self-fashioning), whilst the other investigates the public’s view (fan culture). This chapter combines both approaches to examine the life and work of the student-author Nicolaas Beets (1814‑1903), best known

13 For the nineteenth century, see Eisner 2009 and Mole 2009. For modernism, see Glass 2004; Galow 2011; Goldman 2011. 14 Easley 2011; Weber 2012. 15 See Franssen 2010; Honings 2014a; Honings 2014b; Honings 2014c; Honings 2015; Franssen & Honings 2014.

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today for his Camera Obscura (1839), a collection of sketches and stories in prose, published under the pseudonym Hildebrand. Beets studied theology in Leiden from 1833 to 1839, and those six years he filled with much literary activity. He was one of the driving forces behind the Rederijkerskamer voor Uiterlijke Welsprekendheid (Chamber of Rhetoric for External Eloquence), which, due to the preference of its student members for authors like Byron and Victor Hugo, was mockingly dubbed the Romantic Club.16 It was during this time that he became enthralled with Byron, publishing work himself in a similar vein. Although in later years – once he had become a vicar – Beets distanced himself from what he had by then come to call his ‘black period’, it was during that phase of his life that he managed to attract public attention. When Camera Obscura appeared, he was already a celebrity, having made a name for himself as the Dutch Byron.17 The distinguishing feature of Beets’s rise to celebrity is that he was first and foremost a fan of Byron, who then set about copying Byron’s public image, and in the end had Byron to thank for his own fame: he made use of a pre-existing model for his own self-fashioning.18 We could even go so far as to call it a type of lookalike syndrome. This chapter looks at how Beets acquired fame as a Byronian, and how he used the model of the Byronic hero to construct his own public persona. It will identify the characteristics he took from Byron, and those he contributed himself. Further, it will seek to discover to what extent there existed a fan culture around Beets.

Taken with Byron An important source for any investigation of Beets is his personal diary, of which a transcript spanning the period 1833 to 1836 – when he first came to fame – has been preserved. It begins with his move to Leiden in September 1833. We read about his early life as a student, including reports of his literary activities, most of which were related to Byron. For example, on 11 January 1834 we learn that he read aloud his translation of Byron’s poem ‘Fare Thee Well’ (1816). Several days later he writes that he is working on a rendering of The Prisoner of Chillon (1816), and in February he completed his translation 16 Van Zonneveld 1993. 17 On Beets and Byron, see Popma 1928, chapter 5; D’haen 1992; Mathijsen 2010; Cialona 2009; Schenkeveld in Beets 1979. On Byronism in the Netherlands, see Popma 1928; Schults Jr 1929. 18 Kemperink 2014.

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of Parisina (1816). Later, at the end of February, he approached the publisher Westerman with the request to publish a book containing his translations of Byron. Beets asked his father’s approval for this step, and was advised to publish the translations anonymously, which he subsequently did. His father was apparently concerned that the Byron poems would have a negative effect on his son’s later career. During this period Beets very much admired Byron, so much so that he even read the English author aloud to his friends on more than one occasion, and took pleasure in speaking English.19 In his letters he frequently quoted Byron, sending a friend, who in 1835 was to emigrate to the Cape of Good Hope, a poetic parting word that begins with a line from Byron: ‘Farewell! – a word that must be, and hath been’. In the same tone he himself adds that he could find no words to express his feelings: ‘There is none but that short – cold – grievous – cruel Farewell!’20 When in October 1835 Halley’s Comet appeared, he and a friend visited the Leiden planetarium. The spectacle put him in a poetic mood and immediately Byron’s lines ‘Ye stars! which are the poetry of heaven’ sprang to mind. In his diary he noted: ‘I can imagine how he [Byron] enjoyed walking each evening, in sublime loneliness, arms crossed, over the deck of his ship between the Sea and the starry heavens, especially in those regions where the stars twinkle so much more brilliantly and in such multitudes’.21 In March 1834, Beets was working on Jose: A Spanish Tale, his first original Byronic work. In it he specifically aimed to imitate the style and tone of the English poet. Additionally, from this point onwards, he began to behave more and more like a poet to the outside world. He began to play the role of the Netherlands’ melancholy, roaming Byronian. In his birthplace, Haarlem, he occasionally wandered through the extensive Haarlemmerhout Park in order to experience loneliness. In his diary he writes: ‘A cloudless sunset, red and clear, like a man dying at his peak’.22 A few months later he had completed Jose. When he read it aloud to a friend on 15 June, the friend became enraptured and, according to Beets, ‘springing up, he burst into tears, and taking me by the hand, he said: “Beets, 19 Beets 1983, 45. 20 Beets 1983, 162: ‘Daar is er geen dan ’t kort – koud – smartelijk – wreed Vaarwel!’ 21 Beets 1983, 197‑198: ‘Ik kon mij voorstellen hoe hij er genoegen in had telken avond, in sublieme eenzaamheid, met gekruiste armen over ’t dek van zijn schip te wandelen tusschen de Zee en den starrenhemel, vooral in streken waar de starren zoo veel schitterender en in zulke menigvuldigheid zichtbaar zijn’. 22 Beets 1983, 69: ‘Zonsondergang zonder wolken, rood en helder, als een man, die in zijn glorie sterft’.

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shake my hand; I’ve never loved you so much as now!” Resuming his seat, he shook and wept’.23 Beets was thus confronted with his first admirer. The work was published in October 1834. Although the edition was published anonymously, it was not long before the author’s identity was discovered.

Famous as a Byronian The publication of Jose, if we may base judgement on Beets’s own testimony, made him famous overnight. On 17 November 1834, he confessed to his friend and fellow student-author Johannes Kneppelhout, ‘I am now, as Dutchmen say, making opgang at Leyden’, meaning something to the effect that his star was rising in Leiden.24 People recognized him on the street, Beets writes in his diary, particularly women who – if again we are to take his word for it – were captivated by him: I am currently all the rage. Tout Leiden talks of me and points me out […]. Ladies walk out to see me, and want to detect something special in me. One even claimed that my physiognomy is characteristic of a poet! All manner of false rumours circulate about me, fortunately not to my detriment. People hope to see me appear in public places. ‘Whether I am a member of The Concert?’ informs Miss A. ‘Whether I have a melancholy nature’, Miss B. ‘Whether I have something of Byron’s character’, Miss C. ‘Whether I am suited to ordinary conversation?’ Mrs D. ‘What colour my eyes are?’ the Honourable Miss E. ‘Whether I am long or short?’ Miss F. And Miss G.: ‘Whether I can quite stand so much honour as appears to befall me? Whether I am not a-tro-cious-ly pedantic?’ Moi, je ris. [Me, I laugh].25

23 Beets 1983, 80: ‘Toen opvliegende borst hij uit in tranen, en mij bij de hand vattende zeide hij: “Beets, geef me de hand; ik heb u nog nooit zoo lief gehad, als nu!” Nederzittende beefde hij en weende, en had het sterk op de zenuwen’. 24 Letter by N. Beets to J. Kneppelhout, 17 November 1834. University Library Leiden, LTK 1663. 25 Beets 1983, 120: ‘Dames loopen uit om mij te zien, en willen iets bijzonders aan mij zien. Eene zelfs heeft beweerd dat mijn physionomie den dichter kenteekent! Allerlei valsche geruchten gaan over mij om, gelukkig niet tot mijn schade. Men hoopt mij op publieke plaatsen te zien verschijnen. “Of ik lid van ’t Concert ben?” vraagt juffer A. “Of ik melancholiek van aard ben”, juffer B. “Of ik iets van Byron’s karakter heb”, juffer C. “Of ik voor de gewone conversatie geschikt ben?” Mevr. D. “Wat kleur van oogen ik heb?” freule E. “Of ik lang of kort ben?” Juffr. F. En juffr. G.: “Of ik tegen zoo veel eer kan, als mij schijnt te wederwaren? Of ik niet aller-ij-se-lijkst pedant ben?” Moi, je ris’.

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From this diary excerpt, a number of things may be deduced. Firstly, that Beets was indeed rather suddenly treated as a celebrity and quite abruptly found himself confronted with admirers. In this sense, his fame developed in much the same way Byron’s did. Byron, upon the publication of the first two cantos from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812), observed: ‘I awoke one morning and found myself famous’.26 He was the talk of the town, as a contemporary noted: This poem is on every table, and [Byron] himself courted, visited, flattered, and praised wherever he appears. He has a pale, sickly, but handsome countenance, a bad figure, animated and amusing conversation, and, in short, he is really the only topic of almost every conversation – the men jealous of him, the women of each other.27

Within three days the 500 copies of the first printing were sold out, ‘making Byron instantaneously famous’.28 In the next six years eight reprints would follow, totalling 20,000 copies. Beets’s fame, too, can be said to have come all at once, albeit on a more modest scale. Byron’s female readers in particular were completely captivated by him. Many attempted to come into contact with him. The poet received an extraordinary number of love letters from women, both married and unmarried, young and old, and spanning different social classes. Some wanted no more than to let him know how his verse had touched them, others asked him for a signature, a signed book, a lock of hair or even a meeting. With one, the ultimate fan Caroline Lamb, Byron began a tempestuous affair.29 It is improbable that Beets received this kind of fan mail – if he did then none survive as proof. The passage cited above nonetheless shows that the ladies had a more than passing interest in him. That was certainly in keeping with his intention, as he revealed to the literary figure E.J. Potgieter in an 1835 letter: ‘I had imagined how great it would be to win the hearts of all the women’.30 We must however be cautious here, for Beets is our only witness. We know that Byron’s readers compared him to characters in his work. In Beets’s case, admirers compared him to Byron – which is not so surprising, 26 MacCarthy 2003, x. 27 MacCarthy 2003, 159. 28 MacCarthy 2003, 159. 29 MacCarthy 2003, 162‑163. 30 Institiuut voor Neerlandistiek 1980, 13: ‘Ik had er my veel van voorgesteld alle vrouwenharten in te pakken’.

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knowing that Beets derived his identity from Byron. Readers wanted to know to what extent he resembled Byron in looks and melancholy. Beets established his name as a poet in a single act with the publication of Jose, the first reviews promptly appearing in the journals of the day.31 Whereas once he had struggled to publish, he now found publishers knocking at his door. Beets became the subject of hot debate in both literary and other circles across the Netherlands. In Rotterdam an author was convinced that Beets could not have written Jose, whilst in The Hague, the poet was rumoured to be sixteen years of age. The machinery of mythmaking was swiftly set into motion, fuelled by the fact that Beets had published his work anonymously. During this period his fame continued undiminished, as did his appeal to his readers. This is apparent from a visit he paid to Professor Johannes Henricus van der Palm in March 1835, where he met several ladies, some of whom had even drawn up a list of questions to put to him.32 The year 1835 saw the appearance of The Masquerade, a poetic work written in satirical Byronic style (à la Don Juan, 1819‑1824) inspired by the Leiden student pageant on 9 February of the same year. This work further served to increase his fame: ‘People shake my hand left and right, and applaud me as the Author’. This indicates that readers now knew Beets to be the author, even though this work had also been published anonymously. From his diary, we can conclude that Beets had done this intentionally: ‘I had wished more or less to make a mystery of it’.33 However, by now his reputation had spread too far for this to be possible. He was inundated with compliments and invitations to suppers. By the end of the year Beets declared: ‘I am all the fashion in Leiden these days, and as sought-after as a pair of orange gloves’.34 Then for the first time Beets was confronted with the down side of his fame. The growing adulation of the author annoyed Professor Matthijs Siegenbeek, who is said to have claimed: ‘That Mr Beets is one of those geniuses doomed to run himself aground and break upon the rocks of conceit and condescension’. Additionally, the Leiden professor and essayist Jacob Geel came out with a vicious review of both Jose and The Masquerade in which he denounced Byronism and commented that the author would one day 31 See Van Zonneveld 1993, 68‑75. 32 Beets 1983, 121‑122, 143. 33 Beets 1983, 145: ‘Men schudt mij van alle kanten de hand, en juicht mij toe als den Auteur’; ‘Ik had half en half gewenscht er een mysterie van te maken’. 34 Beets 1983, 215: ‘Ik ben tegenwoordig te Leiden in de mode en gewild als een paar oranje handschoenen’.

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look upon his works with remorse. He considered the poet overrated, and was vexed that one could not go anywhere without ‘constantly hearing the praises of Beets being sung’.35

A Visual Cult It is well known that Byron actively magnified his own fame, not least through an overt exploitation of the visual – he had numerous portraits made of himself.36 In his lifetime alone, more than 40 images of him appeared. In 1816, Madame Tussaud even constructed a wax f igure of him. Byron was without a doubt ‘the most frequently painted poet of his generation’.37 Beets, too, was aware of the power of the visual image. On Monday 14 July 1835 he noted: ‘I shall and must bring out a portrait very like me’. The immediate reason was a critical review of The Masquerade that had appeared in the journal Vaderlandsche Letteroefeningen in which the critic warns readers against the dangerous influence of such Byronic ‘wild fowl’. Beets was indignant – he was, as he put it, presented as a brute, as a Ghengis Khan. Not without irony he wrote to a friend, stating that even though now that he was so very popular with the ladies, he feared the negative review would ruin his success with the fair sex. He maintained that his dedication ‘To Serena’ that opens his Jose – a variant of Byron’s ‘To Ianthe’ preceding Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage – had caused many women to fall in love with him, however that image was now at risk of becoming tarnished. To correct this, Beets thought it might be good to bring out a portrait of himself, although ultimately he never did.38 Despite the irony in the passage above, it does make explicit that Beets was the centre of much female attention during these years. Just like Byron, he implicitly appealed to women to comfort him. ‘Yes! Should my sombre tone a female heart enthrall…’, he writes in his epic poem Kuser (1835).39 If we once more may count on his own testimony, many women let him turn

35 Beets 1983, 150, 153: ‘Die mijnheer Beets is een van die genieën, die zich op de klippen van eigenwaan en laatdunkendheid te barsten stooten zullen’; ‘of men hoorde de glorie van Beets voor en na’. 36 On Byron’s image, see Kenyon Jones 2008. 37 Holmes 2013, 7. 38 Beets 1983, 169: ‘Ik zal en moet mijn welgelijkend portret in ’t licht geven’; ‘wildzang’. 39 Beets 1979, 40: ‘Ja! mocht mijn sombre toon een vrouwlijk hart verrukken’.

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their heads, and he had admirers as far away as Utrecht. 40 During suppers women often asked him to recite his poetry. 41 When in 1836 he was to give a reading at the Hollandsche Maatschappij van Fraaije Kunsten en Wetenschappen (Dutch Society of Fine Arts and Humanities) in Amsterdam, a hall bursting with spectators awaited him, among whom numbered more than 200 women. Unsurprisingly, Beets took some pains with his appearance. A diary entry from 14 April 1834 allows us a glimpse of his thoughts, and shows how deliberately he dealt with his image: I had long been uncertain whether I would put on my blue or my black dress coat; in the end I chose the blue one and while I put it on, I couldn’t recall ever in my life having given so much thought to a dress coat. […] I had also taken care that, in the bow of my neck cloth, in the way in which I had the cord of my watch about the neck, there emerged a kind of originality that must be personal and unaffected; in any event I felt that, as far as my dress was concerned, I could pass for a young genius as well as any other. 42

Not everyone could stomach this vanity. Some thought Beets’s appearance ridiculous. Leiden medical student Jan Bastiaan Molewater was one who observed the young celebrity from a critical distance, and he was not taken with Beets’s imitation of Byron. Whereas ladies hoped to discover a self-portrait of Beets in Jose, Molewater noted that he was entirely unable to identify with the hero of the poem. As for Beets’s attempts to copy the appearance of the English poet he so admired, Molewater described Beets as ‘wholly dressed in black, much powdered, with a woefully rumpled-up neck cloth’, most akin to a pedantic ‘country schoolteacher’. 43 An examination of the portraits of Byron circulating at the time shows that Beets did indeed adjust his appearance to resemble that of Byron, who also wore dark clothing with a flamboyant, crumpled cravat. 40 Beets 1983, 230. 41 Beets 1983, 237. 42 Beets 1983, 63: ‘Ik had lang in twijfel gestaan of ik mijn blaauwen of mijn zwarten rok aan zou trekken; eindelijk verkoos ik de blaauwen en terwijl ik hem aantrok herinnerde ik mij niet ooit van mijn leven zooveel over een rok gedacht te hebben […]. Ik had ook zorg gedragen dat er in den strik van mijn das, in de wijze waarop ik het snoer van mijn horologie om den hals had, een soort van originaliteit plaatshad die particulier en ongemaakt moest wezen; enfin ik meende wat het costuum aanging zoo goed voor een jong genie te kunnen doorgaan als ieder ander’. 43 Molewater 1999, 74: ‘ganschelijk in het zwart gekleed, zeer bestoven, met een bitter verkreukten witten das’; ‘dorpsschoolmeester’.

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The critic Potgieter joined Molewater in finding Beets’s vanity irksome, giving short shrift to Beets’s adoration of Byron. In 1835, Potgieter wrote to him (in broken English) about his Byronic character in The Masquerade: ‘I hope seriously that his nose will grow more like the Yours – that his lips will not ever smile to (sic) much in Mr By[ron’s] manner, for people would say, Your dearest looked more on him than on You!’44 His criticism extended to Beets’s own look: he considered the author’s habit of carrying a bottle of cologne in his waistcoat pocket a little strange. Despite such critical notes, there were also those who greatly revered Beets, amongst them the sixteen-year-old Jan Jacob Lodewijk ten Kate from The Hague, who would himself go on to establish his name as a poet years later. He sent Beets a fan letter on 19 April 1836: ‘For quite some time now I have looked (albeit fruitlessly) for a favourable opportunity to express to the poet of Jose, Kuser, and Ode to the North, my genuine, heartfelt esteem’. That chance had, in his estimation, now arrived as he had written a poem he wanted to put to Beets. Though the value of his own work was ‘inconsiderable’, his feelings toward Beets were sincere: ‘These are pure and unfeigned, and it is with a warm admiration of your talents, that I presume to draw your attention to the buds of my spring’. The young Ten Kate hoped that he might one time meet Beets: ‘I declare to you in all candour that I heartily wish to make your acquaintance, and hope that this may be so ere long’. 45 This letter shows that Beets had become a celebrity and was now treated as such by his admirers – not only at a local level, but at a national level as well.

The Melancholy Pose One of the most fundamental characteristics of Byron’s image as a poet is melancholy, and melancholy appealed to the imagination: ‘Byron’s sombreness could imply an awful destiny and a mysterious past behind the public

44 Instituut voor Neerlandistiek 1980, 2. 45 Letter by J.J.L. ten Kate to N. Beets, 19 April 1836. University Library Leiden, LTK Beets A 1: ‘Sedert langen tijd zag ik (doch vruchtloos) naar eene gunstige gelegenheid uit, om den dichter van den Jose, den Kuser en de Ode aan het Noorden, mijne ongeveinsde en oprechte hoogachting te betuigen’; ‘dezen zijn zuiver en ongehuicheld, en het is met warme bewondering voor uwe talenten, dat ik het waag u mijne lenteknopjens onder ’t oog te brengen’; ‘Ik verklare U ronduit, dat ik hartelijk wensch, kennis met Uwed. te maken, en hoop dat dit weldra het geval zal mogen zijn’.

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self’. 46 His protagonist, the Byronic hero, was based on its creator. 47 The prototypical Byronic hero is Childe Harold from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. His attitude toward life is characterized by dissatisfaction with the here and now. This prompts him to seek happiness elsewhere; lonely and alone he wanders the earth. He has been disappointed in love, a disappointment that embittered him, so all that rests him now is to scoff at the world and yearn for death. From the moment Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage came out in 1812, readers interpreted Byron’s work autobiographically. This is unsurprising, considering the many parallels that can be drawn between the life of Childe Harold and that of the poet. Indeed, the journeys described, Byron had himself taken. In the manuscript, Byron had initially called the protagonist ‘Childe Burun’, only later did he change it to Childe Harold. 48 In his preface he states: ‘It has been suggested to me by friends, on whose opinions I set a high value, that in this fictitious character, “Childe Harold,” I may incur the suspicion of having intended some real personage: this I beg leave, once for all, to disclaim – Harold is the child of imagination’. 49 This statement presumably had quite the opposite effect, encouraging readers instead to hunt for similarities between the character and the author. Later, in the preface to the third canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Byron once again touched on the possible autobiographical character of his work. This canto he had written after leaving England a second time in 1816 to travel. All manner of rumours – for example, that he had homosexual tendencies and that he maintained an incestuous relationship with his half-sister – circulated about him, giving him the air of a ‘fallen angel’. Once a celebrated figure, he had now become persona non grata and would never again set foot in England.50 Thus it was no longer necessary to keep up appearances. In the third canto, Childe Harold appears once more: a misanthrope with a proud soul, an exile, a lonely vagabond consumed by rage. In the fourth and last canto, however, Byron definitively takes leave of his protagonist. In a preface in the form of a letter dated 2 January 1818, he writes:

46 47 48 49 50

Braudy 1986, 406. Thorslev 1962; Stein 2004. MacCarthy 2003, 160. Byron 1847, 1. MacCarthy 2003, 280.

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I recur from fiction to truth […]. With regard to the conduct of the last canto, there will be found less of the pilgrim than in any of the preceding, and that little slightly, if at all, separated from the author speaking in his person. The fact is, that I had become weary of drawing a line which every one seemed determined not to perceive […]. It was in vain that I asserted, and imagined, that I had drawn a distinction between the author and the pilgrim; and the very anxiety to preserve this difference, and disappointment at finding it unavailing, so far crushed my efforts in the composition, that I determined to abandon it altogether – and have done so.51

There can be no doubt that Beets drew inspiration from Byron’s melancholy. As a student, Beets did not have to keep to the social customs and mores.52 This allowed him to unabashedly glorify Byron’s melancholy in public, without fear of damaging his own reputation. So Beets let the outside world believe that he, too, suffered from melancholia. Writing in a review he lays out his view that it was incumbent upon a true poet to feel depressed: he is dissatisfied ‘with the world in which he has been placed, with the society that encompasses him, with the time in which he lives’. This is not surprising, in Beets’s estimation, because a poet feels things differently than the average mortal, belonging as he does to a higher order. It is as though, in the true poet, the memory lives on of mankind’s divine state in ages past, before it was lost, hence the true poet’s inability to reconcile himself with the world.53 Beets saw reflected in Byron the ideal of the true, melancholic poet. Beets also incorporated that melancholy in his own Byronic protagonists. Jose, in the work by the same name, is no cheery figure by any stretch of the imagination. Saddened at the death of his parents and disappointed in love (the love of his life, Florinde, has been promised to another man), he wanders the earth, thinking only of revenge. His melancholy inner nature is reflected in his outward appearance: ‘His cheek was pale, and glum his features’.54 Although Beets did not address his readers directly as Byron did, many still looked for a connection between his work and his own life. It was 51 Byron 1847, 41‑42. 52 See Van den Berg 1990, 96. 53 Praamstra 1989, 393‑394: ‘met de wereld waarop hij is geplaatst, met de maatschappij die hem omringt, met den tijd, waarin hij leeft’. 54 Beets 1834, 17: ‘Zijn wang was bleek, en droef zijn trekken’.

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previously mentioned that a number of women, after reading his work, asked Beets whether he suffered from melancholia. Further evidence that many readers read Beets’s Byronic works autobiographically can be found in his diary. In November 1835, in the middle of his ‘black period’, Beets fell ill. We do not know what exactly afflicted him, but headaches and fever kept him housebound for fourteen days. His doctor, however, did have an idea what ailed the young poet and, according to Beets, divulged to interested parties ‘that he found my nervous system extremely oppressed and suffering’. This the doctor associated ‘with a suspected frame of mind, melancholia, contemplation, attractiveness, and poetical sentiment’. Particularly interesting is what Beets then adds: ‘This did my reputation no end of good without being all too true’. Thanks to the story spread by the doctor, many readers came to wonder if Beets had sketched an image of himself in his poems.55 In his book Byron’s Romantic Celebrity (2007), Tom Mole discusses the ‘hermeneutic of intimacy’, and the strategies the English poet employed to achieve intimacy with his readers in his poems: ‘It worked by suggesting that his poems could only be understood fully by referring to their author’s personality, that reading them was entering a kind of relationship with the author and that that relationship resembled an intimate connection between individuals’.56 The reader was given the feeling of being allowed a glimpse into the heart of the poet. This reinforced the idea that the poet and his main character were one and the same person, and that his work was autobiographical. In his poem ‘To Ianthe’ (1812), for example, Byron invited women readers to read his deepest feelings.57 Beets’s readers also felt they could get to know him through his work, as is apparent from the anecdote with the doctor. However, Beets never went as far as Byron did and plainly suggested parallels between his protagonist and himself in his prefaces. Beets did nonetheless build up that sense of autobiography and intimacy by exploring melancholy in lyrical verse, which, while epic in nature, managed to suggest that he was pouring out his own feelings. Jose, for example, was prefaced by an ode, ‘To Serena’, in which the ‘I’ laments his ‘sorrow of life’.58 In ‘The Melancholy One’, Beets writes that a sombre shadow had been cast over the cradle of the protagonist, and that 55 Beets 1983, 204: ‘dat hij mijn zenuwgestel zeer onderdrukt en lijdende gevonden heeft’; ‘met eene door hem vermoede gemoedsstemming, melancholie, diepdenken, aantrekkelijkheid en poetische stemming’. 56 Mole 2007, 23. 57 See Mole 2007, 58. 58 Beets 1876‑1900, vol. 2, 12: ‘levenssmart’.

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his soul was bound to the path of sadness.59 Then in ‘Autumn Musings’, he follows up the lines ‘I am no cheerful child of spring’, by describing a ‘vague feeling’ indicative of some unhappiness: ‘a general sense of grief’.60 He glorified, moreover, the yearning to die young, like Byron: ‘Let me lose autumn with my summer / Let me in life’s spring expire’.61 For some readers it was shocking to realize that Beets was not so melancholy in reality as he made it seem in his work. Indeed, in 1834, Molewater sketched a very different Beets – one veritably cheerful and drunken.62 Potgieter, too, perceived a contrast between the sombre Byronian of his work and the ‘true’ Beets, as he informed him in an 1836 letter. Potgieter had heard how people were talking about Beets, putting him in the same category as his sombre characters, but he knew better. He was annoyed by the admiration shown to Beets at the gathering of The Dutch Society of Fine Arts and Humanities, and equally by the way in which the poet took all this praise in his stride. This had prompted him to ponder what Beets’s characters would say, were they to see him all bright and cheery. This image was not in keeping with Beets’s public image: ‘Call it petty of me to feel or think thus, to want to discover you always the same and never otherwise, but grant me that I prefer – if it must be! – the melancholy Beets to the Beets flattered and befuddled by the cheers of the crowd’.63 The response Beets sent Potgieter is intriguing: ‘Can I help it that people call me a Kuser, that people tell you that I have chosen myself for a hero, and that Jose has only now been shed light on? I pray you, do not hold me responsible for the remarks and notions of others’. Beets claimed that he only wished to be himself, whether that was cheerful and happy or melancholy: ‘If I myself am now letting down my reputation here by taking on an attitude of ease that can ill be rhymed with what I have written […] and am making myself despicable in your eyes – then so be it!’64 Though Beets distances himself 59 Beets 1876‑1900, vol. 2, 26‑27. 60 Beets 1876‑1900, vol. 2, 41: ‘Ik ben geen vreugdig lentekind’; ‘[een] onbestemd gevoelen’; ‘een algemeen besef van smart’. 61 Beets 1876‑1900, vol. 2, 43: ‘Laat mij en herfst en zomer derven, / Laat me in mijns levens lente sterven…’ 62 Molewater 1999, 39. 63 Instituut voor Neerlandistiek 1980, 34: ‘Zeg nu, dat het bekrompen van mij gevoeld of gedacht is, U altijd dezelfde en nimmer verscheiden te willen vinden, maar vergun mij de voorkeur te geven, aan den – if it must be! – zwaarmoedigen B[eets] boven den B[eets] door de toejuiching der menigte gestreeld en bedwelmd’. 64 Instituut voor Neerlandistiek 1980, 38‑39: ‘Kan ik het helpen dat men my een Kuser noemt, dat men u vertelt dat ik my zelven ten held heb gekozen, en dat Jose nu eerst duidelijk is geworden? Ik bid u maak my toch niet aansprakelijk voor de uitstrooisels en opvattingen van anderen’;

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from his characters here, Potgieter’s accusation makes it evident that Beets, like Byron, was able to create a ‘hermeneutic of intimacy’ in his works, which led readers to interpret them as personal divulgences.

A Byronian in a Christian Guise Though Beets was strongly influenced by Byron, this is not to say that he followed his example in every matter. Beets added his own elements to the Byronic model of the poet, elements typically Dutch in nature. Unlike Byron’s protagonists, Beets’s do not preach revolution.65 That did not fit within prevailing Dutch discourse, which was focused on reconciliation and political peace and order. Another difference is the attitude toward religion. Byron’s characters have turned away from their faith. Nowhere is there evidence that Childe Harold acts on Christian principles. Byron made his readers aware that he was an atheist – the reason many rejected his works. One might reasonably question then how this dynamic played out with Beets – as both a Byronian and a theology student. In Jose it is immediately apparent that the protagonist Jose is certainly not an atheist. We read that he likes to retreat into nature to be ‘With You-Alone’. His father dies in battle when Jose is still a child, whereupon he is taken from his devout mother, as she is not thought to be capable of raising a knight. This proves immensely difficult for him, but he is too proud to give in to his sorrow. When his mother subsequently dies, Jose turns into a vengeful misanthrope. He roams the earth, and whoever sees him, turns away in fear: ‘I became a devil – God left me!’66 Yet in the course of the story, it becomes apparent that Jose has not entirely lost his faith. When he passes a cloister on his travels, he is deeply moved by the religious hymns he hears. However, he tells himself that he must not be weak. Then he remembers his devout mother and regrets that he no longer believes in God. Jose, rather than being an unbeliever simply has no way to return to Christianity – as he has sworn revenge on humanity – no matter how dearly he wants to, as revealed when he says: ‘I want to be reconciled with God’.67 Even Florinde, his unattainable love, ‘Doe ik my zelven, mijne reputatie te kort door als dan eene houding van ongedwongenheid aantenemen, die weinig met wat ik schreef schijnt te strooken […] en maak ik my in uwe oogen verachtelijk – het zij zoo!’ 65 See Chantepie de la Saussaye 1906, 13. 66 Beets 1834, 11, 23: ‘Met U-alleen’; ‘Ik werd een duivel – God verliet my!...’. 67 Beets 1834, 31: ‘Ik wou met God verzoend zijn’.

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is not able to bring him back to his faith, though it remains buried deep down within him. Kuser relates the story of the nobleman Willem Kuser, also called ‘the Sombre One’, who can likewise be categorized as a Byronic hero.68 He, too, is not in principle unreligious, but has the idea that the world has deceived him. God is present in this work as well, as expressed primarily through nature. The poem opens with a passage in which the narrator exhorts the reader to look for God in nature – a Christian moral. The narrator adds that there are people who take no heed of this, and so are walking in darkness – as is Kuser, who has closed his heart to God, yet is still not an atheist deep down. Finally, in Guy de Vlaming (1837) Beets describes how the protagonist, again a nobleman, is reduced to madness after he has discovered that he has unwittingly married his sister and is therefore damned. Although Guy may think he has turned away from God given his madness, in the work it is clear that he is a Christian. He was raised in virtue and piety from his earliest youth. Every day he rose early for Mass, and he married his wife Machteld because of her virtue and piety. He had tried to be a good Christian his entire life. This is all to no avail in the end, however, as nothing can remedy his madness. This situation, desperate as it may be, can still not prove him to be an atheist. From the discussion of these three works, it is evident that Beets deviated from his English example regarding his attitude towards religion. As opposed to his idol, he refused to have his characters denounce their faith, even though at times they went astray through the circumstances in which they found themselves. Apparently, Beets thought it would be going too far to make his characters atheists. Considering his intended career as a vicar, this would also not have been prudent. The young poet Beets presented himself as a genuine Byronian, tormented by melancholy. His protagonists, however, are ‘desatanized’: nowhere do they essentially reject the Christian faith.69 Beets added that Christian element, so characteristic of Dutch literature of the time, to his Byron imitation. It is interesting to note that he was not alone in this. Other Dutch authors of works with a Byronic hero, such as Adriaan van der Hoop, Jr and Hendrik Arnold Meijer, also gave their poems a Christian veneer.70 For the Netherlands at least it appears that the godlessness of Byron’s characters went beyond the pale. 68 Beets 1979, 52: ‘den Sombre’. 69 See Van Zonneveld 1987, 201‑202; Van Zonneveld 1993, 123; Mathijsen 2013; Jensen 2008, 165. Drop in Van der Hoop (1965, 10) speaks of the ‘desatanized Byron-hero’. 70 See Jensen 2008, 164‑169.

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In Conclusion This article has analysed how Nicolaas Beets became a literary celebrity in the 1830s. His first steps as a poet were taken during his student years. The poet Byron had created a model of authorship that writers across Europe utilized. In the Netherlands it was Beets who derived his fame from employing it. Beets took inspiration from Byron for his own self-fashioning both with regard to his work and to his image as the melancholy poet. Beets quickly rose to fame just as his idol had and he, too, found himself confronted with fans approaching him as such. As with Byron, they tried to read Beets’s poetry autobiographically. Readers were fascinated by the similarities between Beets’s characters and the author himself, as Byron’s readers were with parallels between Childe Harold and Byron. Whereas Byron himself played a game weaving personal facts with fiction, this was not at all the case with Beets. In analysing the celebrity culture around Beets, use was made of his own observations on the subject from his diary – he is in most cases the only available source. It was nonetheless possible, with the aid of letters from, for example, E.J. Potgieter, to verify that Beets did indeed present himself as the Dutch Byronian and was treated accordingly. In contrast to his role model, however, he did not distance himself from the Christian faith. That Beets’s Byronic melancholy was an act became clear around 1836, when he began to distance himself from it. On 25 January 1836, he noted in his diary that he no longer wished to be known as a Byronian. Although he still had a high regard for him, Beets stated that Byron was no longer his favourite poet.71 To Potgieter he wrote in March of 1837 that he had left his Byroniana behind him, for they bored him. He wished no longer to be known as ‘the professed lackey of Byron’, adding: ‘I’ve had enough of it’.72 It would not be until 1839 that Beets openly distanced himself from his Byronic image. This he did in his essay ‘The Black Period’ (1839). There he confesses that he had idolized the ‘gloomy, sombre, desperate’, and looking back, he now realizes that he had been playing a dangerous game: The soul likes to take on that melancholy pose; and there are plenty of circumstances to encourage us in it. Women are sympathetic to it; young girls are charmed by it. The imagination loses its light, the heart its health, the artistic sensibility its freshness, nature its beauty. Yes, in 71 Beets 1983, 231. 72 Instituut voor Neerlandistiek 1980, 82: ‘slipdrager van Byron’; ‘ik heb er genoeg van’.

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the end we would succeed in becoming the people we had pretended to be. True poetry is extinguished, and believe me, to the point even one’s physical health suffers; I had already progressed to sleepless nights and pale cheeks; who knows where it would have ended!73

More than ever, Nicolaas Beets was aware that his Byronic works were capable of being damaging: not only to himself, but also to his readers. Henceforth he wanted to leave this black period behind him and pursue a new direction. As a ‘vicar-poet’ he would sing the praises of God, nature, and domestic happiness – in short, the positive – exclusively. It was nevertheless his idolization of Lord Byron that established him as a national celebrity before the age of 30.

Bibliography N. Beets, Jose: Een Spaansch verhaal (Amsterdam: J. Immerzeel junior, 1834). N. Beets, Dichtwerken, 5 vols. (Amsterdam: Kirberger, 1876‑1900). N. Beets, Kuser, ed. by M.H. Schenkeveld (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979). N. Beets, Het dagboek van de student Nicolaas Beets, 1833‑1836, ed. by P. van Zonneveld (’s-Gravenhage: Nederlands Letterkundig Museum en Documentatiecentrum, 1983). W. van den Berg, ‘Leidelijk verzet en overgave’, Literatuur 7 (1990), 95‑99. L. Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame & its History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). Lord Byron, The Poetical Works: Complete in One Volume (London: John Murray, 1847). P.D. Chantepie de la Saussaye, Het leven van Nicolaas Beets (Haarlem: De Erven F. Bohn, 1906). A. Easley, Literary Celebrity, Gender, and Victorian Authorship 1850‑1914 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2011). E. Eisner, Nineteenth-century Poetry and Literary Celebrity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 73 Beets 1876‑1900, vol. 2, 185: ‘De ziel neemt gaarne dien melankolieken plooi aan; en het ontbreekt niet aan omstandigheden, die er ons in aanmoedigen. Vrouwen hebben er sympathie voor; jonge meisjens worden er door bekoord. De verbeelding verliest haar licht, het hart zijne gezondheid, het kunstgevoel zijne frischheid, de natuur haar schoon. Ja, eindelijk zouden wij er in slagen de menschen te worden, die wij gespeeld hadden te zijn. De waarachtige poëzy wordt uitgedoofd, en geloof mij, tot zelfs de physieke gezondheid lijdt: ik had het reeds tot slapelooze nachten en bleeke wangen gebracht; wie weet waartoe het gekomen zou zijn!’

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G. Franssen, ‘Literary Celebrity and the Discourse on Authorship in Dutch Literature’, Journal of Dutch Literature 1 (2010), 91‑113. G. Franssen & R. Honings (ed.), ‘Literaire fancultuur in Nederland’, Spiegel der Letteren 56 (2014), 243‑419. R. Garland, Celebrity in Antiquity: From Media Tarts to Tabloid Queens (London: Duckworth, 2006). T.W. Galow, Writing Celebrity: Stein, Fitzgerald, and the Modern(ist) Art of Selffashioning (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). L. Glass, Authors Inc. Literary Celebrity in the Modern United States, 1880‑1980 (New York: New York University Press, 2004). J. Goldman, Modernism is the Literature of Celebrity (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011). D. Higgins, Romantic Genius and the Literary Magazine: Biography, Celebrity, and Politics (London/New York: Routledge, 2005). R. Holmes, The Romantic Poets and Their Circle (London: National Portrait Gallery, 2013). R. Honings, ‘De mythe van de dichter: Willem Bilderdijks beroemdheidscultus’, Nederlandse Letterkunde 19 (2014a), 1‑32. R. Honings, ‘De roem van het “Rijntje”: Literaire celebrity culture rond Elias Annes Borger’, De Negentiende Eeuw 38 (2014b), 270‑294. R. Honings, ‘“Mijn Heer, ben jy die groote Poëet!” Literair toerisme in de vroege negentiende eeuw’, Spiegel der Letteren 56 (2014c), 279‑307. R. Honings, ‘A Poor, Inspired and Melancholy Poet: Willem Bilderdijk, a Calvinist Celebrity’, The Low Countries 23 (2015), 252‑263. A. van der Hoop Jr, De renegaat, ed. by W. Drop (Zwolle: W.E.J. Tjeenk Willink, 1965). F. Inglis, A Short History of Celebrity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). Instituut voor Neerlandistiek, We like us at a distance: De briefwisseling tussen Beets en Potgieter (Amsterdam: Instituut voor Neerlandistiek, 1980). L. Jensen, De verheerlijking van het verleden: Helden, literatuur en natievorming in de negentiende eeuw (Nijmegen: Vantilt, 2008). M. Kemperink, ‘Modellen en de self-fashioning van de auteur: Enkele overwegingen en het geval Mina Kruseman’, Nederlandse Letterkunde 19 (2014), 277‑299. C. Kenyon Jones (ed.), Byron: The Image of the Poet (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008). R. van Krieken, Celebrity Society (London/New York: Routledge, 2012). F. MacCarthy, Life and Legend (London: Faber & Faber, 2003). M. Mathijsen, ‘The Taming of Byron in the Netherlands’, Byron Journal 41 (2013), 35‑48. T. Mole, Byron’s Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

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T. Mole (ed.), Romanticism and Celebrity Culture, 1750‑1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). J.A. Molewater, ‘Hoe zal het met mij afloopen’: Het studentendagboek 1833‑1835, ed. by H. Eijssens (Hilversum: Verloren, 1999). O. Praamstra, ‘De derde voetstap van de vaderlandse Romantiek’, in: De achtervol­ ging voortgezet: Opstellen over moderne letterkunde, aangeboden aan Margare‑ tha H. Schenkeveld, ed. by W.F.G. Breekveldt et al. (Amsterdam: Bakker, 1989), 374‑403. C. Rojek, Celebrity (London: Reaktion Books, 2001). A. Stein, The Byronic Hero in Film, Fiction, and Television (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004). P.L. Thorslev Jr, The Byronic Hero: Types and Prototypes (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1962). G. Turner, Understanding Celebrity (London: Sage, 2004). B.R. Weber, Women and Literary Celebrity in the Nineteenth Century: The Transat‑ lantic Production of Fame and Gender (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012). P. van Zonneveld, ‘Het dichtverhaal in de Nederlandse Romantiek’, in: De Romantiek in de Europese roman van de 19e eeuw/Le romantisme dans le roman européen du 19ème siècle/Romanticism in the European Novel of the 19th Century, ed. by E. van Itterbeek (Leuven: Leuvens Schrijversaktie, 1987), 191‑204. P. van Zonneveld, De Romantische Club: Leidse student-auteurs 1830‑1840 (Leiden: Athenae Batavae, 1993).

Figure 8 Henrik Ibsen, without year

Norsk Folkemuseum, Oslo

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Enemy of Society, Hero of the Nation Henrik Ibsen (1828‑1906) Suze van der Poll

In 1891, Henrik Ibsen returned home to his native Norway following a long voluntary exile. He was hailed as a super star by his fellow Norwegians and admirers from all over the (Western) world. The young Irish student James Joyce wrote him a fan letter, and the young painter Edvard Munch portrayed him sitting in his own chair at the Grand Hotel in Oslo. Though Ibsen often reacted somewhat grumpily when people tried to approach him, he had yearned for admiration and acknowledgement before he left Norway in 1864. The English poet, writer, translator and critic Edmund Gosse characterized Ibsen in a biographical study, issued a year after Ibsen’s death, with these lines: ‘During the latest years of his life, which were spent as a wealthy and prosperous citizen of Christiania, the figure of Ibsen took forms of legendary celebrity which were equalled [sic.] by no other living man of letters, not even by Tolstoi, and which had scarcely been surpassed, among the dead, by Victor Hugo’.1 Henrik Ibsen (1907) was published simultaneously in New York and London and subsequently reprinted four times in ten years, illustrating that even at the very beginning of the twentieth century Ibsen’s celebrity status was not an exclusively national or even Scandinavian phenomenon. One might of course argue that Gosse’s description was perhaps rather over-embellished. Gosse was indeed one of Ibsen’s main advocates in Britain and had something of ‘a genius for inaccuracy’, as his friend Henry James put it.2 Yet, as Narve Fulsås has pointed out, Ibsen was far more successful at the end of the nineteenth century than were his German and Russian contemporaries, and did very well in comparison with bestselling authors like Emile Zola and Robert Louis Stevenson.3 If one takes into account the fact that Ibsen’s market was much smaller than Zola’s or Stevenson’s, Ibsen’s

1 Gosse 1917, 188. 2 See Thwaite 2002, xvi. 3 Fulsås 2011. Del Guercio (2007, 408) informs that 40,000 copies of Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde (1886) were sold in the UK and US within six months.

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plays published in the latter half of his career sold extremely well, so that in fact Gosse’s characterization seems accurate enough. 4 However, sales figures alone – although they can be seen as the outward sign of recognition, power and status – do not fully explain Henrik Ibsen’s celebrity. In this chapter I analyse the background to Ibsen’s success. Rather than simply charting his rise to fame chronologically, I will analyse what I consider to be the three core elements that contributed to Ibsen’s renown: the resonance between his oeuvre and the sociopolitical and literary context in which it was embedded; the way in which Ibsen fashioned himself in and through his literary works, articles and letters as well as his appearances in the public domain; and finally the recognition of his work by critics, biographers, colleagues, and the establishment.

Ibsen as a National Literary Icon: The Sociopolitical and Literary Context Robert van Krieken views celebrity ‘as a central aspect of a range of features of modern social life, such as democracy, individualism, state-formation, long-distance intimacy, imagined community, the public sphere and of course the changing technologies of the mass media’.5 The def inition applies particularly to the case of a nineteenth century figure like Ibsen, for his success as a writer cannot be understood without taking the historical context of modernity into account. Although Ibsen himself often felt at odds with his time, he did have an extremely fine sense of the relationship between his literature and the modern times in which it was produced. Ibsen’s rise to fame needs to be seen in the context of the contemporary Norwegian nationalist sentiments of the time. Norway had become a sovereign state only a year before Ibsen’s death. In the late 1300s, Norway had ceased to exist as an independent kingdom and had gradually been subsumed into the Danish monarchy. The effects on Norway of Danish domination were not solely geopolitical. The introduction of a common legal 4 Ibsen wrote in Danish – with some Norwegian elements – and the population in Denmark and Norway was circa 3,9 million, whereas France and the United Kingdom had around 39 million inhabitants each in 1880. For print numbers, see http://ibsen.nb.no, last accessed 1 December 2015. When his first play, Catilina (1850) was issued, 250 copies were printed. However, 205 copies had been returned by booksellers and finally ended as waste paper. During the 1860s, the numbers of first editions rose from 1250 copies (The Pretenders, 1862) to 2000 (The League of the Youth, 1869), and from 1881 (Ghosts) Hegel issued 10,000 copies. Ibsen’s last two plays were issued in 12,000 copies. 5 Van Krieken 2012, 8.

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system caused the written Norwegian language to disappear, and because the civil service and the bourgeoisie used Danish as their language of preference, the status of spoken Norwegian declined. However, Norwegian did survive as a spoken language, but mainly in peripheral, rural areas. It was not only language that was affected by the loss of sovereignty: both intellectual and cultural life were also heavily influenced. The Danish city of Copenhagen functioned as the capital. It housed the university, academies, theatres, printing presses, and bookshops. As a result intellectuals and artists – authors, painters, and so on – born north of the Skagerrak had to move to Copenhagen in order to receive higher education. Subsequently, few of them returned home to their native regions. As a result of its alliances during the Napoleonic wars, Denmark was required to hand over Norway to the Swedes in 1814. During the transitional phase the Norwegians wrote a constitution that not only signalled the taking of the first steps towards democratization but also towards independence.6 Shortly afterwards, a process of national cultural awakening was initiated, although primarily by writers and intellectuals rather than by the government. That process intensified in the second half of the nineteenth century when writers such as Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, Arne Garborg, and Henrik Ibsen; musicians such as Edvard Grieg and Johan Halvorsen; and the painters Adolph Tidemand, Hans Gude, and Nikolai Astrup, highlighted national themes and role models in search of national, cultural, and political legitimacy. Their works helped to constitute ‘Norwegianness’, and made the Norwegians aware of their national identity. Ibsen’s choice of drama as his main medium (he also wrote about 200 poems, although most were of the ‘occasional’ variety) certainly contributed greatly to his development as a national celebrity. Drama, being a much more ‘public’ genre than either the novel or the poem, played an important role in the process of spreading a national culture, so it was no coincidence that the wish to establish a Norwegian theatre became one of the focal points of the nation-building process when national thought gained a stronger foothold in Norway during the 1850s. That wish was realized when the world famous violinist Ole Bull, a central figure in the national movement because of his interest in Norwegian folklore and folk music, established Det norske Theater (The Norwegian Theatre). Significantly, he chose Bergen rather than the capital Christiania. As Danish had been the language of the cultural and political elite in Norway, the language used 6 Although Norway had to recognize the Swedish King as their king, and shared foreign policy with the Swedes, Norwegians did have a voice in internal affairs.

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in the Norwegian professional theatre was Danish – as were most actors. Bull chose in contrast to employ Norwegian actors and strove to produce Norwegian plays. To that end he commissioned the young Henrik Ibsen as both director and playwright in 1851.7 Ibsen had made his literary debut only the year before, although he was no novice, having written a number of newspaper articles about language and theatre in relation to the Norwegian nation. In those writings Ibsen had already shown himself to be the man Bull had been looking for.8 Ibsen’s literary debut had been a play about Catiline, the Roman nobleman, but as soon as Ibsen was employed by a theatre with national reach he stopped writing about ancient Roman heroes and instead presented himself as the agent of the new Norwegian cause. Like many of his colleagues he concentrated on themes and heroes closer to his own time and country: medieval Norway with its Vikings, paragons of the formerly strong, and independent Norway. Oddly enough, despite the fact that the audience loved some of his plays, no one in the 1850s would have identified Ibsen as one of the more promising dramatists. In fact the critics were rather inclined to be disparaging about him.9 Financial troubles reflected his lack of real success, something which did not change greatly, even after he was appointed director of the newly established – but not very successful – Christiania Norske Theater in 1858. Worse still, Ibsen’s duties at the theatre kept him from his writing, something which greatly affected his self-esteem. For Ibsen, who as a child experienced social degradation at close quarters after his father’s bankruptcy, literature was the only way he could see both to attain social prestige and to express himself. That might explain why – as Vigdis Ystad put it – he underwent a kind of character transformation during his years in Christiania, ‘[letting] his appearance go’ and seeking solace in drink. This might also explain why he felt so offended whenever his aesthetic capacities were questioned.10 However, when Ibsen issued Love’s Comedy in 1862 after five years of silence things changed. In Love’s Comedy, which had been issued as a New Year’s present by Illustreret Nyhedsblad and was delivered to the weekly’s 7 Ibsen was by no means an established author at that time, but in his newspaper articles he had supported Bull, who tried to get financing for the newly established Norwegian Theatre. 8 Henrik Ibsen, ‘Hvorfor bør en Nation søge at bevare sine Forfædres Sprog og Minder?’ (1850), ‘Theater Revue’ (1851), ‘Om Samfundstheatret’ (1851) in Ystad 2010. 9 What seems to have been most important during his Bergen years is the fact that the work at the theatre, where Ibsen also worked as a bookkeeper and set designer, gave him the opportunity to learn the tricks of the trade. 10 Ystad 1999.

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subscribers on 31 December 1862, he attacked the amatory institutions of society. Ibsen questioned the objectives of both love and marriage, and wondered whether love could be equal to formalities such as engagement, marriage, and the obligation to support.11 The play established him as a ‘talented mauvais sujet’, and induced Paul Botten Hansen to investigate the man behind the work that had shocked so many of his countrymen.12 Botten Hansen’s investigation resulted in a short Ibsen biography published in July 1863, although the controversial nature of the play did Ibsen few favours when it came to gaining official recognition. The situation was this: the Norwegian government acknowledged the importance of its cultural ambassadors and was in the habit of granting scholarships to them. One was Bjørnson, seen in the 1860s as the clear leading man of the Norwegian cause, who was awarded an annual salary in 1863. Ibsen felt that he himself, just as much as Bjørnson, had given the Norwegians something to be proud of, so he wrote a personal letter to the King to ask for an annual salary for himself. His two major arguments were that such a salary would probably find favour with the public and that government support would enable him to ‘continue to offer his services to literature’.13 The authorities meanwhile considered Ibsen to be of less national importance than Bjørnson and were only willing to grant him a travel scholarship. Although it was less than he had hoped for, the scholarship proved to be the unequivocal turning point in Ibsen’s career and the starting point for his status as a celebrity. In 1864, he left Norway on the first ship that managed to break through the ice in the Oslo fjord and went to Italy, where he chose to strike out on a new course. Disappointed in his countrymen, who in his opinion had shown themselves to be rather self-absorbed and xenophobic about recent political and social matters both at home and abroad (such as the Danish-German war in 1864), Ibsen no longer wished to praise Norway’s greatness and by settling in a remote place like Rome – Italy had by then lost its place as the centre of European intellectual life – he deliberately chose to stay out of the limelight. There he was able to operate as a critical chronicler of his own time and hold up a mirror to his countrymen. Brand (1866) was the first result of Ibsen’s new approach. Contrary to the expectations of Ibsen’s Danish publisher Hegel, the play was a success,

11 Brandes 1899b, 43. 12 Brandes 1899b, 42. 13 Henrik Ibsen, letter to King Carl XV (10 March 1863) in Fulsås & Ystad 2005.

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despite the reserved reactions of several critics.14 Sixteen years later, the critic Georg Brandes admitted that it was Brand that had laid the foundation for Ibsen’s fame as an author. The general public loved Brand, forcing Hegel to reissue it three times in its first year – the revenue significantly reducing Ibsen’s financial concerns. This financial success is aptly illustrated by an anecdote referred to by Ibsen’s daughter-in-law Bergliot. Apparently, in the year before Brand was published, the Circolo Scandinavico had elected Ibsen its shabbiest member, but shortly after receiving his first revenue payment, Ibsen appeared – much to the surprise of his fellow Scandinavians – in a black velvet topcoat, a shirt of gleaming white linen and a pair of kid gloves.15 Obviously, a more suitable turnout for a man now acknowledged as one of Scandinavia’s greatest living authors. However, as is often the case, fame turned out to be fickle. Peer Gynt (1867), the play Ibsen presented two years later, raised some concerns as to Ibsen’s qualities as a writer. Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson apparently laughed out loud whilst reading this ‘satire on Norwegian self-admiration’. In his review in the Danish newspaper Fædrelandet Clemens Petersen opined that Peer Gynt was too fragmentary and lacked both idealism and poetry.16 Petersen’s critique enraged Ibsen, who in a letter to Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson (9 December 1867) admitted that he would have gladly beaten Petersen’s brains out. ‘My book is poetry; and if it isn’t, then it will be so in the future. My book will redefine “poetry” in Norway’, claimed Ibsen rather self-confidently.17 Ibsen’s foresight was proven true by the fact that the raging Danish master critic Georg Brandes, who shortly after would bloom into one of the most influential critics in Scandinavia with a vast European network, initially had shared Petersen’s low opinion of Peer Gynt, believing that a poet should not be a polemical moralist – only to change his mind four years later. Once again Ibsen had proved to be ahead of his time. In Indledning til Emigrantlitteraturen (Introduction to Emigrant Literature, 1872), in which Brandes introduced naturalism to Denmark, a critical attitude towards 14 Clemens Petersen (8 April 1866) characterized the play as ‘unrestrained’, Marcus Jacob Monrad (23 September 1866) found it ‘an abstractum’, ‘an idea with no relation whatsoever to reality’, whereas Georg Brandes (23 May 1866) felt Brand was ‘poetry in the service of religion’. Monrad (April 1866) had initially written a positive review, but in September he sent four highly critical articles to Morgenbladet in which he expressed his discontent with Ibsen’s genre of choice (why had Ibsen opted for the dramatic form for his satire?) and the abstract, void nature of the idea put forward in Brand. 15 Ibsen 1964, 24. 16 Bjørnson 1867; Petersen 1867. 17 Henrik Ibsen, letter to Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, 9 December 1867.

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contemporary social reality was presented as one of the most important criteria of literary quality. Hence, Ibsen – being the critic of modern society – soon grew to be one of Brandes’ literary heroes. In the plays following Peer Gynt the target of Ibsen’s criticism moved from Norwegian national consciousness to elements of modern Norwegian society. He successively excoriated capitalism, the church, the education system, the role of the press (Pillars of Society, 1877), marriage (A Doll’s House, 1879; Ghosts, 1881), and democracy (An Enemy of the People, 1882). Ibsen’s new plays shocked his readers and theatre audiences, who were horrified by the sight of a woman forsaking her ‘duties’ as a mother and wife (A Doll’s House), or another wife killing herself essentially out of boredom (Hedda Gabler, 1890). The plays’ shock value seemed to contribute to Ibsen’s notoriety. What is more, by this time Ibsen’s plays were deliberately issued in late November or December, since this was the time of year when people would be buying their Christmas presents. Of course controversy did no harm at all to sales figures, or to Ibsen’s income. The cartoon ‘Henrik Ibsen’s Juleklap’ (‘Henrik Ibsen’s Christmas Present’), which appeared in the magazine Vikingen of 31 December 1881 shortly after Ghosts was published and is presumed to have been drawn by Andreas Bohr Olsen, is nicely illustrative. The cartoon is presented in two adjacent panels: in the left panel sits an impassive Ibsen holding a small gift on his knee and surrounded by a curious and expectant public; in the right panel a snake emerges from the wrappings to terrify them. That Ibsen’s plays managed to shock his audience proved to Brandes that Ibsen had touched several raw nerves in contemporary society. In Det moderne Gennembruds Mænd (The Men of Modern Breakthrough, 1883), a study of contemporary Scandinavian literature, Ibsen was presented as one of the leaders of the aesthetic movement characterized by Brandes as the Modern Breakthrough in Scandinavian literature. Brandes’ presentation proved to be of great importance for Ibsen’s image as a social critic.18 It is no coincidence that plays like A Doll’s House, Ghosts and An Enemy of the People – all characterized by a critical attitude toward nineteenth-century society – were welcomed by supporters of the realist and naturalist movements, both in Scandinavia and elsewhere on the European continent. Ibsen’s rise to fame as outlined so far might give the impression that his artistic development was fully in line with developments in European literary and cultural history, but it would be difficult to deny that Ibsen’s work was open to multiple interpretations – a trait that could be seen 18 Nonetheless, Brandes later distanced himself from Ibsen again.

88 Suze van der Poll Figure 9 Cartoon by A.B. Olsen, ‘Henrik Ibsen’s Juleklap’, in: Vikingen, December 31, 1881

National Library of Norway, Oslo

as the result of Ibsen’s personal reluctance to take sides. In France, for example, he was received both as a proponent of the naturalist school (by Antoine’s Théâtre Libre) and as a symbolist (by Lugné-Poë’s Théâtre de L’Oeuvre). The Swedish critic Edvard Alkman mentioned in his review of The Master Builder (1892) that in Germany Ibsen was known as both realist and naturalist.19 In her study The World Republic of Letters from 2004, Pascale Casanova summarized the situation quite effectively: ‘every director or critic pretending to have special understanding of Ibsen’s plays, whose form and subject matter represented a considerable departure from the conventions of European theatre at that time, used them for his own purposes and in ways that depended on the position he occupied in his own national literary space’.20 The multifaceted character of Ibsen’s plays thus seemed to contribute to his popularity in the broadest sense of the term. It is telling that Casanova specifically mentions Ibsen’s plays – the texts themselves – whereas in Britain critical attention seemed to be equally 19 Alkman 1893. 20 Casanova 2004, 158.

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concerned with Ibsen the man and his alleged political preferences. In the British Isles Ibsenites like William Archer, Bernard Shaw, and Edmund Gosse (and later, as we shall see, James Joyce) presented their idol to British audiences as a ‘master’ and ‘a prophet’, a view contested by various antiIbsenites like Clement Scott. Ibsen never visited the United Kingdom, but he tried to influence his foreign image through intermediaries. When he learned that he was associated with social-democratic ideology, for example, he wrote a letter to a Norwegian diplomat in London, Hans Lien Brækstad (18 August 1890), in which he indicated that he felt his words had been rendered inaccurately. He added that he never had been, and probably never would become, a member of any political party.

Critics, Biographers, and the Establishment Even though Ibsen criticized modern society, he made effective use of its advanced technologies and media culture. Here one can think not only of marketing strategies (for example, the fact that his plays were published just before Christmas) but also of Ibsen’s attempts to gain control over his media image, as illustrated by his letter to Brækstad. The role of reviewers in spreading Ibsen’s work and fame can hardly be overestimated. Even so, Ibsen himself was highly critical of the press and attacked them both in his plays and letters. In a letter to Brandes (3 January 1882) he writes off the Norwegian press: ‘Critics are theologists in disguise and the (commercial) liberal press is a slave of its readers’ opinions – neither independent nor able to evaluate poetry’.21 Yet Ibsen does acknowledge in the same letter that, 21 Editor Hovstad in An Enemy of the People serves as a representative of what Ibsen characterized as the liberal press. In his letter to Brandes, Ibsen writes: ‘Deroppe besørges nemlig kritiken delvis af ​nogle mere eller mindre ​formummede theologer; og disse herrer er i regelen aldeles ude af stand til at skrive fornuftigt om digterarbejder. [...] Og hvad skal man så sige om ​den såkaldte liberale presses forhold? Disse førere, som taler og skriver om frihed og frisind og som samtidigt dermed gør sig til trælle af abonnenternes formodede meninger! Jeg får mere og mere bekræftelse på at der ligger noget demoraliserende i at befatte sig med politik og i at slutte sig til partier. Under alle omstændigheder vil jeg aldrig kunne slutte mig til et parti, som har majoriteten for sig’. [‘There – in Norway – critiques are written by theologists in disguise, those gentlemen generally lack the talent to write something sensible about poetry. […] What to say about the conditions of the so-called liberal press? Those guides, who write about freedom and broad-mindedness and who with that become slaves of the opinions of their subscriber’s alleged beliefs! More and more it becomes clear to me that there is something demoralizing in political involvement and siding with political parties. I will not get involved with a party which has the majority’s support’.] See http://ibsen.uio.no/BREV_1880‑1889ht|B18820103GB.xhtml, last accessed 1 December 2015.

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even though they might have misinterpreted his plays, it was thanks to his critics that his work received such a great deal of attention. The release of the Wild Duck in December 1884 is indeed demonstrative of such: ‘Denmark’s Nationaltidende reported from Christiania that the book had arrived at about noon or one o’clock. It was on sale in the bookshops at a little past two o’clock. That same afternoon, Morgenbladet, Aftenposten, and Christiania Intelligenssedler all carried full summaries of the play’s action’.22 The news value of Ibsen’s plays was enormous, as was the speed with which news was disseminated to large numbers of readers. The closing decades of the nineteenth century were an era of technological progress. Thanks to mass media innovations such as the rotary printing press (1843) and the Linotype machine (1884) huge audiences could be reached in a short period of time. Moreover, the introduction of a parliamentary system in Norway in 1884 stimulated a rapid increase in the number of newspapers and magazines, as they were used as a means to spread political views produced by a small elite group of specialists, but intended for a general reading public. It is telling that many of those specialists – not just Norwegian, but Danish too – reviewed and discussed Ibsen’s plays extensively.23 Here the importance of the genre Ibsen had chosen comes to the fore once again. Not only were his plays reviewed in detail, but the performances themselves also aroused the attention of the media. Hedda Gabler is a good example. The play was issued by Hegel on 16 December 1890 in Christiania and Copenhagen, and seven reviews appeared in Norwegian newspapers that same month. The exact dates were 17 December (Dagbladet), 20 and 21 December (Aftenposten), 21 December (Morgenbladet), 23 December (Ver‑ dens Gang), 28 December (Illustreret Tidende), and 29 December (Vårt Land). The play was given its premiere on 31 January 1891 at the Residenztheater in Munich, followed by performances in Helsinki (at both the Finnish and Swedish theatres, on 4 and 6 February respectively), Berlin (10 February), Stockholm (19 February), Copenhagen (25 February), Christiania (26 February), Gothenburg (30 March), and London (20 April). Each performance drew reviews, so that Ibsen and his play were in the news for five months consecutively. When looking for signs of Ibsen’s growing celebrity, it is worth noting that the reviews and critiques changed character in the course of time. 22 Fulsås 2011, 4. 23 Considering the number of reviews, one can argue that Brand served as a turning point: since its appearance in 1866 all greater newspapers and, what is more, influential critics, started to pay attention to Ibsen’s plays.

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After Ibsen had become a well-known author the focus in reviews was no longer exclusively on the text nor on the performance. Increasingly, the man behind the work became a subject for reflection, and one of the first critics who argued that Ibsen’s work could be read autobiographically was Georg Brandes. In his Andet Indtryk (Second Impression) from 1882, the Danish critic drew a portrait of Henrik Ibsen, in which he paid attention to the man’s life as well as to his looks and character which, according to Brandes, were both to be seen reflected in his writings: ‘Ibsen’s personal appearance is suggestive of the qualities he has revealed in his poetry’.24 Beginning with the author’s early years and a characterization of John Gynt’s household, Brandes discerns clear traces of Ibsen’s personal experiences of impoverishment in his works. What is particularly interesting is that Brandes adds that the poor conditions of Ibsen’s upbringing ‘probably rendered him ill at ease in society, and produced in him some ambition in the direction of external badges of honour that should place him on an equal footing with the class with which, as a youth, he did not associate’.25 Brandes’ observation is highly relevant for the development of Ibsen’s status, for celebrity, according to Van Krieken, ‘is always accentuated by some degree of “ordinariness” – a movement from humble origins to higher status’.26 Brandes presented Ibsen as a homeless exile with no connections – neither to institutions, political parties, nor newspapers; a European who did not ‘feel himself to be the son of a fatherland, part of a whole’.27 The author, Brandes concludes, ‘simply feels himself to be a gifted individual’.28 Ibsen was highly delighted, as is witnessed by the fact that he thanked Brandes in a personal letter (21 September 1882) for the glorious and extensive presentation – ‘this token of appreciation’.29 In Brandes he recognized the critic who 24 In his First Impression (1867), Brandes (1899a, 46) had focused on Ibsen’s idealistic dramas from a romantic point of view. In the Second Impression (1882) the realist dramas are included and connected to Ibsen’s personal life. Brandes discerns clear connections, like militant fervour and the sense of isolation, between Ibsen’s early and later plays. Brandes writes: ‘The severe or sarcastic expression of his face conceals a delicate spirituality that only occasionally breaks through. Ibsen is short and thick-set; he dresses with a certain style and elegance, and looks very distinguished. His walk is slow, his carriage dignified and stately. His head is large and striking, with its thick mane of greyish hair, which he wears rather long. The forehead […] abrupt, high, broad […] bears the stamp of greatness and spiritual wealth. The mouth, when in repose, is compressed, as if lipless; closed and resolute, it reveals the fact that Ibsen is a man of few words’. 25 Brandes 1899b, 41‑42. 26 Van Krieken 2012, 10. 27 Brandes 1899b, 48. 28 Brandes 1899b, 48. 29 Henrik Ibsen, letter to Georg Brandes, 21 September 1882.

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truly understood him and his work. Ibsen himself, preferring to stay out of the limelight, had always been (and would always remain) reluctant to reveal the details of his personal life to the outside world. At times, however, he did reveal something about himself through his literary characters. When the Danish literary historian Peter Hansen once asked him if he could provide some personal information, Ibsen replied that everything he had written had its origin in a life situation. He added that the character of Brand ‘is like me in my best moments, – just as through “self-anatomizing”. I have created many features of Peer Gynt and Stensgaard’.30 In other words: read my plays, Ibsen seems to say, and you will get the inside story. The self-image Ibsen presents through his dramas changed over the course of time. Through figures such as a liar and storyteller (in Peer Gynt), an enemy of the people, an old master-builder afraid of the new generation, an artist who has forsaken his muse (When We Dead Awake, 1899), to name but a few, the audience is presented with a multifaceted image of the author behind the works. The fact that Brandes was certainly not the only critic to stress the close connection between the author and his work indicates that Ibsen’s image was increasingly associated with that of the playwright’s protagonists.31 Ibsen was first presented as a controversial author after his work gained wider recognition, beginning with Brand. Here Brandes’ casting of Ibsen as a critic of society is clearly discernible. The image of the notorious author, or to rephrase Ibsen himself, an enemy of the people, seemed to change after the publication of The Wild Duck. An anonymous reviewer in Aftenposten described the author of the play as ‘the poet decorated with many awards’, which signalled Ibsen’s new status.32 However, it would not be until the late 1880s and early 1890s, that Ibsen would acquire real fame sufficient to paint him as a celebrity figure. By then, rather than his work, it was his personality that attracted the public’s attention: from 1891 onwards the media became increasingly focused upon the author’s visual appearance and his physical presence in the Norwegian capital. This development contributed to making Ibsen visible to a broader public. During the last two decades of his life the attention paid to Ibsen the man outshone his works. The evolving public interest in the author and his private life, the human Ibsen behind the works he produced, can 30 Henrik Ibsen, letter to Peter Hansen, 28 October 1870. 31 The frequency with which Ibsen’s name is mentioned in reviews of An Enemy of the People in 1882 is illustrative in this respect: Vullum (1882) mentions Ibsen’s name 27 times, Henrik Jæger (1882) 42 times, Michael Johan Færden 45 times, Borchsenius (1883) thirteen times. Ibsen’s name is also used as an adjective. 32 S.n. 15 November 1884.

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be seen as indicative of his celebrity status. In the following section I will illustrate that development by examining the response in the Nordic press to two of Ibsen’s plays. In my opinion, these plays define the evolution of Ibsen’s status: initially depicted as notorious yet later lauded, and onwards to his recognition as a celebrity – an evolution that was completed within a decade. The first play I look at is An Enemy of the People, issued in 1882. Many reviewers of the play, such as Erik Vullum, endorsed the image of Ibsen that Brandes had drawn earlier that year: a cosmopolitan who, although politically engaged, did not take sides.33 Most critics referred explicitly to the connection between the author and the play’s main character, Dr Tomas Stockmann. Otto Borchsenius underlined that Ibsen was not a man of the public, although the critics portrayed him no longer as an enemy of the people.34 Henrik Jæger emphasized that the play’s hero finds himself in the same situation as Ibsen: ‘“The majority never has right on its side. Never, I say”, replies Dr Stockmann in the play – and I’m confident in adding “so would Henrik Ibsen”’.35 Jæger holds that Ibsen, whom he depicts as an aristocratic intellectual, had never before revealed so much of his own character. Erik Vullum shared Jæger’s view, as did Ibsen himself: before the work was issued, he had written to his publisher Hegel that Dr Stockmann and he ‘got on excellently with each other, we agree on many matters, though the Doctor is more confused than I am, and he has some peculiarities, so that one might be more willing to accept things he says, than when they had come from me personally’.36 The second play that marks a change in Ibsen’s reception is Bygmester Solness (The Master Builder), which appeared on 12  December 1892 in Christiania. Previous works had been issued simultaneously in Copenhagen (where Ibsen’s publisher was based) and in the Norwegian capital. It is unlikely to have been a coincidence that copies of The Master Builder first went on sale in Copenhagen two days later, since Ibsen had recently returned 33 Note the anonymous review of A Wild Duck in Aftenposten (18 November 1884): ‘One can study and study what Ibsen is at, and still not find it’. [‘Man kan studere og studere paa, hvor Ibsen vil hen, og ikke finde det’.] 34 This thought is also carried out by Jæger 1882, according to whom Ibsen indirectly responded to the public’s anger to his earlier plays in An Enemy of the People. 35 The original (Jæger 1882) reads: ‘Flertallet har aldrig Retten paa sin Side, aldrig siger jeg’, svarer Doktor Stockmann og – jeg tør trygt tilføie – Henrik Ibsen’. 36 Vullum 1882: ‘Doktor Stockmann is Henrik Ibsen personally’. [‘Doktor Stockmann er Henrik Ibsen personlig’.] Ibsen’s comment on Stockmann can be found in his letter to Hegel, 9 September 1882.

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to his native country after a voluntary exile of 27 years. Within a month twelve reviews found their way to Scandinavian readers. The opening line of the first Norwegian review is telling: ‘The Norwegian Sphinx has spoken once more’. Alfred Sinding-Larsen expected that no less would be written about this dark and mystical play than about its predecessor ‘in the whole civilized world, both in the Nordic countries and in all eight languages in which the work will be issued’.37 Sinding-Larsen mentioned that The Master Builder was the first work Ibsen had written on Norwegian soil since The Pretenders (1863), and expected reviewers would look for traces of Norwegian influence. Hans Aanrud reviewed the drama two days later in Christiania Intelligenssedler, and wondered whether the master builder was not a substitute for ‘that famous master builder who is now at the height of his European fame’.38 Aanrud felt Ibsen had drawn a portrait of both himself and his literary oeuvre. Kristian Randers was even more explicit: ‘Ibsen is the master builder’ in what was, in fact, an allegorical drama.39 Just as Sinding-Larsen did, he felt that Ibsen was implicitly announcing the end of his career and therefore he expressed his deep gratitude for what Ibsen had written until then. Christian Brinchmann reviewed the ‘season’s most important work’ in Nyt Tidsskift. 40 Though his review mainly contained a summary of the play, it is interesting to note that Brinchmann presented the work as literature of world importance. He pointed out that, with the publication of Hedda Gabler, its author was believed to be an international personality whose new works ‘every person interested in literary matters’ should take notice of. 41 What the reviews of An Enemy of the People and The Master Builder show us is that between 1882 and 1890 Ibsen grew to be a European celebrity whose plays were performed and talked about all over Europe. It was a popularity that only served to increase the already profound interest in the man who had written them.

A Picture of the Celebrity The growing interest in Ibsen’s character and private life is clearly reflected in Scandinavian visual culture as well. The number of paintings, drawings, 37 38 39 40 41

Sinding-Larsen 1892. Aanrud 1892. Randers 1892. Brinchmann 1892‑1893. Brinchmann 1892‑1893.

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and photographs of the author increased inordinately after he had returned to Christiania. Ibsen’s publisher Hegel ordered a portrait of his bestselling author from the Christiania-based painter Eilif Peterssen in March 1895. Later in May 1895, Ibsen posed for Erik Werenskiold, who painted six portraits in total. A month later the sculptor Stephan Sinding appeared at Ibsen’s home and the statue of Ibsen he produced was placed next to the one of Bjørnson in front of the National Theatre in Christiania at the opening of the new building in 1899. Although since his emigration to Italy in 1864 Ibsen had led a rather secluded life – as he continued to do when he moved back to Norway – he was much more visible from 1891 onwards: every day he would walk from his home at Arbinsgate to take lunch at the Grand Hotel, which stood in the main shopping street. The Grand Hotel was frequented by painters, writers, and foreigners, and there Ibsen could escape the ordinariness of Norwegian society he found so depressing. He could, as Edvard Brandes would put it in 1928, imagine himself abroad again. 42 Ibsen’s daily visits to the Grand Hotel actually illustrate various aspects of his celebrity status. The author had his own chair, and though ‘all the world’ frequented the Grand, Ibsen would sit alone. Whoever might want to speak to him could come and sit at his table whilst he enjoyed his simple lunch – a glass of beer and a sandwich. One of his admirers was the still young painter Edvard Munch, whose portrait of Ibsen is quite telling. The old master is seated with his back to the crowd in the street visible through the window behind him. Indeed the Grand Hotel’s large windows were rather like shop windows: passers-by could easily see who was inside. Since Ibsen was such a creature of habit, always taking the same route at the same time, his daily strolls soon became a tourist attraction in themselves. Ibsen himself did not enjoy the attention. Indeed, he would seldom condescend to receive admirers at home. His home had become a place to see, at least from the outside, for tourists visiting Christiania. In 1898, Olaf Krohn presented a drawing in Vikingen, a satirical weekly that appeared between 1862 and 1931, of Ibsen surrounded by English tourists. 43 It is a telling image, showing a crowd of admirers eagerly taking pictures of an angry little man. Indeed in the 1890s, many snapshot photographers and cartoonists portrayed him in ways Ibsen himself did not always appreciate, but that 42 Brandes 1928. 43 The original drawing is owned by the National Library in Norway.

96 Suze van der Poll Figure 10 Cartoon by Olaf Krohn, ‘Ibsen og de engelske Turister’, in: Vikingen, 6 August 1898

National Library of Norway, Oslo

revealed a different image from the official studio photographs that had been published when Ibsen was still living abroad. These new pictures showed an Ibsen that differed fundamentally from the more contrived, cool and collected images presented in paintings by the likes of Werenskiold and Krohn, or in Sinding’s statue of him. A remarkable insight to be gained from studying these caricatures is that they seem to illustrate quite neatly the impressions of Ibsen that can be found in the reviews of his plays. Let us take a closer look at three caricatures drawn respectively in 1882, 1892, and 1894. A little more than a week after the publication of An Enemy of the People, a caricature was published in Vikingen displaying characters from three of Ibsen’s plays, namely the lawyer Stensgård from The League of the Youth at the top of the page, and Consul Bernick from The Pillars of Society in the

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Figure 11 Anonymous cartoon, ‘Henrik Ibsen som Tugtemester’, in: Vikingen, 9 December 1882

National Library of Norway, Oslo

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middle. 44 The first is being prodded towards the right by Ibsen, the second is being soundly kicked by his creator, who is driving him to the left. At the bottom of the page, in a reference to Stockmann from An Enemy of the People, Ibsen is seen with a whip in each hand beating both sides. Just as the reviewers of his plays had done, the cartoonist portrayed Ibsen as a critic of society on all sides, right-wing and left-wing, in the end favouring no particular political leaning. The caricature drawn by Carsten Ravn on the occasion of the publication of The Master Builder ten years later presented yet a different Ibsen. This time his status as a celebrity is highlighted. Instead of the hatchet man presented in Vikingen, Ibsen is now portrayed as a great man of letters and a national hero hailed by an enormous crowd of Norwegians with a brass band. The streets are decorated with Christmas trees and Norwegian flags and to cap it all there are signs bearing the names of Ibsen’s most recent plays. The author himself is depicted with his iconic beard holding his walking stick up in salute and carrying a parcel addressed to ‘Hegel, Copenhagen’. Whereas Ibsen had previously been portrayed amidst his literary characters, Ravn portrays the author carrying his newest creation, without revealing anything about the content of the play. Ravn’s caricature was published in the Christmas edition of Blæksprutten’s (The Octopus), and was entitled ‘Today 11.35 am Ibsen posted his manuscript’. The conservative Danish magazine shows its political preferences by printing a depiction of Ibsen as a celebrity smiled upon by both a reindeer (!) and the Norwegian people (some of whom are even on skis). The celebrated author is humbly received by a man in uniform. Amusingly, the actually rather short Ibsen – he was barely 5’4” – appears to be a giant among the crowd of admirers surrounding him. Eivind Nielsen, too, portrayed Ibsen as a celebrity (27 January 1894 in Vikingen), but whereas Ravn’s caricature was suffused with admiration, Nielsen’s was much more critical. The illustration on the left surely not coincidentally reveals Ibsen from the socialist and anarchist viewpoint, as an old man carrying two bombs. The illustration on the right, meanwhile, shows him through a more cynical lens: a small man, decorated with numerous tokens of regard and dancing with members of the establishment. Whilst alluding to Ibsen’s contemporary dramas, Nielsen deliberately deployed the same rhetoric by showing the contrast between the misleading mask and the true, exposed face beneath

44 S.n. 1882.

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Figure 12 Cartoon by C. Ravn, ‘Henrik Ibsen bragte i Dag Kl. 11.35 sit Manuskript paa Posten’, in: Blæksprutten, December, 1892

National Library of Norway, Oslo

it. Indeed, although a profound distrust of institutions and the state ran deep with Ibsen, he was certainly not averse to official recognition. In fact, it can be argued that Ibsen was very much aware of the importance or even the necessity of success, recognition, and other marks of honour. To his colleague Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, who was an opponent of decorations, Ibsen wrote as early as 28 December 1867: ‘Shall we decline the honour every time people would like to fete us? […] I shouldn’t object if I should be decorated’. 45 Taking this one step further, Ibsen had asked Orhan Demirgian, the son of the Egyptian Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, in 1870 when he, Ibsen, could expect to receive the decorations the Egyptian caliph had granted him at the opening of the Suez-channel in 1869, where he had represented Norway. Ibsen added that he considered that such a tribute would ‘be of the greatest value to my literary position in Norway. It will be some consolation for being disregarded in my own country, where many other artists, painters, and musicians have been admitted to the Order of St Olav while I have been passed over, even though I support the government in my writings and with my talents’. 46 45 Henrik Ibsen, letter to Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, 28 December 1867. 46 Henrik Ibsen, letter to Orhan Demirigian, 23 November 1870.

100 Suze van der Poll Figure 13 Cartoon by E. Nielsen, ‘Henrik Ibsen som Politiker’, in: Vikingen, 27 January 1894

National Library of Norway, Oslo

Ibsen’s strategies of self-fashioning paid off. Shortly after, the first signs of official acknowledgement by the Scandinavian establishment did reach him. In 1871, he was knighted in Denmark and received the Order of Dannebrog. Two years later he was awarded the coveted Order of St Olav. Yet it would take until the 1890s for Ibsen to become a true celebrity and in many respects 1898 saw the height of his popularity. His 70th birthday in March 1898 was celebrated by the leaders of Norway’s cultural life with banquets in Christiania, Stockholm, and Copenhagen. In Copenhagen not only were Ibsen’s colleagues present, but also the Danish minister of cultural affairs, the director of the Royal Theatre, and a representative of academic life, Professor Peter Hansen. Special performances of Ibsen’s plays were produced. In Berlin six of his plays were performed that year on 20 March and students organized torchlight processions in Christiania and Copenhagen. He was honoured with the Grand Cross of the Swedish Order of the North Star. His German publisher issued an edition of his collected works, festschrifts appeared, and in Norway a folk edition of his collected works was published in order to present Ibsen’s work to those who were not able to afford earlier, more expensive editions. A revealing detail in

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all this: Hegel agreed to print 15,000 copies of the folk edition, and offered Ibsen 75,000 kroner in royalties – the equivalent of £404,000 today – while Ibsen himself was only too glad to pose for photographic portraits as fitting decoration for the series. Literature had indeed proved to be Ibsen’s route to prestige. Socially disgraced as a child and hardly able to make ends meet after starting a family himself, Ibsen had become an extremely wealthy man by the time he returned to the country that he had loathed and yet had fascinated him. Honoured by his fellow Scandinavians, by theatre directors and actors all over Europe, his fame was now being spread by promising younger authors: I have sounded your name def iantly through a college where it was either unknown or known faintly and darkly. I have claimed for you your rightful place in the history of the drama. I have shown what, as it seemed to me, was your highest excellence – your lofty impersonal power. Your minor claims – your satire, your technique, and orchestral harmony – these, too, I advanced. Do not think me a hero-worshipper. I am not so. 47

The eighteen-year-old student of literature and budding author who put these words to paper, was none other than James Joyce, a great admirer of the Norwegian master. In the Master Builder Ibsen had feared that he would be left behind by future generations. Clearly, he was proven wrong.

Bibliography H. Aanrud, ‘Review of The Master Builder’, Christiania Intelligenssedler, 16 December 1892. E. Alkman, ‘Review of The Master Builder’, Svensk Tidskrift, 1893, 138‑152. B. Bjørnson, ‘Review of Peer Gynt’, Norsk Folkeblad, 23 November 1867. O. Borchsenius, ‘Review of An Enemy of the People’, Ude og Hjemme, 7 January 1883. E. Brandes, ‘Henrik Ibsens Personlighed’, Politiken, 20 March 1928. G. Brandes, ‘Review of Brand’, Dagbladet, 23 May 1866. G. Brandes, ‘First Impression’, in Henrik Ibsen: Björnstjerne Björnson, Critical Studies (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1899a), 1‑38. 47 James Joyce, letter to Ibsen, 8 March 1901. The Dano-Norwegian original is lost, see http:// www.falseart.com/fan-letter-from-james-joyce-to-henrik-ibsen-1901/, last accessed 12 February 2015.

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G. Brandes, ‘Second Impression’, in Henrik Ibsen: Björnstjerne Björnson, Critical Studies (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1899b), 39‑82. C. Brinchmann, ‘Review of The Master Builder’, Nyt Tidsskrift, 1892‑1893. P. Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. by M.B. Debevoise (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004). N. Fulsås & Vigis Ystad, Henrik Ibsens skrifter XII: Brev 1844‑1871 (Oslo: Aschehoug, 2005). N. Fulsås &Vigis Ystad, Henrik Ibsens skrifter XIII: Brev 1871‑1879 (Oslo: Aschehoug, 2008). N. Fulsås &Vigis Ystad, Henrik Ibsens skrifter XIV: Brev 1880‑1889 (Oslo: Aschehoug, 2009). N. Fulsås, ‘Ibsen Misrepresented: Canonization, Oblivion and the Need for History’, Ibsen Studies 11 (2011), no. 1, 3‑20. E. Gosse, Henrik Ibsen (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1917). D. del Guercio, ‘Robert Louis Stevenson’, in The Facts on File Companion to British Short Story, ed. by A. Maunder (New York: Facts on File Inc., 2007), 408‑409. B. Ibsen, De tre (Oslo: Gyldendal, 1964 [1947]). H. Ibsen, Henrik Ibsens skrifter, http://www.ibsen.uio.no/skuespill.xhtml, last accessed 1 December 2015. H. Jæger, ‘Review of An Enemy of the People’, Aftenposten, 4, 5 & 6 December 1882. R. van Krieken, Celebrity Society (New York: Routledge, 2012). A. Sinding-Larsen, ‘Review of The Master Builder’, Morgenbladet, 14 December 1892. M.J. Monrad, ‘Review of Brand’, Morgenbladet, 2, 9, 16 & 23 September 1866. C. Petersen, ‘Review of Brand’, Fædrelandet, 7 April 1866. C. Petersen, ‘Review of Peer Gynt’, Fædrelandet, 30 November 1867. K. Randers, ‘Review of The Master Builder’, Aftenposten, 18 December 1892. S.n., ‘Review of A Wild Duck’, Aftenposten, 18 November 1884. A. Thwaite, Glimpses of the Wonderful: The Life of Philip Henry Gosse, 1810‑1888 (London: Faber & Faber, 2002). E. Vullum, ‘Review of An Enemy of the People’, Dagbladet, 30 November & 1 December 1882. V. Ystad, ‘Suicides in Ibsen’s Plays’, trans. of ‘Ibsens selvmordere’, Suicidologi (1999), no. 2, 3‑6, http://www.med.uio.no/klinmed/english/research/centres/nssf/ articles/culture/Ystad.pdf, last accessed 1 December 2015. V. Ystad, Henrik Ibsens skrifter XVI: Sakprosa (Oslo: Aschehoug, 2010).

Part 2 The Golden Age of Literary Celebrity

Figure 14 Holger Drachmann, without year

Danish Royal Library, Copenhagen

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From Bard to Brand Holger Drachmann (1846‑1908) Henk van der Liet

When the Danish poet, painter, and bon vivant Holger Drachmann died in 1908, his death marked the end of an era in more ways than one. His passing symbolically signalled the end of the romantic and late-romantic tradition in Danish art and culture, one that had dominated most of the nineteenth century. From the 1870s onwards, new literary and cultural currents gradually came to the fore and gathered momentum. Just as in many other parts of the world, remarkable progress was made in science, industry, transportation, and communication, as well as in the cultural realm. Commonly this period in Scandinavian cultural history is framed as the breakthrough of modernity, starting in the early 1870s and resulting, at the beginning of the twentieth century, in the advent of modern democracy in politics as well as modernism in art.1 In the final decades of the nineteenth century, literature played an essential role in the proliferation of new ideas and the notion of modernity, not least due to widespread censorship and deadlock in the Danish political arena.2 In this relatively short and intense time frame, which constitutes a watershed in Scandinavian cultural history, Drachmann was one of the most prominent and versatile authors in Denmark. His impressive body of work comprises more than 60 books and hundreds of separate publications in almost every imaginable literary genre. Clearly Drachmann was aware of the latest trends in literature and constantly on the lookout for opportunities to maintain his position centre stage. The versatility of his oeuvre however, simultaneously gives rise to the impression that his work lacks both ‘gravity’ and generic focus as all his best-known works were not only written in different genres, but also across different literary periods. Furthermore, none of these principal works – the poem ‘Engelske Socialister’ (‘English Socialists’, 1871), the play Der var Engang (Once Upon a Time, 1885), which includes the famous ‘Midsummer Song’ and the novel Forskrevet (Signed Away, 1890) – made any waves outside Scandinavia, and relatively few translations appeared. 1 2

Hertel 2004, 19‑48; Aarseth 1988, 509‑523. Jespersen 2004, 147‑148, 67‑69.

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In Danish literary history Drachmann tends to be regarded primarily as a ‘national’ author with an intermediary and transitional role, functioning as a steppingstone for those who looked for new artistic forms of expression that would be more in tune with the rapid metamorphosis of art and society.3 Drachmann helped to introduce new aesthetic currents, such as symbolism, impressionism, and vitalism, but at the same time he sought to preserve some of the aesthetic forms and values of the bygone era of romanticism. 4 Hence, probably the most accurate way to characterize Drachmann’s position in this period of cultural and ideological turmoil and change is to understand him as an artist who intended to straddle the divide between the two antagonistic cultural orientations – romanticism, representing the past, versus positivism, the ideology of the future. Metaphorically speaking, Drachmann had one leg firmly planted in nineteenth-century romanticism, while with his other leg he was trying to find a foothold in the, as yet unsettled, world of modernity. Of course, such an ambiguous position continues to trouble literary historians in search of clear demarcations, categories and periods, instead of the fuzzy delimitations provoked by an interloper such as Drachmann. It is not surprising, then, that both his literary successors as well as the vast majority of the next generations of literary critics and scholars deemed Drachmann outdated. They judged his oeuvre to be obsolete, and, as a consequence, his fame steadily dwindled.5 One critic even claimed that ‘no other Danish poet has been belittled by his successors like he. [...] Initially he was idolized and worshipped, then ridiculed and forgotten’.6 Despite a mere handful of his works surviving, the paradox remains, that each of these remnants finds itself today at the core of Danish cultural self-awareness and cultural identity.7 Although Drachmann’s oeuvre has to a large extent passed into literary oblivion, his name and especially his image – or rather his persona – is very much alive and kicking and surprisingly extant. One might even argue that the name and the persona – that is, the publicly produced image of Drachmann – have outlived his work and since his death a new ‘celeb’ Drachmann has gradually come to overshadow and overtake the artist with the same name. Admittedly, this is by no means unique as there will be many more people that know the names of 3 4 5 6 7

Van der Liet 2006, 146. Ehlers Dam 2010, 153. Van der Liet 2004a, 145‑146. Wivel 1981, 147. Van der Liet 2006; Van der Liet 2008, 139‑142.

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William Shakespeare or Virginia Woolf than readers who have actually read their work.8 Nonetheless, Drachmann’s case remains interesting, because this new ‘image’ of Drachmann seems to be more sustainable than factual knowledge pertaining to his life and work. What is of interest here is not merely the author’s own agency, his active participation in the production of his celebrity status in the literary domain, but notably the way(s) in which his name after his death in 1908 was – and still is – promoted and appropriated in other contexts.9 During his life Drachmann worked incessantly to establish, enhance and protect his celebrity status, which many of his letters – especially those to his publishers – and the portrait photographs he lavishly distributed, clearly demonstrate.10 Thus, the suggestion arises that his artistic work itself was the source of his fading fame – his oeuvre simply did not live up to expectations. The art historian Brian Dudley Barrett adheres to this opinion and defines Drachmann’s efforts as self-fashioning, turning him into ‘something of a poseur’, someone who ‘seemed greatly concerned with his image as a modern artiste’.11 If this really is the case, the conclusion must be that Drachmann was a master in keeping up appearances and that it is with good reason that his oeuvre later lost its appeal to contemporary readers. Yet this does not answer the question of why his name is still known to almost every Dane. Alternatively: why are readers today more familiar with Drachmann’s image – the celebrity persona – than with the content of his work and the actual person behind it? An obvious explanation could be that Drachmann’s death in 1908 marked the end of his own endeavours to actively preserve his artistic fame and celebrity status through self-fashioning. However, it also saw the beginning of a different phase of renegotiating his artistic value and his stardom for reasons other than literary. Clearly Drachmann’s celebrity status was so tenacious that it outlived his person and transmuted into new configurations that exclusively originate from processes of commodification and branding, instead of the possible re-canonization or renegotiation of his purely artistic value. One thing that we know for sure is that for over a century after his death, Drachmann’s reputation has been in the hands of various cultural stakeholders and intermediaries, such as critics, curators, film producers, journalists, photographers, scholars, schoolteachers, and so on. Over the 8 9 10 11

Handesten 2014, 25. Turner 2013, 3‑10. Borup 1968‑1970; Van der Liet 1999. Barrett 2010, 272.

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years, these professionals have been instrumental in the continuance and subsequent transformation of Drachmann’s fame. By singling out aspects of his life and work and reinterpreting them in various ways, they have reshaped his legacy. As will become clear, it was this process of redefining Drachmann and his celebrity status, attuning him to contemporary interests, that has kept his name from falling prey to the ravages of time, unlike his literary work. And although it seems paradoxical, in recent years some parts of Drachmann’s oeuvre have been cautiously rediscovered, presumably though for other reasons than he himself could have envisaged. Oddly enough, this seems to be a side effect of the circumstance that this author, or at least his persona, continues to represent some cultural capital of sorts. The recent indications of a kind of ‘revival’ will be addressed later in this chapter, but first a brief introduction to Drachmann’s career needs to be provided. Thereafter his efforts to gain and preserve his celebrity status will be discussed, and finally attention is given to the post-mortem appropriation of Drachmann.

Setting the Scene When Drachmann made his official debut as a writer with a collection of poems entitled Digte (Poems, 1872), he was instantly celebrated as the quintessential Danish poet of the new era.12 In the following years he did everything he could to live up to the expectations of his readership and the literary mandarins and journalists of his day. However, Drachmann was much more than a poet: he was an extremely prolific writer, employing virtually every literary genre from novels, poems, lyrics, short stories, essays, plays, vaudeville, and melodramas, to journalism and translating. Apart from being an exceedingly versatile writer, he also was a proficient illustrator and painter – often of his own works. Indeed, Drachmann began his career as a visual artist: he enrolled in the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen in 1866, specializing in marine painting. Three years later his first paintings were exhibited and his talent as a visual artist was immediately acknowledged.13

12 Drachmann’s earliest writings (poems, art reviews, and travelogues) already appeared in the 1860s, but were published anonymously. See Ursin 1956, 7. 13 Later art historians seem to have mixed opinions about his abilities as a painter. See Mortensen 1990, 197‑198; Barrett 2010, 272; Nielsen 2013, 53‑62.

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In the eyes of his contemporaries Drachmann was the prime Danish representative of the new era in belles-lettres, along with the ideological founding father of the pan-Scandinavian movement of literary modernity, Georg Brandes.14 Drachmann was simply considered to be the Danish counterpart of famous Scandinavian contemporaries such as Henrik Ibsen, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, and August Strindberg.15 Drachmann’s fame as a writer rose quickly and a number of literati not only recognized his talent, but became – during various stages of his career – passionate supporters or even outright fans of his work.16 Whilst still a student at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, his name was frequently linked to a group of young Copenhagen artists and aesthetes, who rebelled against middle-class propriety and authority. He was also one of the artists who sympathized with Brandes’ plea for modernity and the emancipation of women and the less privileged in society. Furthermore these radicals promoted an aesthetics that would do justice to the importance of literature, as they were convinced that literature could play a vital – maybe even a leading – role in modernizing society. In the eyes of the critic Brandes modern literature could offer leverage to political and societal change because it offered a positivist, ‘scientific’ analysis of social reality.17 It could be said that Georg Brandes acted as midwife to Drachmann’s literary career.18 In 1871, Brandes – after reading some of his articles in a magazine – approached Drachmann upon his return from London to make him aware of his literary potential. Indeed, until 1883, the year that saw the publication of Brandes’ critical work The Men of the Modern Breakthrough, a survey of the group of radical modernists, the poetics of both men were congruent. During his career Brandes helped promote Drachmann’s work, especially his poetry, even though Drachmann never fully became an 14 On 3 November 1871, Georg Brandes (1842‑1927) delivered the first of a series of lectures about the main currents in nineteenth-century European literature (‘Hovedstrømninger i det 19de Aarhundredes Litteratur’) in an auditorium at the University of Copenhagen. This event was – because of publicity reasons – soon credited as the introduction of intellectual modernity in Scandinavia. See Jespersen 2004, 204; Aarseth 1986, 511‑514. 15 Although Drachmann assiduously strove to achieve an international reputation, he never reached the same level of recognition abroad, as in his own country. See Van der Liet 2004a, 146. 16 Apart from Georg Brandes, who was a lifelong admirer especially of Drachmann’s poetry, others like the authors Peter Nansen, Karl Gjellerup, V. Pinger, Otto Borchsenius, and the restaurant owner F.L. ‘Lorry’ Feilberg were definitely ‘fans’ of Drachmann, at least during various stages of his career. 17 According to Brandes Emile Zola was one of the prime examples of this development. See Brandes 1888. 18 Ursin 1953, vol. I, 42‑43; Brandes 1907, 75‑77.

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obedient partisan of the new movement instigated by Brandes.19 Maybe the fact that Drachmann unremittingly tried to find his own ‘niche’ in the political and aesthetic landscape of his time made him a liability for both Brandes and the more diehard liberals. At the same time Drachmann’s independent strategy made him stand out as an individual and thus helped to maintain and promote an aura of uniqueness, further augmenting his celebrity status. Drachmann was a typical representative of the modern artiste of the late 1800s, not least by virtue of his deep dependence on the book-publishing market and the changing tastes of the public. While earlier generations of writers depended upon the generosity of wealthy patrons and sponsors, modern authors were at the mercy of a volatile market economy. Authors now found themselves writing for a new anonymous readership, one that increasingly relied on the opinions of critics as voiced through their reviews in journals, magazines and newspapers. Additionally, new and relatively cheap new printing techniques rapidly developed and were quickly commercialized. In response, writers feverishly created more and more text, in order to keep up with the apparently insatiable demand. Furthermore, this new generation of authors needed the literary agility to catch trends and read the moods of their potential readers. Equally, they needed to be on their toes when it came to getting paid for their products. In the late 1800s, this continuous pandering for the attention of the public became an increasingly important (and unpredictable) aspect of literary life. Authors had to be ‘interesting’ people – in other words, they needed to be personalities that other writers, critics, and journalists would actively watch and write about. Thus, their behaviour, both in private and in public, became an important source for gossip and slander. As a consequence, and in the wake of ‘the rise of personality cults’, proto-paparazzi came into existence.20 Even for a person as industrious and well connected to the cultural elite of his day as Drachmann, becoming famous was still hard work. One of the most challenging obstacles he faced on his path to fame was that – right from its founding in 1884 – he was for many years banned from the pages of one of the most influential newspapers in Denmark, Politiken. The reason was a long-running controversy with one of the owners Edvard Brandes – Georg Brandes’ brother – initially over a private matter and later because of Drachmann’s brief flirtation with anti-Semitism. Although Politiken in reality closely reflected Drachmann’s own political sympathies, he was a 19 In Brandes’ book a chapter was dedicated to Drachmann. See Brandes 1883, 208‑280. 20 Barrett 2010, 19.

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persona non grata in the paper for years. The antipathy between Edvard Brandes and Drachmann took on epic proportions and thus represented a significant impediment to the amount of attention Drachmann and his works were able to generate in the 1880s and 1890s.21 For the market value of any fin-de-siècle artist, it was crucial to be – and stay – ‘in the picture’: one had to be visibly present in the public domain, which in those days was essentially constituted by print media. Authors, whether they were primarily writing fiction or not, were recruited to fill the columns of the rapidly increasing number of newspapers, journals, and magazines. Consequently, distinctions between being a producer of text and being the subject of a text became less obvious. A relatively new kind of writer appeared in the wake of this development: the literary copywriter, who no longer had a steady source of income (generated by a primary occupation, such as a school master or a clergyman, or other direct financial support such as an inheritance or a supporting Maecenas) and who was exclusively dependent on the sale of his or her texts. Whilst there was still no legal protection of authorship or copyright in Denmark until 1903, many writers were nonetheless living either on advance payments by publishers, or scraping by with line- or word-payment for their articles, columns or feuilletons.22 Drachmann countered this dethronement of sacrosanct authorship by refusing to become a mere copywriter – although in reality he was one – framing himself instead as the quintessential festive poet-bohemian. Easily discernable with a dramatic cape and a broad-brimmed hat he appeared a Scandinavian version of the Byronesque or Whitmanesque artist, ‘a superb, period example of a restless bohemian spirit’ who ‘enjoyed the new-found mobility of the age’. 23 It is hardly a coincidence that Drachmann often used Lord Byron as a motif in his own work and translated his Don Juan (1880‑1902) into Danish.24

21 See Van der Liet 1999 for more details on this issue. 22 Although in 1886 the Berne Convention had been agreed on by a number of countries, Denmark – as the vast majority of nations – refrained from ratifying it until 1903. 23 Barrett 2010, 271. 24 See for example the short story ‘Byron i Vadmel’ (Drachmann 1881, 276‑331) and Drachmann’s translation (Byron 1880‑1902).

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From Maritime Bard to Cigar Brand There are a number of ways in which the creation and subsequent development of Drachmann’s image can be studied. The process begins with the choices made by the author himself during his lifetime. Later, different images are produced and negotiated by, amongst others, relatives, scholars, and publishers, all of whom share in managing the author’s legacy, modifying the ways in which the author’s literary heritage and fame are dealt with, both in public space and collective memory. It would appear that Drachmann’s continuing appeal to the imagination of subsequent generations of Danes is not in the first instance due to the success of his work, or his own consciously constructed authorial self – his self-fashioning – but rather the result of the activities of – figuratively speaking – his ‘heirs’, who for various reasons appropriated Drachmann and created new images or personae as I chose to call them here. Thus, a ‘new’ Drachmann – the result of negotiations with existing images, endowing them with new meanings for new purposes and new generations – was gradually accomplished. One aspect of Drachmann’s personal life, widely known to the present day, is his much-discussed bohemian lifestyle – especially his tempestuous love life – something which guaranteed him a continuous presence in the newspapers. Many salacious details about the author’s private life were not only the talk of the town as soon as they became public, but were also eagerly peddled by literary biographers in later years. Most of these stories deal with Drachmann’s extra-marital relationships, conducted with various women – or rather young girls – both female admirers and so-called kept women. Not least to cause a stir was the fact that Drachmann publicly acknowledged his relationship with his ‘muse’ – twenty years his junior – singer-dancer Amanda Nilsson, also known as ‘Edith’.25 Naturally, the many public scandals and affaires in which the author became embroiled were criticized by the petite bourgeoisie and middle classes as morally reprehensible, whilst others, more liberal in outlook, especially male supporters of ‘free love’ and ‘modern marriage’, applauded his behaviour.26 Drachmann seems to have been perfectly aware of the fact that his scandalous love life tarnished his reputation among his upper-class peers, but that it also meant that his name was on everyone’s lips, which only strengthened his popular repute and 25 Weis Næraa 2002. 26 See Loerges 1981 for details on Drachmann’s marriages. Drachmann was officially married to Vilhelmine Erichsen (1852‑1935), Emmy Culmsee (1854‑1928), and finally Sophie (Soffi) Lasson (1873‑1917).

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celebrity status. Nevertheless, by the end of his life, public opinion turned against him, for example on the occasion of the magnificent celebration of his 60th birthday, which turned into a catastrophe.27 The persistent framing of Drachmann as the modern bohemian poet of his time was in some part at least false, but has nevertheless outlived the author, and today fully overshadows his literary legacy.28 Despite his enormous productivity, Drachmann was constantly in need of money, and his many personae can thus also be perceived as experiments to find new means of subsistence, simply to keep himself afloat. Therefore, his texts, name, and portrait were used in advertising campaigns, promoting cigars, bicycling, and even luxury hotels.29 However, Drachmann was also present in financially less self-serving contexts, including charity fundraising campaigns for the benefit of others. This had an immense effect on Drachmann’s popularity among ‘the common people’, especially those involved in maritime activities: fishermen, sailors, and their families. It is certainly no coincidence that Drachmann, in many paintings, sketches, and even advertisements is often depicted in maritime surroundings. Drachmann was familiar with the maritime world, not least because his father, A.G. Drachmann, had been a ship’s doctor.30 As previously stated, Holger himself was trained as a marine painter and the sea is without doubt the most prominent topic in his literary and pictorial oeuvre.31 However, 27 Nansen 1918, 77‑83. 28 Bredsdorff 1973, 39. 29 In 1906, Drachmann gave permission to the tobacco company Karl [sic] Petersen & Co to name a cigar after him and for that purpose the poet wrote a few lines and added his signature, thus increasing the cigars symbolic value. See http://archive-dk.com/page/34397/2012‑06‑02/ http://www.brandts.dk/da/component/content/ article/41-institutioner/mediemuseet/ nyhedsbrevsartikler/247-reklamer-for-et-elsket-og-hadet-nydelsesmiddel, last accessed 10 November 2015. Drachmann promoted cycling in 1890 in one of the first bicycling magazines in Denmark, Cycletidende (Saturday 1 March 1890, test issue). The poem ‘Cycle-Sang’ was subsequently set to music (by the composer Fr. Rung) and published separately in an advertorial tie-in to promote the magazine: Cycletidende, no. 1, 2 April 1890. I am grateful to Prof Peer E. Sørensen for bringing this to my attention. See Sørensen 2009, 261; Gregersen 2013, 156‑158; Hofman Hansen 2015, 13. Drachmann’s promoting luxury hotels happened on a number of occasions when he visited the then newly established and fashionable seaside resort of Fanø on the North Sea coast, where he was invited – together with other Copenhagen celebrities, among others Brandes himself. See Hofman Hansen 2015, 31‑36; Bang 2011, 272‑273. Brandes wrote an article about this event in Politiken on 20 May 1894. A transcript of this interesting piece is to be found in Hofman Hansen 2015, 125‑131. 30 His autobiography entitled Min Rejse gennem Livet: en gammel Skibslæges Erindringer (1942‑1943) was reprinted in 1990. 31 See Hendriks 2007.

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Figure 15 Commercial newspaper ad for so-called Drachmann cigars, without year

Private collection

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the reason why Drachmann became held in such high esteem in maritime milieus, originates more from a number of instances where he acted in favour of fishermen and mariners. In one of these cases he assisted the courageous fisherman Lars Kruse, who also worked as a volunteer lifesaver on a lifeboat in the remote coastal village of Skagen, on the most northern tip of the peninsula of Jutland. Kruse had saved many lives, but was denied his well-deserved royal decoration for valour and self-sacrifice by a narrowminded local official – primarily because of some juvenile misdemeanour. Drachmann intervened and with his help, Kruse eventually obtained his medal. Of course this feat added luster to Drachmann’s fame, who – for his part – did not hesitate to grasp the opportunity and ‘capitalized’ on the dramatic story by writing Lars Kruse: En Skildring fra Virkelighedens og Sandets Regioner (Lars Kruse: A Picture from Regions of Reality and Truth, 1879).32 This, and other public interventions characterize Drachmann’s PR strategy. He often used topics of this kind in his work, describing heroic maritime endeavours performed by honest, ordinary people, simply doing their work to the best of their abilities yet rarely receiving proper appreciation from their superiors. Drachmann found these ‘authentic’ working-class heroes in remote, picturesque coastal villages, notably Skagen and Hornbæk, north of Copenhagen. In effect, erecting literary monuments for real-life mariners such as Kruse from Skagen or Peder Andersen (‘Store Bjørn’) from Hornbæk.33 Thus, by writing dozens of popular maritime stories, poems, and plays Drachmann ensured his immense popularity in maritime and working class milieus.34 Another characteristic example of how Drachmann managed his popularity and PR, was the publication of the booklet Ved Dampskibet ‘Jarl’s’ totale Forlis (On the Shipwreck of the Steamer ‘Jarl’, 1890). The cover proclaimed that the entire profit earned by the booklet was to be donated to the bereaved widows and children of the twelve sailors who perished when the Danish steamer Jarl capsized and sank in early March 1890.35 32 Wivel 1981, 147. 33 See for example the poem ‘Den store Bjørns Endeligt’ (Drachmann 1878, 155‑158). 34 This also explains the popularity of his works dealing with maritime subjects, such as Sømandshistorier, one of his few bestsellers. See Nielsen 2013, 32. The fact that his mistress and muse, the young singer-performer Amanda Nilsson, was a working-class girl, did not seem to harm Drachmann’s reputation among the lower strata of society – possibly even the contrary. 35 Besides twelve crewmembers also fourteen passengers died. The relief campaign for the bereaved families raised the substantial sum of DKK 42,000. See http://www.nexoe museum. com/soslashforhoslashr-juni-1890.html, last accessed 10 November 2015.

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Through this booklet, Drachmann became a benefactor of people in need, at the same time bolstering his own popularity. The fact that Drachmann’s name does not appear on the cover or on the title page of the booklet, but merely (in a smaller typeface) at the end of the text, is an indication of his generosity – and his strategic genius in terms of celebrity management. His charity work undoubtedly increased his fame: the vast collections of Drachmann’s letters at the Royal Library in Copenhagen bearing witness to how frequently he was asked to contribute to charity initiatives. Often he would write a letter, a poem or a story in response. Such gestures may not have been solely philanthropic, as they helped to support his continuous presence in the media in a positive way. Perhaps Drachmann could simply afford to be generous in this particular case, because 1890 was an extraordinary productive and fortunate year for him. He had plenty of commissioned work, wrote numerous contributions to magazines, journals, and books, and on top of that, his second major work of prose, the two-volume roman à clef Forskrevet, and the first instalment of the second volume of his monumental translation of Lord Byron’s Don Juan, were published that year.36 Whether he acted out of generosity or not, it seems that Drachmann consciously constructed a public image of a ‘modern’ celebrity-artiste – one who was concerned with the fate and lives of ‘ordinary’ people, especially the unobtrusive and taciturn heroes of everyday life at sea. Drachmann’s popularity among the working classes was initially sparked by one of his first poems, the powerful ‘Engelske Socialister’, which has attained an enviable literary omnipresence, appearing in virtually each and every Danish anthology of poetry ever since.37 Drachmann constantly oscillated between various – often conflicting – literary roles and personae, for example between the role of the romantic ‘bard’ and the modern bohemian artist, and between the representative of chivalrous ideals and dreams on the one hand, and leading man of the earthy realism of the common people on the other. This ambiguity is also reflected in the reception of Drachmann’s literary celebrity, which seems to be a mixture of popular veneration and respect for his positive attitude towards the working classes – irrespective of their gender – and bourgeois curiosity fuelled by his nonconformity and bohemian behaviour. Essentially, Drachmann catered for multiple audiences, as exemplified by 36 The poem first appeared in a journal in 1871 under Drachmann’s nom de plume Marc Cole. Together with a number of other ‘revolutionary’ poems it was incorporated in his debut collection the following year, which was simply entitled Digte. See Ursin 1956, 48‑50. 37 Ursin 1956, 9.

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the political variety of the journals and publication platforms in which his work appeared. Additionally, his books often appeared in two or three different editions – corresponding to different price ranges – offering the same content in a cheap ‘popular’ edition, a mid-priced ‘regular’ or a more expensive ‘deluxe’ binding.38

Home at Last? The first time Drachmann visited the remote fishing hamlet of Skagen was in the autumn of 1871.39 A group of painters had started to gather there in the 1870s, to spend the summer together in simple dwellings in unspoiled natural surroundings for very little money. In those years a number of artist colonies popped up all over Europe; in Denmark they were established in Hornbæk, Skagen, and on the island of Fanø, attracting artists and art lovers from all over the country and beyond. Notably for Skagen, Drachmann became an important catalyst, offering just the right leverage at the right moment to make the village known all over Scandinavia and thus subsequently turning it into a cherished tourist destination. Rather than being a direct result of his repeated visits, this process was encouraged primarily by his writing about its charms, in poems, stories and also in a proto-coffee table book – one with clear touristic objectives.40 Indeed, Drachman’s name became so strongly associated with Skagen that following his death his fame made it possible to transform his last place of residence there into a museum, thereby further preserving his VIP status. In 1911, Drachmann’s main publisher and one of his most profound admirers and benefactors Peter Nansen, took the initiative to turn Drachmann’s last home, ‘Villa Pax’, into a museum. 41 ‘Drachmanns Hus’ is situated in the southern part of

38 From an economic point of view Drachmann’s publishers did not substantially profit from him, but print runs seem to have been substantial, most first editions were printed in 2,000‑4,000 copies. According to an article in the newspaper Politiken, the day after Drachmann had died, one of the directors of his preferred publishing house Gyldendal commemorates the fact that only a few of his works could be considered bestsellers, but that most of his books were published in substantial print runs. According to this source Drachmann’s most successful books were Der var Engang (22,000), Sømandshistorier (± 13,000), Derovre fra Grænsen (10,000), Forskrevet (10,000), and Vølund Smed (10,000). 39 Nielsen 2013, 32. 40 Drachmann 1887, 3‑22. 41 Bang 2011, 614; Nielsen 2013, 37‑43.

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Skagen and has recently been thoroughly refurbished and is again accessible to the public. 42 Although Drachmann lived an extremely mobile life, he finally settled in Skagen, a relatively remote place, however, one that since the 1870s gradually changed from an obscure little fishing town to an artist colony. By the turn of the century the village had become a cherished seaside resort and a fashionable hotspot, where even the Danish royal family in 1914 acquired a summer residence, Klitgården. It was artists who initiated it all, attracted as they were to the simple lifestyle and the picturesque surroundings. Paradoxically, their presence also engendered a complete metamorphosis of the idyllic town through increased tourism and its popularity in general. Among the many artists drawn to the town, Drachmann was one of the most interesting, though not simply because he lived there for such a long time. On the contrary, it was because he was instrumental in establishing the ‘myth’ of Skagen through his clever use of the town and its natural beauty as a recurring motif in both his literary and pictorial work. Furthermore, because of his own background as a painter and his friendships with the other artists, Drachmann himself was a much sought after model, often depicted in a clear Skagen mise en scène. Dozens of paintings, drawings, statues, and sketches were made of him during his lifetime and even following his death he was still able to enchant other artists. 43 Today, the local art museum in Skagen bears ample witness of this aspect of his life there. Drachmann’s special status promoted the town and the town, for its part, sustains the author’s fame and celebrity status by housing the first Scandinavian literary museum ever exclusively dedicated to a single author. 44 Also the fact that Drachmann’s spectacular final resting place is situated in a grandiose burial mound in the sand dunes at the north side of the town ties Drachmann even tighter to Skagen. 45 One of the most fascinating artistic spin-offs following Drachmann’s death actually deals with the occasion of his burial. The young painter 42 See http://drachmannshus.dk, last accessed 10 November 2015. 43 Drachmann has been painted and drawn by others innumerable times. Among the most famous of these portraits and full body depictions are paintings, drawings or lithographies by Edvard Munch (1902), numerous times by P.S. Krøyer (1876, 1902, 1903, 1908), N.V. Dorph (1891), Michael Anker (1894), Laurits Tuxen (1894), and Aksel Jørgensen (1911‑1913). A funny anecdote is that immediately after Drachmann’s death, when the painter Michael Ancher was commissioned an official portrait of Drachmann, a local ‘stand-in’ was apparently used who resembled the deceased. See Andersen 2002; Gregersen 2013, 180. 44 Bang 2011, 664‑667. 45 Van der Liet 2001.

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Figure 16 Postcard with Holger Drachmann’s grave, without year

Private collection

Aksel Jørgensen, later professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, painted a series of large canvasses in 1908, depicting various scenes from the naval transportation and subsequent procession over land that brought Drachmann’s ashes from Copenhagen to the port of Frederikshavn and then on to their final resting place near Skagen. 46 On each of these paintings the artist has depicted, accompanying Drachmann’s urn, the crowds of mourners and an abundance of flags and banners that filled the air. Comparing these paintings with photographs taken at the time, it becomes evident that Jørgensen’s series of oil paintings are highly documentary in nature. Their significance in the present context is firstly, that this impressive series of canvasses marks the pinnacle of Drachmann’s celebrity status, for only a royal burial could possibly exceed the prestigious ceremonial valediction that was granted Drachmann. Secondly, Drachmann’s lifelong commitment to the less privileged, especially those depending on the sea, was clearly widely appreciated, as can be seen from the number of trade-union banners and ‘common people’ escorting the procession.

46 Andersen 2002, 30‑32.

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Figure 17 Painting by Aksel Jørgensen, SS Kong Haakon arriving at Frederikshavn with Drachmann’s urn on 26 January 1908, 1908

Skagens Museum

The Drachmann ‘Industry’ Drachmann had been one of the earliest pioneers of Skagen as the place to be, yet since his first encounter with the town in the seminal year 1871, he had only been there occasionally, spending most of his time elsewhere, including abroad. 47 Purchasing Villa Pax in 1902 was obviously an investment in view of retirement, although Drachmann and his third wife Soffi (nee Sophie Lasson) only occupied the house for a year or two before his death. 48 Clearly, Drachmann’s celebrity status survived him, and when Skagen became an increasingly popular destination for holidaymakers in the first half of the twentieth century, the Drachmann House became a beloved tourist destination. The abundance of picture postcards that visitors sent home – often showing the poet and his wife in front of the house, sitting 47 The famous storyteller, writer of fairy tales and international celebrity Hans Christian Andersen presumably was the first to ‘discover’ Skagen in 1859. 48 Barrett 2010, 185.

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Figure 18 Postcard of Drachmann and his wife Soffi in front of Villa Pax, produced by Einer Nielsen’s Bookstore, Skagen, circa 1906

Private collection

Figure 19 Postcard of Drachmann at his desk, produced by Laurits Scheldes Bookstore, Skagen, circa 1906

Private collection

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in their living room, or Drachmann at his desk in his studio – all bears witness to the popularity he attained. These postcards were produced by local booksellers and printers and sold at the increasing number of hotels in the town. It is difficult to determine to what extent tourists today send Drachmann postcards home from Skagen. However, one could surmise that the mere fact that they are still on offer suggests a continuing demand for them. 49 A striking feature of all the postcards representing Drachmann is that he is shown primarily as a celebrity rather than as a professional artist. Even on the picture portraying him sitting at his desk, he is not shown writing or painting, but merely in a pondering, idle pose, looking at (a curtained) window. This seems to correspond to the ‘photographic and painterly iconography in the years around 1900. The author was presented primarily as an interesting personality or as a celebrity, not as a man or woman of letters’.50 Today Villa Pax is lost in time; a chronotope in the Bakhtinian sense or a heterotopia as Foucault might refer to it.51 From its beginnings as a home, it has become a lieu de mémoire, signalling, visualizing and concretizing a literary culture and a lifestyle from a bygone era, now preserved through the veneration of the individual who lived there as one of the last beacons of that culture. For over a century, the Drachmann House has been maintained, largely through private funding and the work of local enthusiasts, many of whom have spent much of their spare time to keep the house intact. Despite the care of sponsors and volunteers, during the period of the 1930s, the house was poorly maintained, falling into disrepair and threatened with ruin. Yet one of the paradoxes of the history of the house is that it was one of the leading exponents of expressionism, Emil Bønnelycke – a representative of an aesthetics with little affinity to Drachmann’s work – who, in 1941, wrote a newspaper article in favour of the conservation of the house and its proper management as a museum. It was Bønnelycke’s plea that helped raise money and awareness towards the preservation of the house.52

49 Of course these sales are incomparable with for example Virginia Woolf, whose portrait still seems to be the best-selling picture postcard at the gift shop at the National Portrait Gallery in London, but the fact that Drachmann postcards are still available, is notable. See Jaffe 2005, 170. 50 Schröder 2013, 169. 51 See Bakhtin 1981, 84‑258; Augé 1995, 89‑90. 52 Emil Bønnelycke’s column appeared in the newspaper Berlingske Aftenavis (1941) and is transcribed in Nielsen 2013, 157‑158. See also Nielsen 2013, 43.

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Figure 20 Statue of Holger Drachmann in Frederiksberg

Photograph by Henk van der Liet, 2015

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Apart from Villa Pax, which became a museum in 1911 – three years after his death – many objects in public space have played a role in maintaining and continuing Drachmann’s name and image. In numerous Danish towns and villages there are streets, roads, alleys, and squares named after him, for example, spatial memorial elements or imprints, signifying his fame.53 Another type of memorial presence in public space encompasses material objects, busts, statues, plaques, and so on. Two plaques commemorating his place of birth can be found in the centre of Copenhagen, right on the main pedestrian street.54 Another plaque, mounted on a massive rock at the harbour of Hornbæk – the home town of the heroic fisherman-lifeguard ‘Store Bjørn’ mentioned earlier – was unveiled in 1936 on the occasion of Drachmann’s 90th birthday.55 These physical manifestations ensure that Drachmann’s celebrity status remains both visible and tangible. The most impressive monument commemorating Drachmann, however, is surprisingly not in central Copenhagen, but situated in Frederiksberg, a borough of Copenhagen, near the Royal Frederiksberg Gardens. The fact that Frederiksberg rather than Copenhagen – Drachmann’s birthplace and the city where he grew up – was selected for this purpose was an ambiguous choice. In the spring of 1924, plans to erect a statue for Drachmann lead to a fierce public debate. The people of Frederiksberg were aware of the link between Drachmann and their town, especially the many theatres near the Royal Frederiksberg Gardens. This area, with popular establishments, offering variety shows, music, and dance flourished from the 1880s well into the twentieth century. Drachmann had been a regular customer, specifically at a café chantant, which became known as ‘Lorry’ – a place with quite a reputation.56 In 1887, a major public scandal emerged at the café. Drachmann met his new muse ‘Edith’, a young woman who would become his mistress for nearly a decade. Even more than a quarter of a century later, 53 For an overview, see the website, http://danmarksadresser.dk, last accessed 10 November 2015. 54 They are not easy to discern, but the plaques are on the facade of Amagertorv 9. 55 On 14 January 2008, a small crowd celebrated the centenary for Drachmann’s death with a ceremony including the laying of a wreath at the monolith, a performance of some of Drachmann’s songs, and a festive procession with torches. See http://helsingoer.nu/m-Kalender. asp?KalenderID=4508&URLB =0&FirmaID=6693, last accessed 10 November 2015. 56 On the same premises Feilberg in 1913 also opened a bar named after Drachmann, ‘Drachmannkroen’, which still exists today, albeit as part of a minute private theatre (Riddersalen). In 1915, Feilberg had put a minor, gypsum cast copy of a statue of Drachmann, made by the sculptor Hans Christian Holter (1890‑1922), in front of ‘Lorry’ in order to promote his desire to raise a real statue in Drachmann’s honour. See Graae 1929, 27‑28, 61‑63.

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the disgrace was still very much on the minds of some morally indignant residents – including the mayor of Frederiksberg – and thus the plans for a monument commemorating Drachmann was met primarily with rebuffs.57 The founder and proprietor of the establishment, F.L. ‘Lorry’ Feilberg, nevertheless, came up with a scheme to collect the necessary means himself. Thus in 1924, well after his own death, this man’s dream, a larger than life-size bronze statue of one of his most memorable customers, was finally unveiled on 4 July 1924.58 The size and splendour of the Drachmann-statue is comparable to similar monuments in the Copenhagen area for worldfamous cultural personalities such as Hans Christian Andersen and Søren Kierkegaard, whilst it is far more impressive than for example the small and relatively hidden bust commemorating Georg Brandes at the busy square in Copenhagen that bears his name.

Conclusion: Appropriation in the 21st Century Apart from Drachmann’s House, which recently became part of the Skagen’s Museum, there also exists an annual literary prize in the name of Drachmann. The so-called Drachmann Grant is awarded to a contemporary Danish author whose work in some way shares an affinity with the spirit of Drachmann’s oeuvre. Despite the fact that only a few people today are familiar with Drachmann’s work at all, the authors that have had the honour of receiving the grant clearly cherish the prize named after him. Their appreciation is not primarily due to the (modest) sum of money attached to the prize, but is rather the result of the prestige, the cultural and symbolic capital that it represents – another vivid token of Drachmann’s enduring fame and status as a literary celebrity.59 Even after the death of the author, Drachmann’s oeuvre kept inspiring painters, writers, composers, and even filmmakers, but increasingly it was the name or the celebrity Drachmann, rather than the artist, that fuelled this interest. 57 See Graae 1929, 63. 58 And as a mere indication of the sustainability of Drachmann’s fame: in 2013 – just a few blocks away from the statue – an exhibition was held at a local cultural centre in Frederiksberg, Møstings Hus, to commemorate the centenary of the opening of Drachmann-kroen, the restaurant and bar named after Holger Drachmann also owned by Feilberg. A nicely illustrated catalogue was produced for the occasion: Drachmannkroen 100 år. Aksel Jørgensen og Lorry Feilberg. See also http://www.frederiksbergshistorie.dk/frederiksbergeren/drachmann, last accessed 10 November 2015. 59 Nielsen 2013, 44.

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Nevertheless, there seem to be clear indications that Drachmann’s literary oeuvre finally seems to be attracting renewed scholarly interest in the 21st century. As a result of the recent spatial turn in humanities, focus in literary studies is shifting from primarily diachronic analyses to including aspects such as ‘space’, ‘mobility’, and ‘flux’, thereby offering new methods to assess literature and literary culture. This paradigmatic change of perspective will also bring forth new readings of Drachmann’s literary legacy, a welcome development not least because – as suggested in a recently published scholarly essay on Drachmann – he ‘did write many words, but there is pure gold between them’.60 Today, the work of Drachmann seems to be going through a phase of public reappraisal: some of his plays are being performed again, the completely refurbished Drachmann Museum in Skagen reopened in 2013, and new books about his life and work are either being published or are in the making.61 All these initiatives fit in with contemporary modes of appropriation of the persona Drachmann, but now with the additional emphasis that they also include focus on his work. Maybe the most convincing proof of Drachmann’s uncontested celebrity status, though, is the fact that, more than a century after his death, he is still a cherished motif for other authors and caricaturists. The recently deceased author Klaus Rifbjerg, an extremely productive, versatile, and widely appreciated representative of modernism in contemporary Danish literature, was an admirer of Drachmann. This veneration was partly the result of Rifbjerg’s affinity with Drachmann’s poetic work, but definitely also because of his own nonconformism and Drachmannian ability to manage his own celebrity status and turn his persona – voluntarily – into a commodity. Since the beginning of his career, Rifbjerg, like no other contemporary modernist of his generation, understood the value of publicity to the successful promotion of his work.62 He not only employed this knowledge for his own benefit, but also to satirize, criticize, and debunk shallow, publicity-driven consumerism. It was precisely this ambivalent, double-edged attitude vis-à-vis his own celebrity status that the cartoonist Per Marquart Otzen in 2002 captured in a cartoon that accompanied a haiku by Rifbjerg in the newspaper Information.63 The cartoon visualizes 60 Rosiek 2015, 104. 61 To mention just a few of the most prominent examples, see Nielsen 2013; Gregersen 2013; Hofman Hansen 2015. 62 Jørgensen 1995, 58‑65. 63 Information, 6 July 2002.

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Figure 21 Caricature by Per Marquart Otzen with a haiku by Klaus Rifbjerg, 2002

Danish Royal Library, Copenhagen

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the kinship between Rifbjerg and Drachmann, giving a clear indication of how vivid the public image of Drachmann remained at the beginning of the 21st century. Moreover, Rifbjerg’s haiku in the top right corner of the cartoon takes us a step further and testifies to his subtle – both respectful and ironic – appropriation of the work of the poet Drachmann, by rephrasing the old bard’s quasi-national anthem the ‘Midsummer Song’. Thus, Rifbjerg coalesces the ‘celeb’ and the text, mixing his own words with Drachmann’s, thereby reinforcing the old bard’s status as a celebrity and a vital part of collective Danish cultural memory and literary heritage. A funny coincidence is the fact that the composition of Otzen’s caricature and Rifbjerg’s haiku echoes earlier picture postcards with – at least in part – the same stanza of Drachmann’s ‘Midsummer Song’ written across the image of an idyllic, stereotypical Danish, ‘national’ landscape. A final contemporary example of the process of commodification of Drachmann is the fact that his name is associated with a specific bench in garden furniture. Judging from a random survey on the Internet, the Drachmann-bench is an iconic and prestigious model in outdoor furniture. It is unknown whether Drachmann himself owned a bench like this, but the design does not in any way resemble the public ‘Drachmann-bench’ in Marielundskov near the city of Kolding.64 Nevertheless, for visitors of the Drachmann House today, it is precisely this type of bench that immediately catches the eye when one enters the premises. Thus, the commodification of Drachmann as a celebrity has turned full circle. In a sense he has returned to a place he helped shape, this time not in the guise of a festive maritime bard, but merely as the name of a piece of patio furniture, which seems to be more famous than anything he produced as an artist during his lifetime. Drachmann remains a celebrity, but instead of in the realm of literature, it is in the world of garden furniture his name primarily lives on.

Bibliography A. Aarseth, ‘Det moderne gjennombrudd – et periodbegrep og dets ideologiske basis’, in The Modern Breakthrough in Scandinavian Literature, 1870‑1905, ed. by B. Nolin & P. Forsgren (Göteborg: Göteborgs Universitet, 1988), 509‑523. 64 See https://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marielundsskoven#/media/File:Drachmanns_benchMarielundsskoven_Forest _ in_Kolding_Denmark_2009_25‑05.jpg, last accessed 10 November 2015.

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T. Andersen, Aksel Jørgensen – liv og kunst (Copenhagen: Borgen, 2002). M. Augé, Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity (London: Verso, 2008). M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. by C. Emerson & M. Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981). K. Bang, Lykkens kælebarn: En biografi om Peter Nansen I-II (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2011). B.D. Barrett, The Rise of Coastal Artists’ Colonies, 1880‑1920 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010). M. Borup (ed.), Breve fra og til Holger Drachmann I-IV (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1968‑1970). G. Brandes, Det moderne Gjennembruds Mænd (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1883). G. Brandes, Emile Zola (Berlin: Verlag von Gebrüder Paetel, 1888). G. Brandes, Levned. Et Tiaar (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1907). E. Bredsdorff, Den store nordiske krig om seksualmoralen (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1973). G.G. Byron, Don Juan, trans. by H.H. Drachmann (Copenhagen: H. Schubothe, 1880‑1902). T. Cresswell, On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World (New York/London: Routledge, 2006). A.G. Drachmann, Min Rejse gennem Livet I-II (Copenhagen: Hagerup, 1942‑1943). H.H. Drachmann, Med Kul og Kridt (Copenhagen: Andr. Schou, 1872). H.H. Drachmann, Digte (Copenhagen: Andr. Schou, 1872). H.H. Drachmann, Paa Sømands Tro og Love (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1878). H.H. Drachmann, Lars Kruse: En skildring fra Virkeligheden og Sandets Regioner (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1879). H.H. Drachmann, Vildt og Tæmmet (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1881). H.H. Drachmann, Der var Engang (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1885). H.H. Drachmann, ‘Skagen’, in Danmark i Skildringer og Billeder af danske Forfattere og Kunstnere, ed. by M. Galschiøt, vol. 1 (Copenhagen: P.G. Philipsen, 1887), 3‑22. H.H. Drachmann, Ved Dampskibet ‘Jarl’s’ totale Forlis (Copenhagen: Schubothe, 1890a). H.H. Drachmann, Forskrevet (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1890b). A. Ehlers Dam, Den vitalistiske strømning i dansk litteratur omkring år 1900 (Århus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag, 2010). F. Graae, Københavner–Minder ‘Lorry’ (Copenhagen: Bogforlaget Athene, 1929). H. Gregersen, Her går solen aldrig ned. Drachmann og Skagen (Aalborg: Højers Forlag, 2013). L. Handesten, Bestsellere. En litteratur- og kulturhistorie om de mest solgte bøger i Danmark (Hellerup: Forlaget Spring, 2014). M. Hendriks, Det bevægende hav. Kvantitativ og kvalitativ motivundersøgelse af Holger Drachmanns lyriske værk (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam, 2007).

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H. Hertel, Det stadig moderne gennembrud. Georg Brandes og hans tid, set fra det 21. århundrede (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2004). P. Hofman Hansen, Holger Drachmann på Fanø. Skildret i malerier, skitser, breve, rejsebeskrivelser, digte og samtidige dokumenter (Sønderho: Fanø Kunstmuseum, 2015). A. Jaffe, Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). K.J.V. Jespersen, A History of Denmark (Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004). J.C. Jørgensen, Spinatfugl. Klaus Rifbjerg om sit liv med pressen (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1995). S. Kaalø, Komedie i grænselandet. Et teaterstykke i to akter (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1981). S. Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880‑1918. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983). H. van der Liet, ‘”French Fungi”: Some Snooping in Holger Drachmann’s Letters’, in Nordic Letters 1870‑1910, ed. by J. Garton & M. Robinson (Norwich: Norvik Press, 1999), 201‑227. H. van der Liet, Tussen twee werelden (Amsterdam: Vossiuspers AUP, 2001). H. van der Liet, ‘Holger Drachmann’, in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 300: Danish Writers from the Reformation to Decadence 1550‑1900, ed. by M. Stecher-Hansen (Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2004a), 142‑153. H. van der Liet, ‘”With Lute, Cloak and a broad-brimmed Hat”– Stray Notes on two Drachmann Songs’, Tijdschrift voor Skandinavistiek, vol. 27 (2006), no. 2, 139‑156. H. van der Liet, ‘The Discovery of a Memorable Place – Holger Drachmann as Travel-Writer’ in The Discovery of Nineteenth-Century Scandinavia, ed. by M. Wells (Norwich: Norvik Press, 2008), 129‑146. M. Loerges, Drachmanns muser (Charlottenlund: Hernov, 1981). P. Nansen, Portrætter (Copenhagen: Henrik Koppel, 1918). H. Nielsen (ed.), Drachmann & Drachmanns hus (Espergærde: Lamberths forlag, 2013). E. Mortensen, Kunstkritikkens og kunstoplevelsens historie i Danmark I-II (Copenhagen: Rhodos, 1990). J. Rosiek, Danmark, Gurre, stranden. Steder i dansk litteratur (Copenhagen: U Press, 2015). P.V. Rubow, Holger Drachmanns Ungdom (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1940). P.V. Rubow, Holger Drachmann 1878‑97 (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1945). P.V. Rubow, Holger Drachmann. Sidste aar (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1950). S.M. Schröder, ‘How to Film an Author: Portraits Films of Authors in the Silent Age in Scandinavia and Elsewhere’, Journal of Scandinavian Cinema, vol. 3 (2013), no. 2, 161‑181.

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W. Schwartz, Malere ved Staffeliet. Seks Kunstnerportrætter fra Skagens store Tid (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1941). s.n., Politiken,‘Hvorledes Drachmanns Bøger er solgt’, Politiken, 15 January 1908, p. 5. P.E. Sørensen, Vor tids Temperament. Studier i Herman Bangs forfatterskab (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2009). G. Turner, Understanding Celebrity (Los Angeles/London: Sage, 2013). J. Ursin, Holger Drachmann I-II (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde & Bagger, 1953). J. Ursin, Bibliografi over Holger Drachmanns Forfatterskab (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1956). L. Weis Næraa, Ediths historie (Odense: Syddansk Universitetsforlag, 2002). O. Wivel, Rejsen til Skagen. (Copenhagen: Lindhardt og Ringhof, 1981).

Figure 22 Louis Couperus at his desk, without year

Geheugen van Nederland

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In the Future, When I Will Be More of a Celebrity Louis Couperus (1863‑1923) Mary Kemperink

The Dutch writer Louis Couperus (1863‑1923) is considered today as one of the most prominent novelists of the fin de siècle. He made his name with realist novels such as Eline Vere (1889) and Small Souls (1901‑1903). Some of his works raised indignant criticism because of their overt presentation of sexuality – including homosexuality – for example the Indian novel The Hidden Force (1900) and the historical novel The Mountain of Light (1905). For this reason The Mountain of Light, unlike several of his other works, was never translated into English. Couperus is considered exemplary of the fin-de-siècle aesthetics. In January 1915, Louis Couperus requested a special travel visa from the Dutch consul in Florence. Having lived for fifteen years in the south of France and Italy, he wanted to return to the Netherlands. Due to the rise of nationalism during the First World War, he and his wife felt less and less welcome in their beloved Italy. The war depressed Couperus and more importantly, the absence of a regular postal service prevented him from sending his weekly columns – his most important source of income – back to the Netherlands. He therefore decided to return to the city of his birth: The Hague. Back in The Hague in February 1915, he not only returned to his warm and loving family, but was enthusiastically welcomed by the general reading public as well. He quickly discovered that, during his long absence abroad, he had become a celebrity at home. However, it was not only his work, but also his whole personality that attracted public interest. To his great surprise he was quite suddenly the famous – and somewhat notorious – writer Louis Couperus. He now found himself recognized by strangers in the street, whilst during the time that he lived in Italy and France he was simply a distinguished gentleman. He was a long, slim, dark, carefully dressed, somewhat effeminate man with slightly oriental looks. His voice

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and gestures were mannered, but at the same time natural. In general he came across as an aesthetic aristocrat.1 Couperus’s homecoming generated considerable public attention, even before his return the author had established a public image. His weekly feuilletons (nowadays called ‘columns’) published since 1909 in the Dutch newspaper Het Vaderland had familiarized a relatively large group of Dutch readers with his private life in Nice, Florence, and Rome. In these sketches Couperus presented himself as an intimate friend, taking his readers for a walk on the Corso and sharing his daily household troubles. Furthermore his audience had, based upon his earlier novels, constructed an image of Couperus. Thus, in the eyes of the public Couperus was understood to be a refined, aesthetic, artistic, effeminate, immoral, and totally un-Dutch individual.2 This article focuses on two aspects of the celebrity status that Couperus gained in the course of his literary career. First, how did his newly discovered celebrity status influence his public self-fashioning, and did his behaviour change when Couperus realized he had become a celebrity? Second, what has been the afterlife of Couperus’s celebrity following his death, and can Couperus still be considered a celebrity author today?

A Few Theoretical Considerations What is celebrity? What causes it? When is someone a celebrity?3 A significant number of contemporary publications on the phenomenon consider celebrity as an expression of the spirit of the times (‘Zeitgeist’). This approach is for instance chosen by Fred Inglis in his A Short Story of Celebrity (2010). He expressively distances himself from Émile Durkheimer’s idea that actions and emotions are socially governed, but concentrates on the history of what he calls ‘moral sentiments’. 4. Those sentiments are believed to be expressed by – and through – the celebrities of a certain period. Inglis takes us down a well-known path of the history of ideas, 1 Kemperink 2013, 393‑396. 2 About Couperus’s self-fashioning and the reactions it caused in his own time see Kemperink 2013. 3 Theoretically I make use of recent scholarly views on self-fashioning (Goffman 1959; Meizoz 2007; Meizoz 2009) and on celebrity (Evans & Hesmondhalgh 2005; Heinich 2012; Van Krieken 2012). Further, see the bibliography of this article. Most of these studies do not exclusively focus on celebrity authors, but more on celebrity in general. 4 Inglis 2010, 20‑21.

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such as Enlightenment, Romanticism, and Modernism. He presumes that those artistic and philosophic concepts are expressed in the canonized literature of a particular period. With this approach Inglis claims that he is following Clifford Geertz, who considers culture as a specific system of ideas that govern and structure human behaviour. According to Geertz, a culture expresses these ideas through symbols. For later generations, the interpretation of these symbols offers the possibility to reconstruct a past culture.5 Yet on closer inspection Inglis’ method turns out to be the reverse of this approach. In fact, he takes the ideas (of a certain period) as his starting points and then attributes them to the celebrities of the time. His suggestion, then, is that there are monolithic time periods in which culture as a whole is impregnated with a specific Zeitgeist. Moreover, in Inglis’ approach, Zeitgeist equals ‘poetics’. However, poetics is not simply an expression of Zeitgeist and neither is literature: it is rather a proscriptive and a strategic instrument. Robert van Krieken’s approach in his book Celebrity Society (2012) seems more convincing. He focuses on the institutional and sociological aspects of the celebrity phenomenon. In his view celebrity is not an isolated phenomenon – part of a separate celebrity culture – but more of an intrinsic element of social life, including ‘the ways in which celebrity is assigned, distributed, organized and responded to as a part of a particular form of institutionalized social life’.6 Only when celebrity is understood as a social phenomenon does it become possible to distinguish the mechanisms causing its rise and development in time.7 Indeed, the determining factors in the creation of celebrity cannot possibly be only the product of ideas. If that were the case, any writer producing a book expressing the Zeitgeist would become a celebrity writer. There must be social factors at stake that determine celebrity: the existence of both a public space and of a large-scale cultural industry being prerequisites. Public space developed during the nineteenth century via differing forms of mass communication.8 It is no coincidence that in the twentieth century, with the spectacular development of press, photography, radio, film, television, and the Internet, there is a corresponding significant rise 5 Geertz 1975. 6 Van Krieken 2012, 2. 7 See also Evans & Hesmondhalgh 2005, 50: ‘Celebrity does not express a cultural Zeitgeist. Rather […] it is created within specific institutions and within specific historical context’. 8 Van Krieken 2012, 16‑17.

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in the prominence of celebrities. Private life is central here. One becomes a celebrity from the moment that the media become interested in one’s daily existence. This interest brings with it a strong need of ‘autofication’: the need for the public to match the image of the celebrity with the real person.9 As a direct consequence of their visibility celebrities function as public role models. Celebrities are both in the public imagination (and thus widely discussed) and possess financial value, whilst also being widely imitated, for instance in behaviour, dress, and literary style. Functioning as a role model can stimulate different forms of trade, such as merchandising or using a celebrity for advertisement or endorsement purposes. In a capitalist system celebrity stands at the fulcrum of an entire business machine.10 By imitating their idols, fans can increase their social or cultural status; at the same time, the status of the celebrity also increases. Celebrities gain access to new social domains and to social elites, often despite having a less privileged background themselves.11 This is the so-called Matthew effect: fame begets fame.12 When can a person be considered a celebrity? Theories on this subject generally adopt a cause-and-effect approach: a celebrity attracts public attention, whilst simultaneously, public attention can make one a celebrity. Attention can be either positive, in the form of admiration, or negative, in the form of envy. Both triumphs and scandals generate public attention: as long as there is a story – something to gossip about – a celebrity is in the spotlight. Van Krieken notes that through these public stories and gossip celebrities function as a social binding.13 They promote networked communication and in doing so encourage social integration. It must be noted however, that the converse is also true: they can cause social disintegration as well, for example when they are seen as symbols of exclusory social groups. Celebrity is shaped to a great extent by one’s public image, as constructed by public appearances, media coverage, and through one’s art or writing. A celebrity’s public image, in other words, is the product of their self-fashioning or ‘posture’.14 Part and parcel of the celebrity phenomenon, self-fashioning 9 Heinich 2012, 192, 448. 10 Van Krieken 2012, 15, 43. 11 Heinich 2012, 83. 12 Van Krieken 2012, 54‑57. 13 Van Krieken 2012, 67, 82, 89. 14 In his numerous publications on the self-fashioning of the author, Meizoz (2007, 2009) uses the term ‘posture’. In his theories this can mean ‘presentation of the self’ and ‘collective image’, as well as ‘model’ (see Kemperink 2013). Here I make use of the term ‘self-fashioning’ in the sense

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is a socially based phenomenon. In the case of self-fashioning there are two determining impulses: one external, and one internal. On the one hand society demands a specific fashioning that must be complied with – either consciously or unconsciously. On the other hand there is also an inner urge to fashion one’s public self in in a specific way. Self-fashioning partly determines one’s public image and this image partly determines selffashioning. Thus self-fashioning should not be seen as simply an individual choice. There is a permanent interplay between the public (fans, critics, readers, media producers, or publishers) and the individual, with celebrity as a possible result. Logically, then, being a celebrity in the public eye must impact one’s self-fashioning. The author Couperus, as we will see, is a case in point. How did the awareness of his own celebrity affect his self-fashioning? Did his behaviour in public change as his celebrity grew?

Couperus, a Celebrity Back in The Hague, Couperus’s fame reached the status of celebrity. This was not only due to his feuilletons, but also to his appearances – public readings that were a great success – which he organized with the help of an impresario. It is striking that, in their reactions to his performances in the newspapers, journalists paid more attention to his personal appearance, his behaviour on stage, and the aesthetics of the setting in which he performed than to the actual texts he read. His success led to a large tour of the country, which continued until 1921 when he left for the East Indies and Japan. Couperus’s public readings turned out to be sensational events. In his performances he proved to be a spectacular public reader, gifted with a high-pitched voice and a mincing pronunciation. Not only his reading amazed the public, but also his smart garments, from his elegant socks up to his lace-fringed handkerchief and the exquisite surroundings in which his performances usually took place.15 In 1916, the novelist Carry van Bruggen called him ‘this much discussed intriguing man’ whom one longed to meet personally.16 The audience was intrigued: how was this man in real life? A real show-off? A real dandy?17 All kinds of myths about him circulated. of ‘public self-presentation’, with the basic principle that it considers self-regulated (individual) as well as cultural-societal directed (collective) behaviour. I leave aside the question whether this behaviour is conscious, strategic or unconscious. 15 For the reactions on his tours collected by Van Vliet, see Couperus 1998. 16 Bastet 1987, 527: ‘dezen veelbesproken en veelbetwisten man’. 17 Van Booven 1981, 222.

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It was rumoured that when signing a bank check, he would put on his gloves first because he suspected the pen was not clean enough.18 Far more disturbing was the rumour that in 1920 he was discovered, together with the Dutch prince Henry, the husband of Queen Wilhelmina, in a suspicious public house in the company of minor boys – an act, if true, legally liable to punishment.19 Couperus contributed himself to the culture of gossip surrounding him, for example: when a number of schoolboys came to visit him in his home for an interview he dressed them in bronze-coloured robes.20 In the long term everything about him interested the public. Meeting him in real life was a sensation. Couperus himself was well adept in keeping the wheel of fame turning. In one of his columns he stated with some irony: Everyone is publishing ‘memoires’ and the public is more interested in the most insignificant personal facts about someone whose name is well known, rather than being interested in his work. […] Do not write a novel about Wilson or the Emperor William II, but describe in the most simple terms how you drink a cup of tea and you will be successful.21

Indeed Couperus was successful. He was so successful that the internationally celebrated painter Antoon van Welie asked to be allowed to paint his portrait. When the portrait was finished it remained hanging in the house of the painter, increasing his own celebrity whilst at the same time functioning as a sign of Couperus’s celebrity.22 Besides, the painter’s proposal to create the portrait was prompted through a mutual sympathy, a similar aesthetic, and way of life.23 In The Hague, Couperus led a much more intensive and fulfilling social life than he had done in Florence and Rome – places where he had missed a social circle.24 Couperus’s celebrity status in The Hague allowed him easier access to high-class circles.25 The social circuits he frequented most from 1915 18 Vogel 1973, 190. 19 Bastet 1987, 583‑584. This rumour has proven to be idle, see Snijders 2003. 20 Bastet 1987, 521. 21 Couperus 1975, 173: ‘Iedereen geeft “mémoires” uit en het publiek vindt de minste zelfmededeling over iemand, wiens naam niet onbekend is, interessanter dan gehéel zijn werk. […] Schrijf geen roman over Wilson of Keizer Willem II maar deel mede, op allereenvoudigste wijze, hoe ge een kopje the drinkt en ge zult succes hebben’. 22 On the painting of celebrities by celebrities, see Van Krieken 2012, 37. The portrait of Couperus was destroyed during the bombing that burned down the villa of Van Welie in 1944. 23 Bastet 1987, 519‑521. 24 Kemperink 2013, 9. 25 Vogel 1973, 178.

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onwards, were those of his family, and of his art and culture friends, such as Cyriel Buysse, Henri van Booven, the Kleykamp antique dealers, the art connoisseur and collector Abram Bredius, and the previously mentioned painter, Van Welie. Furthermore, Couperus socialized with The Hague’s upper classes and aristocracy. Only the inner circles of the Court were out of reach: to his grief Queen Wilhelmina never received him. In the summer of 1921, Couperus and his wife visited London. The receptions there were for the greatest part organized by his translator Teixeira de Mattos. The respect with which he was received made him realize that his celebrity was not confined to his own country. In London he met other famous writers – such as George Moore and Bernard Shaw – as well as aristocrats and high officials. This gave his reception in England the character of an official recognition, something that touched him greatly. The American edition of Langs lijnen van geleidelijkheid, entitled Inevitable, was a great success in England.26 Additionally, earlier works – Old People and the Things that Pass and Small Souls – were well received in England and the United States, in fact even better than the Dutch reception had been. This felt extremely good and in one of his feuilletons he wrote: ‘Certainly, I have always had, I believe, a good press in Holland, but real enthusiasm to be honest was missing in the Dutch criticism and comment. And it is strange how much warmth I find here’.27 It seemed to him that not only his English colleagues, but also men of a certain stature – English businessmen and government officials – appreciated literature, and his novels in particular. This was a new experience, one that had eluded him in his native Holland. To his surprise Couperus realized that in London he was ‘the lion of the season’. In view of future English interviews, he had his photographs taken by society photographer Emil Otto Hoppé. He even bought the then fashionable top hat. Couperus received numerous invitations from named and important individuals. Indeed, he and his wife were overwhelmed by a flood of invitations, some very prestigious. A few days after his arrival on 6 June, a lavish dinner was organized in honour of Couperus by the Dutch ambassador in London, Esquire De Marees van Swinderen. The dinner took place in the Dutch embassy and many from Dutch high society were present. Couperus felt almost officially honoured.28 It seemed to Couperus that through him, 26 Bastet 1987, 604. 27 Couperus 1975, 189: ‘Zeker, ik had altijd wel, geloof ik, een goede pers in Holland, maar enthousiasme er voor, eerlijk gezegd, dit miste ik wel eens in de Hollandse kritiek en conversatie. En het is vreemd, zo warm, als het hier naar mij toe komt’. 28 Couperus 1975, 197.

140 Mary Kemperink Figure 23 Louis Couperus, photographed by E.O. Hoppé, published in his book Eastward (1924)

Royal Library The Hague

Dutch literature as a whole was being applauded. Indeed, he realized that this was in fact the first time that such an honour had been bestowed on a Dutch author. During his stay in London he was further honoured on several other occasions. The 9th of June, his birthday, for example, was a special day not least because the famous politician Herbert Henry Asquith and his wife honoured him with a lunch. The very same day he was invited to an official dinner in the House of Commons – two official invitations in one day! He commented how, in Holland, such a thing would be impossible: ‘Imagine that an English or French writer arrives in The Hague and one of our high Officials says: we should show this gentleman some courtesy; well let us invite him to dinner together with forty, fifty other guests […] at the Knights Hall in The Hague. Such a thing would be unbelievable’.29

29 Couperus 1975, 205: ‘Stel u voor, dat een Engels of Frans schrijver in Den Haag komt en dat ook een onzer hoge staatslieden zegt: we moeten die meneer toch een beleefdheid doen; wel, we

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Under the heading ‘Mr Couperus honoured’ The Times mentioned a dinner ‘in honour of the great Dutch novelist’ a day later. The most important guests were mentioned, among whom not only writers such as Stephen McKenna, but also high officials, such as the court physician Lord Dawson of Penn and Sir Astbury, a High Court judge. Again, Couperus felt greatly honoured. He confessed that literary recognition by statesmen touched him more than that by critics. On 13 June there was yet another dinner in his honour in the Titmarsh Club. The table chairman, the writer William Leonard Courtney, compared Couperus in his speech to the great English writer Thackeray – a tremendous compliment. When he exclaimed ‘we believe in novels’ and the whole company stood up and sang ‘he is a jolly good fellow’ Couperus was moved to tears.30 The whole reception in London was overwhelming and highly flattering. More than that, it made Couperus painfully aware of how poorly the Dutch official recognition compared. In London it became clear to him that the appreciation in his own country was meagre. Following his experiences in the UK, Couperus had high expectations of the journey to the East Indies and Japan that awaited him. He told Edmond Gosse – to whom he had paid a visit during his stay in London – that he and his wife would soon travel to the Indies in great luxury and state, and were to be received in Batavia with public honours. The official character of the trip had great appeal to him. To Gosse he confessed: ‘It is perhaps a weakness, but I like all that!’31 Unfortunately, his stay in the Indies and Japan did not live up to his high expectations, especially after his glorious days in London.

Under the Spell of His Own Celebrity London made Couperus realize clearly that he was an international celebrity, who deserved not only public attention, but also official recognition. In the Dutch East Indies he expected to get both. The journey had a promising start: Couperus and his wife embarked on the voyage, luxuriously accommodated in the suite that had been arranged for the Governor-General. On

zullen hem inviteren te komen dineren met veertig, vijftig andere gasten […] op het Binnenhof, in het Gebouw der Staaten Generaal. Het zou u wel ongelooflijk schijnen als dit ooit gebeurde’. 30 Couperus 1975, 214‑215; Bastet 1987, 610. 31 Gosse 1925, 266.

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arrival Couperus wrote in the guest book: ‘Je suis le prince des poètes’.32 Until now he had never reached such a level of self-confidence. In a 1904 letter to his publisher Veen, Couperus once stated: ‘In the future, when I will be “famous”’.33 Ten years later, back in The Hague, he sounded even more confident: ‘In the future, when I will be more of a celebrity’.34 By now, as can be inferred from the proud entry in the Indies’ guest book, his fame – he felt with some irony – had reached the level of royal celebrity. In fact, he was treated as a royalty: in Sumatra he was the guest of the Governor-General. In Batavia he stayed in a suite in the Hotel Des Indes and was received by the Governor-General himself. This entire honour was bestowed upon him for no other reason than his famous, almost legendary authorship. He was overwhelmed and happy. Now he found himself in a position to converse on equal footing with high-ranking officials about the situation in the East Indies. Before Couperus went ashore articles in the Java Bode and the Deli Courant had informed the East Indian public of his forthcoming visit.35 Couperus was far from unknown in the Indies. His last visit there, in 1899‑1900, had been notorious. East Indian society of the time, a world of masculine nononsense planters and officials, judged his entire persona to be effeminate and decadent. Pamphlets were written and myths concerning his affected behaviour circulated widely.36 Shortly after his departure in 1900, his two last novels, Inevitable. and The Hidden Force, had received highly negative reviews in the East Indian press because of their so-called immoral themes. Yet now, twenty years later, everything seemed different. Couperus enjoyed the Indies and especially the emphatic homage shown to him by the local officials. Just as he had done in the Netherlands, he publicly performed readings of his own work.37 For the Art Society in Batavia he read a few of his columns. He appeared on a dark red stage in a wealth of flowers. The public was jubilant and so were the critics.38 However, in Surabaya things went wrong. The town happened to be notorious for its abusive local press, but that was not the only reason that the Surabaya appearances were to become problematic. During the preceding years – in The Hague, his stay in London, and his royal reception in the Indies – Couperus had become accustomed to 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

Bastet 1987, 616. Couperus 1977, II, 24: ‘Later als ik “beroemd” ben’. Quoted in Van Vliet 1987, 144: ‘Later, als ik nog beroemder ben’. Bastet 1987, 616. Bastet 1987, 219, 227; Van Vliet 2013, 108, 127. Bastet 1987, 621. Bastet 1987, 623.

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being received with full honours. By now he took for granted that he would be treated as a diva. In Surabaya, however, Couperus’s eminence was highly doubted. There he was rather more notorious than famous. Already, before his arrival, negative personal attributes such as ‘affected’ and ‘effeminate’ had begun to circulate again. The first problem Couperus encountered was his lodging. He was invited to make his appearance at the Surabayan Art Society, but the room in which he was supposed to read left much to be desired in the realms of luxury and glamour. It definitely did not live up to Couperus’s standards. Offstage, the venue was filthy without even a dressing room. Couperus forcibly voiced his resentment to the waiting Board of the Art Society as he, forever the diva, arrived late. Another problem was that, whilst on the one hand Couperus demanded all the respect a famous and (in his own eyes) aristocratic artist deserved, on the other, he showed himself to be a penny-pincher. For a single lecture he asked the considerable sum of 500 guilders – today, the equivalent of EUR 3,000. He even demanded cash payment the very same evening, giving a rather unsophisticated impression of himself in the process – as did his fit of anger caused by all the problems. Needless to say, his lecture was a somewhat mute affair. Thus, before the Surabayan public, Couperus fell from grace. His high expectations of attention, luxury, and honours as a celebrity were his downfall when unfulfilled. In February 1922, Couperus left for Hong Kong and Japan. In Japan he was both anonymous and unknown. The country disappointed him, not least because he found the climate cold, the landscape unimpressive and the Japanese people on the whole unsympathetic. Worst of all, he fell perilously ill. Fortunately, however, he liked his two Japanese nurses, one of whom immediately recognized him as a natural-born artist, which flattered his vanity.39 Depressed and unwell he returned to a grey, autumnal Netherlands where, instead of a glamorous reception he found himself under a medically induced house arrest in a The Hague hotel room. Back in the Netherlands Couperus, in spite of his illness, took up his usual life as a writer. He contributed weekly his columns to Het Vaderland. What is more, much against his usual practice, he wrote a letter to the editor. The reason for his action was the speech the mayor of The Hague had given in honour of the visit of the King of Sweden. In this speech he had stated that, in contrast to Swedish authors such as Selma Lagerlöf, Dutch writers lacked any fantastic elements in their works. This hurt Couperus 39 Couperus 1992, 88.

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greatly, for two reasons. First, he was convinced that in his own work the fantastic element was largely present. Second, he was especially offended because these deprecating words had come from a high-ranking official. To his growing grief and offence the official authorities in Holland had never shown any appreciation of his work, whilst in England and in the Indies he was paid the official tribute he deserved as a famous writer. Unsurprisingly, given his strength of feeling, his letter had a harsh tone: ‘It is no less than a shame and an insult, to Dutch writers, bitterly unaccustomed as they already are of official recognition. It is against this shame and this insult that I am protesting here most emphatically’. 40 This matter hurt him greatly, so much so that in one of his columns he returned to the subject. On behalf of his colleagues as well as for himself he explicitly demanded official recognition: ‘We wish to be officially recognized by authority [the critics] and by Authority [the High and Mighty] as fellow workers to the Building of the State of the Netherlands’. 41 That same column also served as a prelude to his approaching 60th birthday. He stated that for him appreciation at this late stage no longer mattered. Nonetheless, wheels were set in motion to celebrate his birthday. High-ranking officials were invited to participate in the celebration. A committee was set up under the honorary presidency of the minister of Education, Arts and Sciences. Some of the names of the officials involved appeared in the album made for the occasion, such as those of the mayor of The Hague, the Dutch ambassador in London, and the Dutch ambassador in Paris. A call was circulated for a substantial financial contribution to Couperus’s house being built in De Steeg. It would have pleased Couperus had he known that a least one royalty, in fact Queen Emma, contributed 100 guilders. The Royal Family was less generous in the assignation of a royal honour. It was intended to promote Couperus to the rank of Commander of the Order of Orange-Nassau (since 1897 he already had the rank of officer). Yet that aim proved to be too high. He was knighted in the Order of the Dutch Lion – an honour, but not quite at the level of Commander of the Order of Orange-Nassau. Moreover, it had been quite difficult to gain approval even for this distinction. Afterwards Johan de Meester said that it was easier to go to the Sahara to fetch a real lion than to provide a 40 Quoted in Bastet 1987, 650: ‘Het is niet minder dan een schande en een beleediging, die op deze wijze den Nederlandschen schrijvers, reeds bitter weinig gewend aan officieele erkenning, wordt aangedaan en tegen deze schande en deze beleediging protesteer ik hierbij op de meest nadrukkelijke wijze’. 41 Quoted in Bastet 1987, 65: ‘Wij wenschen officieel en door autoriteit èn Autoriteit erkend te worden als medearbeiders aan het Gebouw van den Staat der Nederlanden’.

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writer with this royal title. 42 Nonetheless, Couperus was very pleased with his knighthood. During the official ceremony on 9 June 1923 four people acted as speakers. Apart from the minister who came to decorate Couperus, they all belonged to the literary circuit: the author and journalist Johan de Meester, the novelist and critic Lodewijk van Deyssel, and the publisher L. Simons. Couperus himself was too moved to express his gratitude. After the festivities, he wrote that he considered it as an official honour paid to the Dutch literary guild. 43 Furthermore, he wrote a letter of thanks to the minister, asking if he should request an audience with Queen Wilhelmina to thank her personally. The laudations impressed him, just as in 1897 when he had been promoted to the rank of Officer of the Order of Orange-Nassau. Sadly, his actual experience of this level of recognition was short-lived. Shortly after his knighthood, on 16 July, he died suddenly, probably of a blood poisoning. His cremation at the Westerveld Cemetery included acte de presence delivered by the mayor of The Hague, the mayor of Velzen and a representative of the minister of Education, Arts and Sciences. Not only were there many official invitees, but also many onlookers drawn to Couperus’s cremation. Afterwards the poet and author Annie Salomons, a friend of Couperus, indignantly wrote that everybody in possession of a bicycle considered the occasion as nice entertainment for the day. 44

Celebrity: Postmortem Of course most newspapers paid attention to the death of Couperus. They honoured him as a great artist and writer. Catholic and socialist news media were the only exceptions: the former considered him to be immoral, the latter, bourgeois. 45 In the year of his death, his good friend Maurits Wagenvoort, a novelist and travel author, published a utopian novel with the title A Marriage in the Year 2020.46 The novel takes place in The Hague a century later. By then a splendid Louis Couperus park has been laid out there, with a marble bust of the writer. Wagenvoort mentions the park in his book as ‘one of the most beautiful gardens in town, with exotic flowers and plants surrounding 42 43 44 45 46

Bastet 1987, 666‑667. Bastet 1987, 670. Bastet 1987, 682. Bastet 1987, 686‑688. Wagenvoort 1923.

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the white marble bust of the matchless narrator’. 47 With its allusions to Couperus’s passion for classical marble statues, for flowers, and for the exotic, this passage is clearly intended as homage to the great novelist. However, the Couperus Park has yet to be realized. In the years following his death things grew increasingly silent. The sales of his books, which even during the last years of his life left much to be desired, declined further still. After his death there was a slight temporary increase of interest for his work, but this quickly subsided. After 1931, most of the remaining books, reprinted after his death, were reduced in price. 48 Many books became sold out and were not reprinted. Tellingly, the first edition – 2500 copies – of the novel Old People and the Things that Pass, now a celebrated classic, was not sold out until the Second World War. Despite this waning interest in Couperus’s work and life, in 1928, a circle of friends and admirers took the initiative of founding The Louis Couperus Society. The all-important aim of the Society was the promotion of interest and insight into Couperus’s work, not least by the realization of his complete works. President of the Society was the great Couperus admirer and friend Henri van Booven – who also published the first Louis Couperus biography in 1933. 49 In that same year the Hague municipal archives organized a memorial exhibition in which they presented their collection of acquired Couperiana. However, all this activity was short-lived: a few years later, in 1936, the Society ceased to exist due to financial insolvency. There were a few writers and critics who continued to pay attention to Couperus’s work from time to time. Mostly they were part of an older generation that had known him personally. However, there were also younger, more radical writers who appreciated his work. The critic Menno ter Braak and the novelist Edgar du Perron (a member of the Louis Couperus Society himself), both belonging to the inner circle surrounding the influential literary journal Forum, judged him to be a writer of European level.50 In their opinion he stood head and shoulders above average middle-class realism. Central to Ter Braak’s and Du Perron’s literary taste was the notion of personality, and from this point of view Couperus fits perfectly with their poetics. Appreciation by the avant-garde, however, does not ensure 47 Wagenvoort 1923, 89: ‘een der mooiste gaarden der stad met een grooten overdekten hortus voor exotischen bloemen en planten om het witmarmeren borstbeeld van der onnavolgbaren verteller heen’. 48 Van Dijk 1994, 73. 49 Van Booven 1933. 50 Van Dijk 1994, 69‑89.

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continued celebrity, perhaps even the contrary. The first 30 years after Couperus’s death mark a period in which his former celebrity slowly faded. It was only from the 1960s onwards that Couperus and his work recaptured the public imagination, as demonstrated by the attention paid to his 100th birthday in 1963. The Dutch Theatre Company The Hague Comedy staged a play under the title Zo ik iets ben (If I am Anything) and in The Hague a bust of Couperus was unveiled. Additionally, the twelve-volume edition of his collected works, published in the 1950s, contributed to Couperus’s return to fame, despite the fact that from its first appearance this respelled edition was much disputed. However, even if disputed it reopened Couperus’s oeuvre to a larger public all the same. An unmodified reprint of this edition was published in 1975. Apart from these more monumental editions, regular reprints of single titles appeared, among others in the popular series Amstelpockets. Television adaptations of his novels, Small Souls (1969‑1970), The Hidden Force (1974), and Old People and the Things that Pass (1975‑1976) are other signals of his growing popularity. They were broadcast in the 1970s and were tremendously successful. The adaption of The Hidden Force was generally acclaimed, not least because of a daring naked shower scene with the actress Pleuni Touw playing the character of Léonie van Oudijck. Such a scene is emblematic of the time, one in which the slogan ‘nude should be permitted’ was very much to the fore. The renewed interest in Couperus’s work, especially in his The Hague novels, matched a general revival of interest in the art and culture of the nineteenth century, especially the fin de siècle. In later decades, popularization of Couperus’s work continued by means of film and theatre adaptations: Eline Vere (film, 1991), Along the Road of Joy, under the title A Woman from the North (film, 1999) and Small Souls (play, 1993 and 2012). Moreover, a whole Couperus trilogy on stage started September 2015. In scholastic circles interest has also steadily increased since the 1960s. The prominent academic Wouter Blok made his name in 1960 with his structuralist dissertation on Old People and the Things that Pass.51 From that point onwards the study of Couperus has expanded enormously.52 The impressive Couperus biography by Frédéric Bastet from 1987 deserves special mention. Lastly, under the direction of Dick van Vliet a new, original spelling, scholarly edition of the Volledige Werken Louis Couperus (Complete Works Louis Couperus) in 50 volumes was published

51 Blok 1960. 52 See Van Kalmthout 2013.

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between 1987 and 1996. It has become universally considered to be the standard edition. A significant sign of the renewed interest in Couperus is the rebirth of the Louis Couperus Society in 1993 under the presidency of José Buschman. From its beginnings, the Society has worked closely with Couperus specialists, recruiting from the academic community a committee of recommendation. The objective – in line with the aims of the first Society – is to promote interest and insight into the work of Couperus, an objective in which The Louis Couperus Society has gloriously succeeded. During the last twenty years it has been the source of a constant stream of activities.53. I should mention here the Louis Couperus Museum with a variety of exhibitions, the magazine Arabesken, exclusively dedicated to Couperus and his work, the annual scholarly magazine Couperus-cahier, the Couperus lecture series, the Couperus walk, the Couperus medal, and even a whole range of Couperus merchandise such as a bookmarker, a birthday calendar, cuff links, a violet Couperus tie, and a violet Couperus writing pen. Society membership has grown steadily up to currently 550, a number that makes the Louis Couperus Society one of the largest Dutch writer’s societies. The commemoration of Couperus’s 150th birthday in 2013 can be considered as his apotheosis. The number of organized activities are almost incalculable: scholarly lectures and articles, a complete edition of Couperus’s letters by Dick van Vliet, a television documentary by Bas Heijne dedicated to the novel The Hidden Force, the unveiling of a plaque at the house of Couperus’s birth, an Eline Vere twitter day, a Couperus dinner, a Couperus cookery book, roses named after Couperus and his novels, and more. All these accolades are not only signs of interest; they generate more interest as well, as witnessed by the popular television programme ‘De wereld draait door’ (‘As the World Turns’), on which author and television personality Adriaan van Dis (dressed in a pink jacket, one of Couperus’s extravagant trademark outfits) and columnist Bas Heijne were invited to speak of Louis Couperus. In this time of declining interest in the art of reading, Couperus can still be considered a celebrity. Not only his work, but also his life are subjects of renewed public attention. His private persona is again surrounded by gossip and myths. His name evokes not only the image of a great Dutch novelist, but also of an upper-class inhabitant of The Hague – a soigné, affected, decadent homosexual. Given the present interest 53 Information on the Louis Couperus Society I partly owe to the interview I had with its former president Petra Theunissen and its current president, Annebeth Simonsz. See also Peterson 2003.

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in gender and sexuality, his presumed homosexuality has undoubtedly increased attention for his persona as a writer. Another sign of Couperus’s celebrity postmortem is the contemporary existence of real Couperus fans. They are to be found especially among the members of the Louis Couperus Society. They collect, read and reread his work, some of them yearly visit his grave. Some admirers possess impressive collections of Couperiana. Other collectors are mainly interested in his work and in special editions. They devote much time to this and sometimes even write about it.54 His appearance, clothing and behaviour are admired and sometimes imitated. One admirer even possesses two of Couperus’s famous rings, which he wears himself.55 Couperus lives on.

Conclusion: The Twin Phases of Couperus’s Celebrity Couperus’s celebrity developed in two phases. The first, towards the end of his career, following his long stay abroad. Only then did his fame reach the level of celebrity, one involving admiration, myth, gossip, sensation, and public curiosity. After his arrival in the Netherlands in 1915, Couperus himself came to realize that he was a celebrity author. More and more he became convinced that he deserved the attention, respect, and above all official honour he encountered in England and in the East Indies, in his native Holland. Occasionally this expectation determined his self-fashioning. His celebrity and his own conviction to be of noble birth provided him an entrance in The Hague’s high-class circles. His celebrity and his belonging to an outstanding family of East Indian officials enabled him to associate with the highest officials in the East Indies, something that would have been impossible during his previous visit to the colony, twenty years earlier. The more accustomed he became to celebrity treatment – public attention, applause, flowers, and a glamorous lodging – the worse it became when in public he was treated as an ordinary human being. His anger could rise to such an extent that he made a shameful exhibition of himself. Further, the official honours he received abroad made him even more discontented with 54 With one of the collectors, E.P. Veltkamp, I had the opportunity recently to have an interesting conversation on his impressive collection Couperiana, which contains more than 2500 items. See Veltkamp 2013. 55 This information is based on a conversation I recently had with the owner of the rings, Mr W.F.Schuwirth. Besides the rings he also owns several other objects that once belonged to Louis Couperus and his wife. On Couperus’s rings, see Boer 2000.

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the poor official attention he got in his own country, even prompting him to write an open letter, something highly contrary to his usual demeanour. His cremation as a public spectacle marked the end of this first phase of celebrity. After his death Couperus’s celebrity rapidly died out. During the latter years of his life, the public in general had taken more interest in the persona of Louis Couperus than in the writer Couperus. Already from 1904 onwards, his novels attracted fewer and fewer readers. It is understandable in many ways that from the moment the public person Louis Couperus disappeared from daily life and his columns ceased to appear, his celebrity quickly faded. However, his celebrity status revived during the 1960s, marking the start of the second phase of Couperus’s celebrity. It is difficult to identify one decisive reason for this, probably a series of factors played a part. Contemporary interest in the culture of the fin de siècle, television adaptations of his novels, re-editions of his novels, his supposed homosexuality, and the effective PR of the Louis Couperus Society, can all be attributed to his posthumous celebrity. The commemoration of his 150th birthday in 2013 was a tribute to his work and to his person. Was this event the final peak of his celebrity, or will the Couperus myth continue to grow in the future? The commemoration of his 200th birthday in 2063 will tell.

Bibliography F. Bastet, Louis Couperus: Een biografie (Amsterdam: Querido’s Uitgeverij, 1987). W. Blok, Verhaal en lezer: Een onderzoek naar enige structuuraspecten van ‘Van oude mensen, de dingen die voorbij gaan’ van Louis Couperus (Groningen: Wolters, 1960). E. Boer, ‘Fonklende vingertooi’, Arabesken 8 (15 May 2000), 12‑14. H. van Booven, Leven en werken van Louis Couperus (Velsen: Uitgeverij Schuyt, 1933). L. Couperus, Verzamelde werken, vol. XII (Amsterdam: Van Oorschot, 1975). L. Couperus, Nippon (Amsterdam/Antwerpen: Veen, 1992). L. Couperus, Met Louis Couperus op tournee: Voordrachten uit eigen werk 1915‑1923 in recensies, brieven en andere documenten, ed. by H.T.M. van Vliet (Den Haag: Letterkundig Museum, 1998). N. van Dijk, De politiek van de literatuurkritiek (Delft: Eburon, 1994). J. Evans & D. Hesmondhalgh (eds.), Understanding Media: Inside Celebrity (Maidenhead Berkshire: Open University Press, 2005). C. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (London: Hutchinson, 1975).

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E. Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Anchor Books, n.d. [1959]). E. Gosse, ‘Louis Couperus: A Tribute and a Memory’, in Silhouettes (London: William Heineman Ltd., 1925), 259‑267. N. Heinich, De la visibilité: Excellence et singularité en régime médiatique (Paris: Gallimard, 2012). F. Inglis, A Short History of Celebrity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). T. van Kalmthout, ‘De beoefening van de Couperus-kunde: Hoofdlijnen en discussiepunten in de wetenschappelijke literatuurbeschouwing’, Spiegel der Letteren 55 (2013), no. 3, 233‑260. M. Kemperink, ‘Kunstenaar, aristocraat en zakenman: Couperus’ self-fashioning’, Spiegel der Letteren 55 (2013), no. 3, 375‑401. R. van Krieken, Celebrity Society (London/New York: Routledge, 2012). J. Meizoz, Postures littéraires: Mises en scène modernes de l’auteur. Essai (Genève: Slatkine Érudition, 2007). J. Meizoz, ‘Ce que l’on fait dire au silence: Posture, ethos, image de l’auteur’, Argu‑ mentation et Analyse du Discours 3 (2009). K. Peterson, Generaties rond Couperus: Genootschappen 1928‑2003 (Den Haag: Louis Couperus Genootschap, 2003). P. Snijders, ‘De Legenden van de Roze Lust: Het Haagse Zedenschandaal van 1920’, Arabesken 11 (2003), no. 22, 17‑26. E.P. Veltkamp, Luxe, bijzondere en bibliofiele uitgaven van Louis Couperus: 140 uitgaven en hun varianten (Brussel: Evert Paul Veltkamp, 2013). A. Vogel, De man met de orchidee: Het levensverhaal van Louis Couperus (’sGravenhage/Rotterdam: Nijgh & Van Ditmar, 1973). M. van Wagenvoort, Een huwelijk in het jaar 2020 (Amsterdam: J.M. Meulenhoff, 1923).

Figure 24 Marcel Proust, without year

Culture Club/Getty Images

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À la Recherche de la Gloire Marcel Proust (1871‑1922) Sjef Houppermans

The term célèbre appears 88 times in Marcel Proust’s novel À la recherche du temps perdu (translated as Remembrance of Things Past, 1922‑1931, and, recently, In Search of Lost Time, 2002) and presents an essential term if one is to acquire a nuanced understanding of the aesthetic dimension of this oeuvre.1 Certain architectural works may be célèbres and, of course certain aristocratic families as well. Robert de Saint-Loup gives his nobility an aesthetic turn, being ‘famed for the smartness of his clothes’.2 The singular quality of his appearance ‘must correspond to a life different from that led by other men’, and this observation is certainly preponderant for the narrator’s choice of Saint-Loup as his best friend.3 Celebrity also touches important scientists or doctors, although the Recherche demonstrates how public fame can be combined with professional mediocrity in other circumstances (as with Sorbonne professor Brichot or doctor Cottard). In a wider context, the word célèbre is regularly used to determine a major aspect of an artist’s life. Regarding the great expectations of the protagonist of the Recherche we read that his fervent wish to be famous is frustrated during the greatest part of the work. This ensures that his desire, unsatisfied as it is, becomes all the more obsessive. In the theatre his admiration is reserved for the actresses – particular to his attention l’illustre Berma and the profusion de gloire she amasses.4 However, his idol eventually embodies the evanescence of glory as, in the final volume, she is both eclipsed by the most vulgar Rachel and paralyzed by illness. The imaginary character of her status is revealed when her fictitious name figures between those of historical personages: ‘I classified, in order of talent, the most distinguished: 1 Célébrité shows ten more entries; besides we find 32 cases with ‘fameux’ and 55 examples of ‘gloire’. Illustre also has some 30 entries. 2 Proust 1987‑1989, vol. 2, 88: ‘célèbre pour son élégance’. References in French to the Pléiades edition in 4 volumes by Jean-Yves Tadié. The translation used is by Scott Moncrieff, e-book edition by the University of Adelaide, https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/p/proust/marcel/, last accessed 5 November 2015. 3 Proust 1987‑1989, vol. 2, 88: ‘Devait correspondre à une vie différente de celle des autres hommes’. 4 Proust 1987‑1989, vol. 4, 575.

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Sarah Bernhardt, Berma, Bartet, Madeleine Brohan, Jeanne Samary; but I was interested in them all’.5 However, this constitutes the counterpart of another phenomenon that predicts the final goal of the oeuvre, namely that often the beginnings of a creator are rather obscure and it is only after a significant period, or even after death, that celebrity occurs. The composer Vinteuil is the principal example, but the same principle applies to Elstir who is first presented as the young, all too pretentious Biche, whilst Mundane Octave becomes a fine author and even super snob Legrandin eventually writes good poetry. The narrator soon realizes that it is not ‘[just] the desire to become famous but the habit of being laborious that enables us to produce a finished work’.6 However, it is only in the last part, Le temps retrouvé (Time Regained, 1931), that he decides to pledge all his efforts to ‘le fameux “travail”’.7 He has, by then learned that the experiences of life will provide the material of his writing and that aesthetic elaboration has to transfigure it. For examples to imitate he turns to the mirrors offered by the three major artists of the Recherche, Elstir the painter, Bergotte the literary author, and Vinteuil the composer. If the last of these, Vinteuil, presents probably the most convincing example of the possibility of transcending lost time, Elstir also provides some salient lessons, becoming an object of celebrity when Saint-Loup and Marcel are soliciting his attention in a restaurant. When they enquire towards the solitary man in a corner, the host replies: ‘What!’ he exclaimed, ‘do you mean to say you don’t know the famous painter Elstir?’ ‘He is a friend of Swann, a very well-known artist, extremely good,’ I told Saint-Loup. Whereupon there passed over us both, like a wave of emotion, the thought that Elstir was a great artist, a celebrated man, and that, confounding us with the rest of the diners, he had no suspicion of the ecstasy into which we were thrown by the idea of his talent.8 5 Proust 1987‑1989, vol. 1, 74: ‘Je classais par ordre de talent les plus illustres, Sarah Bernhardt, la Berma, Bartet, Madeleine Brohan, Jeanne Samary, mais toutes m’intéressaient’. 6 Proust 1987‑1989, vol. 2, 172: ‘Le désir de devenir célèbre, mais l’habitude d’être laborieux qui nous permet de produire une œuvre’. 7 Proust 1987‑1989, vol. 4, 435. 8 Proust 1987‑1989, vol. 2, 182: ‘Comment, vous ne connaissiez pas le célèbre peintre Elstir?’ […] ‘C’est un ami de Swann, et un artiste très connu, de grande valeur’, dis-je à Saint-Loup. Aussitôt passa sur lui et sur moi, comme un frisson, la pensée qu’Elstir était un grand artiste, un homme célèbre, puis, que nous confondant avec les autres dîneurs, il ne se doutait pas de l’exaltation où nous jetait l’idée de son talent’.

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If this situation explains the interaction between a celebrity and his admirers, searching for a glimpse of glory themselves, a few pages after that an even more important fact is discovered when Marcel expresses his awe: I had supposed Elstir to be a modest man, but I realized my mistake on seeing his face cloud with melancholy when, in a little speech of thanks, I uttered the word ‘fame’. Men who believe that their work will last – as was the case with Elstir – form the habit of placing that work in a period when they themselves will have crumbled into dust. And thus, by obliging them to reflect on their own extinction, the thought of fame saddens them because it is inseparable from the thought of death. I changed the conversation in the hope of driving away the cloud of ambitious melancholy with which unwittingly I had loaded Elstir’s brow.9

The more direct object for comparison on the literary level is Bergotte. His situation is symptomatic for reflections about art and celebrity: But it was while he still lived, and during his slow progress towards a death that he had not yet reached that this writer was able to watch the progress of his works towards Renown. A dead writer can at least be illustrious without any strain on himself. The effulgence of his name is stopped short by the stone upon his grave. In the deafness of the eternal sleep he is not importuned by Glory. But for Bergotte the antithesis was still incomplete. He existed still sufficiently to suffer from the tumult. He was moving still, though with difficulty, while his books, bounding about him, like daughters whom one loves but whose impetuous youthfulness and noisy pleasures tire one, brought day after day, to his very bedside, a crowd of fresh admirers.10 9 Proust 1987‑1989, vol. 2, 198: ‘J’avais cru Elstir modeste mais je compris que je m’étais trompé, en voyant son visage se nuancer de tristesse quand dans une phrase de remerciement je prononçai le mot de gloire. Ceux qui croient leurs œuvres durables et c’était le cas pour Elstir – prennent l’habitude de les situer dans une époque où eux-mêmes ne seront plus que poussière. Et ainsi en les forçant à réfléchir au néant, l’idée de la gloire les attriste parce qu’elle est inséparable de l’idée de la mort. Je changeai de conversation pour dissiper ce nuage d’orgueilleuse mélancolie dont j’avais sans le vouloir chargé le front d’Elstir’. 10 Proust 1987‑1989, vol. 2, 622: ‘Mais c’était en vie encore et durant son lent acheminement vers la mort non encore atteinte, qu’il assistait à celui de ses œuvres vers la Renommée. Un auteur mort est du moins illustre sans fatigue. Le rayonnement de son nom s’arrête à la pierre de sa tombe. Dans la surdité du sommeil éternel, il n’est pas importuné par la Gloire. Mais pour Bergotte l’antithèse n’était pas entièrement achevée. Il existait encore assez pour souffrir du tumulte. Il remuait encore, bien que péniblement, tandis que ses œuvres, bondissantes, comme

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It is remarkable here that ‘Glory’ (‘Gloire’) and ‘Renown’ (‘Renommée’) receive capitals and that the object of celebrity takes metaphorical form, the living metaphor of young girls. Celebrity in the case of Elstir and Bergotte surpasses the person of the painter and the writer. As Nathalie Heinich shows in her sociologically oriented studies, public celebrity is structurally accompanied by depersonalization. In Être écrivain: Création et identité (2000) she questions the possibility of founding a writer’s identity on indetermination and extreme singularization, and she uses a psychoanalytical vocabulary with which to identify that situation as a depersonalization.11 One might ask with Heinich if that is not a kind of perversion. Alternatively, we see in our quotations from the Recherche that another kind of depersonalization coincides with future glory. The death of the author is the key of this evolution even when it happens during his lifetime, as the reflection on Bergotte shows. We could even insist that depersonalization – or better still de-individuation – is necessary for a literary work to advance beyond simply private interest and thus gain wider recognition and glory. Proust, in writing the most personal oeuvre ever, because his ‘I’ explores all the farthest corners of subjectivity, provides concomitantly this text with an increased, wider frame. He does this in several ways: Firstly, by multiplying the points of view and the ‘intermittences’ of this ‘je’, in following his evolution, his hesitations, his display of virtualities as regards himself and the others as well. Secondly, by combining in his writing specific stories, anecdotes, episodes, and theorizing in a search for ‘laws’ and general observations. Finally, by transforming his personal experiences and his more abstract conclusions into images, intertextual relations, and hybrid settings. So my ‘recherche’ becomes the Recherche. Real celebrity belongs to the oeuvre and not to the man. Celebrity itself is taken as an object of reflection and echoes its own displacement in this way. In the first lines of the book a kind of allegory indicates the starting point of this (de)construction. The narrator relates how, when awakening in the night, he thinks that he becomes the content of the book he was reading when he fell asleep: ‘A church, a quartet, the rivalry between François I and Charles V’.12 This rivalry for honour and celebrity incarnated by the des filles qu’on aime mais dont l’impétueuse jeunesse et les bruyants plaisirs vous fatiguent entraînant chaque jour jusqu’au pied de son lit de nouveaux admirateurs’. 11 Heinich 2000. 12 Proust 1987‑1989, vol. 1, 3: ‘Une église, un quatuor: La rivalité de Charles Quint et de François premier’.

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dreamer symbolizes an ongoing imitation in the search for fame and glory that traverses the Recherche in its entirety until its solution in the final pages where the ‘bal de têtes’ – the exhibition of human decay as the last stage of rivalry – morphs into a writing scene. 13 But who was the man behind this construction?

Marcel Proust As Antoine Compagnon rightly remarked in his study Proust entre deux siè‑ cles (1989), Marcel Proust’s life bridges two centuries and his work displays influences of both.14 His vision and his style combine nineteenth-century idealism based on a specific mixture of classicism and romanticism with a twentieth-century openness to modernism and the avant-garde. As the son of a renowned professor in medicine (there are hereditary aspects in celebrity!) his childhood was carefree despite a problematic health (he would suffer from respiratory weakness all his life). It was principally his mother Jeanne Weil, born from a Jewish family in eastern France, who stimulated his interest in art and culture. Already, as a student at the prestigious Lycée Condorcet, he began to write literary texts with his fellow scholars. His artistic ambitions grew during his literature degree at the Sorbonne. In his milieu the major artists of the epoch were revered as great heroes, the leading intellectual figures. Even if the political and social status of prominent authors had diminished as Pierre Bourdieu shows in his studies on this subject (most particularly in Les règles de l’art, 1994, with Flaubert as principal example), their public image often preserved a rather mythical dimension.15 One of the ‘great magicians’ (as Paul Bénichou called them in his major study), Victor Hugo, rather than ‘l’ermite de Croisset’, was venerated by the French beau monde of the ‘belle époque’ as well as by readers of all classes.16 His funeral, on the first day of June 1885 was a moment in history, one in which more than two million enthusiastic admirers participated.17 The influence of these magnificent images is illustrated and exemplified by Raymond Roussel, a contemporary author for whom, besides Hugo, Jules Verne represented the apogee of literary fame. In his posthumous 13 14 15 16 17

Proust 1987‑1989, vol. 4, section ‘Le temps retrouvé’. Compagnon 1989. Bourdieu 1994. Bénichou 1996. For the position of Proust as an adored writer see Tadié 1996; Tadié 2013‑2015.

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autobiographical text he praises the genius of Verne that permitted him to gain ‘incredible heights’ and he describes the crises he went through when he was eighteen years old and experienced an immense feeling of glory. But his own oeuvre was unsuccessful and he finished his last book with this closing sentence: ‘For lack of anything better my last hope is for some posthumous fulfilment’.18 Indeed, he became one of the canonical writers in French literary history as a representative of modernist formalism, but his fame is far more limited than that of Marcel Proust. For Proust, admiration of the major authors of the nineteenth century depends above all on their ‘vision’ as he writes in the Recherche: when Chateaubriand, Balzac, Stendhal but also Dostoyevsky and Hardy are celebrities, it is because of their artistic peculiarity. Particular forms of beauty are witnesses of truth in this way. Specific stylistic means – such as metaphors – possess a hermeneutic power, and these pertinent qualities constitute the guarantee of fame. But Proust’s position is a paradox and his writing demonstrates this double bind: failure and misfortune are at the heart of his work, and redemption by art cannot appear except by a deus-ex-machina procedure. If this reflects the content of the Recherche, in life also his major fear was that he be conceived as a psychologist and a composer of fine painting instead of being seen as a constructivist writer for whom the architecture of the whole building was of primary importance. This misunderstanding, especially by critics, was due both to the authors’ previous publications and his societal behaviour. He was actually known as a bit of a snob who liked to be seen in aristocratic salons and who wrote poems in the style of the decadent school. His first publication dates from 1896. It is a volume of poems entitled Les plaisirs et les jours (Pleasure and Days) with illustrations by his friend Madeleine Lemaire in whose salon he met his bosom friend Reynaldo Hahn (whose songs have contributed to his recently renewed fame). Dandyism and refinement were predominant in those (homosexual) circles, however, Proust had already discovered that his attitude should necessarily intertwine bravura, brio, prestige, and an analytical attitude as well as critical irony. He may have admired Montesquiou (the principal dandy aristocrat and poète précieux of the time), but his aim was to become the Saint-Simon (the meticulous satirist of the court of Louis XIV) of his generation. In 1896, critics were either merciless or silent. One of the leading and most provocative authors at the turn of the century, Jean Lorrain (now famous for 18 See Roussel 1935. Also see Proust 1987‑1989, vol. 1, 3: ‘Faute de mieux je me réfugie dans l’espoir d’un peu d’épanouissement posthume’.

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his erotic writings), published a review article that so ferociously attacked Proust that he felt obliged to challenge him to a duel. The painter Jean Béraud was Marcel’s witness for this encounter ‘sur le pré’ with pistols. Whilst no physical injury ensued, the adventure caused considerable psychological damage. Proust may have realized then that the way to glory could only be via a challenge of ‘longue durée’. He began attending the lectures of his relative, Henri Bergson, who made him think about the versatilities of Time. However, notwithstanding any philosophical reflection on ‘sic transit Gloria mundi’, the search for celebrity never stopped. In the closing years of the nineteenth century, Proust became inspired to write a complex novel about the initiation into society of a young man. This was to become Jean Santeuil (1952), a book that was never published during his lifetime, because the author himself had many doubts about the formula he used in his composition.19 Today we can conclude that much of the material that would eventually figure in the yet to be published Recherche already had its place in Jean Santeuil, however the limited scope of this initial work did not permit an elaboration on three major components of the chef-d’oeuvre to come. These were first of all the change from a third-person narration with an omniscient overview to a subject-bound story told by a ‘je’ (‘I’); further a much larger composition that permits the preparation and introduction of radical changes in personages and visions; finally a much more nuanced application of his revolutionary view on the art of the novel as being fiction, essay and treatise all in one. Proust had some famous predecessors in the domain of the ‘roman-fleuve’ and his admiration went first of all to Balzac’s La comédie humaine (The Human Comedy, 1799‑1850) even if he had a low opinion of his style. Zola’s Les Rougon-Macquart (The Rougon-Macquarts, 1871‑1893) lay at the other end of the scale as Proust considered the work as flat realism incapable of representing the complexity and the spiritual dimension of the world. In the first half of the twentieth century another major series of novels offered a comparable panorama of life concomitantly at the level of individuals, of society and of history: Roger Martin du Gard with his Les Thibault (The Thibaults, 1922‑1940) a multivolume series that ultimately led to the Nobel Prize and its accompanying celebrity. Returning now to Proust. In 1907, he made what proved to be the most important decision of his life: he began the composition of the Recherche. Worldly life was reduced to a bare minimum and many days he only left his room for a dinner in the Ritz hotel. The room of his apartment on the 19 Proust 1971b.

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Boulevard Haussmann (from which he was obliged to quit in 1919 for another in the Rue Hamelin – where he would eventually die) was lined with cork panels and often he performed fumigations in the hope of alleviating his asthma (to no avail, his respiratory problems only worsened). By consulting the archives of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF) one discovers the astonishing number of manuscripts, ‘cahiers’, ‘carnets’, ‘paperolles’, and other papers that bear witness to the overwhelming writer’s ‘rage’ that possessed Marcel. Many of these manuscripts can be accessed via the website of the BNF. Proust frequently changed the sequence of the different volumes, and of the episodes within them, always paying special attention to long-distance echoes and the interaction between story and reflection. In the years between the publication of the first volume in 1913 and the year of his death, 1922, he continued this laborious rewriting and reordering. Whilst the first part and the end of the novel were fixed from the beginning, large fragments were inserted into the body of the text to enable further character development and to encompass contemporary history, principally the First World War as seen from Paris. The nights of Götterdämmerung when Paris was bombed and the narrator’s stay in a ‘maison de repos’ afterwards concretize the breaking point between two centuries and two ideas of culture and humanism. The Recherche ends with a ‘perpetual adoration’ where art saves the subject: in its programmed reversal we have to return incessantly to suffering and dehumanization. In 1913, Proust sought a publisher realizing that only the publication of his work by an established house could guarantee a large readership. He had already given some pages to the Nouvelle Revue Française (NRF), the most prominent modernist review, where the editors were both pleased and puzzled. When the manuscript of Du côté de chez Swann (Swann’s Way, 1913), the first volume of the Recherche, arrived on the NRF desk, the secretary, Jean Schlumberger – supported by editor in chief André Gide – declined the offer. This decision was to prove very advantageous to Bernard Grasset, another publisher who profited from the situation. It is only after the war, in 1919, that Gallimard-NRF corrected this ‘error’ and published the upcoming volumes, beginning with A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, 1919), which was awarded the important Goncourt prize in its first year of publication. In fact, already in 1913 the first publication, à compte d’auteur, gained significant success, although reactions were very diverse. In his correspondence of that period – complete edition by Philip Kolb – Proust writes about his ideas of celebrity in different tones depending on

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his addressee.20 In the introduction to her selection of the letters Françoise Leriche observes that from the beginning Proust had a strategy intent upon building a literary career and that a significant amount of his day-to-day correspondence with its various aspects of flattery and hypocrisy was aimed at extending the cultural and social network necessary to obtain public success and worthy positions. I quote her in translation: So this correspondence is perhaps less interesting for what it says ‘objectively’, than as a double witness: witness regarding the remarkable comedian that was the social man; witness to his ‘vocation’ that very soon inspired young Marcel and to the way in which, from one act of reading to the next, from hesitations to certitudes, the principles of his aesthetic vision were constituted – taking into account where necessary the importance of the reception – while he established parallel to this a vast network of friends and acquaintances in influential milieus indispensable for celebrity not only on a national level (Goncourt, Légion d’honneur, jurys littéraires) but also on an international level.21

To René Blum who assured the connection with Grasset he writes that he thinks the book will not sell very well in the beginning until the readers are habituated to its style, but he adds: ‘I think that this work that is very superior to anything I made before will one day bring honour to him’ (i.e. Grasset).22

Celebrities in the Recherche The best example of how Proust envisages a literary vocation and its perspectives is to be found in the evolution experienced by the main figure of the Recherche in his dual incarnation. We see the hero as both child and young man presented by an elder ‘I’ as a narrator – the dual incarnation – and at the end of his search the suggestion is that he begins to write the book that we just finished. From his earliest readings in the summer garden of their holiday home the young Marcel aspires to become a writer. Bergotte, the well-known author previously mentioned, regularly visits the 20 Proust 1970‑1993. 21 Leriche 2004, 18. 22 Leriche, 2004, 607: ‘Je crois que l’ouvrage, très supérieur à ce que j’ai jamais fait, lui fera un jour honneur’.

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family and thus figures in this context as a role model (we may recognize amongst other ‘keys’ Anatole France, the most famous of the contemporary writers). Later on in the novel Bergotte is shown in a famous scene where he has a stroke in front of Vermeer’s View of Delft (during an exhibition of this painting in Paris). His last words express the regret that he never could equal the sublime ‘little yellow patch of the wall’ where the beauty of the View of Delft culminates. This can be considered as an allegory for the narrator’s desire to create a superior work of art. A first attempt is found in the description of a spectacular view where three bell towers coincide in the evening light. His ecstatic feelings of happiness and the euphoria of writing rest upon a rediscovered unity behind the fragmentation of reality. It has often been argued that a symbiosis with the mother figure is the underlying motivation of this desire. However, we can also see the consequences in a larger perspective where unification of the subject and of the world thus signifies an ultimate aspiration. Marcel’s childhood experiences will remain troubling, and the search for a lasting resolution will prove long and beset with disappointments. Gradually he realizes that his ambitions to obtain a social position amongst the aristocracy is a lost cause and a waste of time, as are – on a more individual level – friendship and even love, in their ‘intermittences’, as represented by their lack of constancy. Paradoxically, these unfulfilled dreams will nevertheless constitute the central theme of his future oeuvre, although the starting point from which to regain time – to rediscover the ‘lost paradises’ – is a certain conception of memory. There the essence of coincidence and superposition can be attained and arrive at an extratemporal ecstasy. The kind of remembering capable of performing this experience is not the conscious memory directed by will and reason but rather the involuntary one when, as if by a miracle, a present sensation evokes automatically a privileged moment of the past. The most famous example is the ‘petite madeleine’, the orange-flavoured cake shaped like a shell, that, when immersed in a cup of tea, provokes the resurrection of Combray, the village of past holidays by the same patisserie tasted at aunt Léonie’s bedside. Reliving this sublimation of time constitutes the major axis of the novel’s search and the narrator will only arrive at a magnificent renewal of the event at the final meeting in the town house of the Guermantes family, where a whole series of these coincidences occur. Only if he succeeds in finding an artistic expression of this experience can a lasting fulfilment be guaranteed. He discovers that the most pertinent and powerful tool capable of achieving this literary goal is the metaphor – the figure that permits the coincidence of two universes. For example:

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in describing the madeleine experience the narrator uses the image of Japanese folded papers (origami) that, submerged in water, open as a cloud of butterflies. The Recherche can be summarized as ‘the history of a vocation’, because after all these tribulations Marcel decides to retire to his room and to dedicate all his time to the writing of his novel. Proust is not this Marcel (this Christian name occurs only once, in an indirect way), but he gives form and content to him by making use of his own experiences, feelings, and thoughts. Glory and celebrity in this victory over time coagulate in the notion of eternity, because even if a lifetime is transient and writings will disappear one day (as he writes in Le temps retrouvé – the final volume) the discovery of aesthetic truth provides us with a taste of eternity. Speaking of music (another art that reflects writing) the narrator contends that: Perhaps in Le temps retrouvé it is not-being that is the true state, and our whole dream of life is without existence; but, if so, we feel that it must be that these phrases of music, these conceptions which exist in relation to our dream, are nothing either. We shall perish, but we have for our hostages these divine captives who shall follow and share our fate. And death in their company is something less bitter, less inglorious, perhaps even less certain.23

Through the existence of art, death not only becomes less bitter, but glory can reappear and death even becomes less probable (Du côté de chez Swann). This music, a sonata for piano and violin that combines references to Camille Saint-Saens and César Franck, is another example of a work of art that serves as an instigation for writing (as we said before, the paintings of Elstir are the principal third element of comparison). During the whole Recherche the composer of this music evolves through ever more complex creations (ending with a brilliant septet). It is not without coincidence that, precisely in 1913, when Proust was certain of being published and he became more and more convinced of his mastery, he gave his name and his ‘Gestalt’ to this artist.

23 Proust 1987‑1989, vol. 1, 345: ‘Peut-être est-ce le néant qui est le vrai et tout notre rêve est-il inexistant, mais alors nous sentons qu’il faudra que ces phrases musicales, ces notions qui existent par rapport à lui, ne soient rien non plus. Nous périrons, mais nous avons pour otages ces captives divines qui suivront notre chance. Et la mort avec elles a quelque chose de moins amer, de moins inglorieux, peut-être de moins probable’.

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As Roland Barthes has affirmed, the onomastic system of the Recherche can be considered as one of its major organizing patterns, and Vinteuil, the composer, occupies a specific place in this system.24 However, he also sheds a particular light on the notion of celebrity. Proust stresses the fact that Vinteuil is a modest, insignificant public figure and that Marcel is astonished to discover that this grey person is the composer of the brilliant music he so worships. The thesis of the Contre Sainte-Beuve (Against SainteBeuve, another preparatory work, written between 1985‑1900) that advances the essential difference between man and work is clearly exemplified in Vinteuil.25 Celebrity will come when the world is capable of understanding his genius. In Vinteuil’s personal relations we can discover a comparable evolution: his only daughter has a lesbian relationship and, with her girlfriend, mocks her father whose sorrow is overwhelming. Yet here, too, there is a turning point after the death of Vinteuil: Mlle Vinteuil’s friend was sometimes worried by the importunate thought that she had perhaps hastened the death of Vinteuil. At any rate, by spending years in poring over the cryptic scroll left by him, in establishing the correct reading of those illegible hieroglyphs, Mlle Vinteuil’s friend had the consolation of assuring the composer whose grey hairs she had sent in sorrow to the grave an immortal and compensating glory.26

Reception Following the publication of Du côté de chez Swann in November 1913, Proust shows a great sense of authority in his interviews and other public engagements. The reception by the critics is generally positive and when some readers are rather puzzled, Proust sees this as quite comprehensible because his aim was to create this kind of psychological suspense. The interruption of the First World War makes it possible to further elaborate

24 In particular the assonance with Montjouvain, the place where the lesbian relation of his daughter is consumed. See Barthes 1967. 25 Proust 1971a. 26 Proust 1987‑1989, vol. 3, 766:‘L’amie de Mlle Vinteuil était quelquefois traversée par l’importune pensée qu’elle avait peut-être précipité la mort de Vinteuil. Du moins, en passant des années à débrouiller le grimoire laissé par Vinteuil, en établissant la lecture certaine de ces hiéroglyphes inconnus, l’amie de Mlle Vinteuil eut la consolation d’assurer au musicien dont elle avait assombri les dernières années une gloire immortelle et compensatrice’.

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the vast network of relations that accompanies and influences the personal, social, and artistic formation of Marcel. An event of significant importance that took place in the spring of 1914 had even more radical consequences for the construction of the novel: the death of Alfred Agostinelli, Proust’s beloved friend, who had fled from Paris and perished in an airplane crash. The story of Albertine in La prison‑ nière (The Prisoner, 1923) and Albertine disparue (The Fugitive, 1925) is a metamorphosis par excellence of these facts. When Proust is recognized today not only as a canonical celebrity but above all as one who reveals and offers commentary on our actual problems, this is due to the fundamental confrontation in his work between, on the one hand, pain, sorrow, deception, loss, and solitude (be it in individual lives or in a social-political context) and, on the other, the tenacious hope and incessant will to create an artistic alternative. Between 1919 and 1922, three more volumes are published, then, following his death, three final volumes. The Goncourt prize in 1919 is an obvious sign of the exceptional status that is increasingly attributed to the novel, and it should be emphasized that A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs was preferred by the Goncourt jury to major war novels such as Dorgelès’ Les croix de bois (Wooden Crosses, 1919). Leading critics in France concentrated on the psychological aspects often situating the Recherche in the tradition of symbolism and the decadents. This could partially explain a decline in interest for Proust’s work in the 1930s and 1940s in a France where community thinking and collective ideology dominated discourse. Proust was considered an author of the past, a snob or at the very least an admirer of old-fashioned ways, thus creating a sense of diminished relevance during the interbellum period. The young Irish writer Samuel Beckett, not yet naturalized as a Frenchman, came to Paris in the late 1920s and read Proust. His reaction was quite different from that of the French critics. In his study on Proust, published in 1929 (in English), he was the first to define with great precision the scope of memory and the struggle for artistic life.27 He stressed the capital importance of loss and mourning even in the heart of remembrance, and the role of art to continue in spite of everything. These attributes were to provide the principal ingredients of his own future work (particularly: Krapp’s Last Tape, 1958, and Company, 1979).28 For Beckett success came late, as evidenced by the 1969 Nobel Prize (in this respect the title of the principal biography by 27 Beckett 1929. 28 Beckett 2012b; Beckett 2012a.

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James Knowlson is eloquent: Damned to Fame, 1996).29 Interestingly, in the English-speaking world the fame of Proust did not undergo the same decline as in France. This was in substantial part due to the excellent translation of Scott Moncrieff (Remembrance of Things Past, with a Shakespearian accent), a translation accompanied by fine critical pages. Further, we can surmise that the modernist tradition in England (Joyce, Woolf, T.S. Eliot) created an environment more conducive for the reception of Proust than the more traditional literary scene in France. In the 1950s, France rediscovered Proust, his work firmly canonized by its publication in the Pléiades Library of Gallimard (the Clarac and Ferré edition of 1954). It was above all essayists and (aesthetic) philosophers (Deleuze, amongst others) who exploited the richness of the Recherche, and in the same way as the Nouvelle Critique they insisted on structural, formal, and stylistic properties.30 Psychoanalysis also found an exuberant and inexhaustible source of inspiration in Proust’s work.31 Literary theory, such as the narratological system of Gérard Genette, found their establishing principles within Proust’s work.32 Increasingly academic works featured Proust and his work became extensively reviewed. In the 1980s, the Recherche became one of the most prominent objects for a (re)new(ed) branch of research: literary genetics. The exploration of the imposing mass of ‘brouillons’ shed new light on technique, methods, intertextual connections, and originality. The new Pléiades edition, published under the direction of Jean-Yves Tadié between 1987 and 1989, proposes nearly the same quantity of variants and ‘esquisses’ (‘sketches’) as it reserves for the ‘basic’ text (Tadié also wrote the most complete biography of Proust). At present Brepols, in cooperation with the French research group Institut des Textes et Manuscrits modernes (ITEM), is publishing a facsimile edition of all the manuscripts with a diplomatic transcription and every possible critical support. Other editions offer alternative interpretations of the composition of the Recherche, as with the Nathalie Mauriac version of the Albertine story – one based on a heavily edited manuscript found in a house of her family that was related to the Prousts’. The image of his work that Proust advanced himself, showing the Recherche as a cathedral, becomes a subsequent meaning when we consider the genesis of the oeuvre: not only the different sections of the novel can be compared to parts of 29 30 31 32

Knowlson 2004. Deleuze 1968. See Bowie 1987; Bowie 2000. See Genette 1970.

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that sacred building, but its openness and inherent incompleteness offers another resemblance. In the final book the narrator suggests that every reader shall build his own Recherche, and this appeal for collaboration strikes a thoroughly contemporary note. Proust opened literature to the twentieth century whilst on the one hand conserving the values of tradition, and on the other forecasting the diversification and fragmentation of modern times. Together with James Joyce, this may go some way to explain how they became two of the most significant writers of the twentieth century.

Expansion and Influence Further vehicles for celebrity are of course the f ilms made after the Recherche, many with first-class actors and top locations: Volker Schlöndorf’s Un amour de Swann (1984), Raoul Ruiz’ Time Regained (1999), Nina Companéez’ A la recherche du temps perdu (2011), and last but not least the superb creation of Chantal Akerman’s La Captive (2000). And of course the beautiful version in bande dessinée (comics) by Stéphane Heuet.33 Schlöndorf opens his film with images of the writer in his bed, collecting his souvenirs, talking with Céleste. Companéez portrays the French belle époque to a television audience (the series was broadcasted at prime time) where Marcel is depicted as a somewhat naïve dandy. Ruiz presents the boy as the future artist eager above all to look and observe (using all sorts of instruments), this portrayal being a complex mirror of the entanglement of literature and cinema. Akerman gives a very intense impression of the visual and interpersonal enactment of jealousy with Sylvie Testud as a moving Albertine. Heuet finally respects the literary dimension of the Recherche – although his Marcel rather resembles Tintin. The international importance of Proust’s work is reflected first of all in the different translations (into more than a hundred languages). It seems every generation should have its own Proust translation. In Japan and in China where Proust is quite popular, several successive translations have been published. In 2003, new translations appeared in the UK (In Search of Lost Time, a Penguin edition, with Christopher Prendergast acting as general editor) and in Germany (by Luzius Keller, a Suhrkamp publication). The Dutch translation by Thérèse Cornips is currently undergoing a complete facelift. In 2015, the publisher Athenaeum published a new translation of 33 See Houppermans 2002, 203‑219; Houppermans 2008; Beugnet & Schmid 2005.

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Du côté de chez Swann by Martin de Haan and Rokus Hofstede (after their foregoing edition of Contre Sainte-Beuve). Whilst Cornips is more solemn in her interpretation, De Haan and Hofstede give a more modern feel to the text. To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the publication of Swann’s Way on 14 November 1913, the department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard organized a reading of an excerpt of Proust’s novel in many modern languages. How might we judge the celebrity of Proust nowadays? By his academic fame? The multitude of conferences, theses, studies, monographs? His prominent position in all levels of education? The number of books sold during a longer period? When we look at the Figaro-list of most sold classics in France between 2004 and 2012, Proust figures at an honourable – but not exceptionally elevated – 38th place, with the number of committed readers to finish the entire Recherche remaining fairly limited.34 However, celebrity is probably dependent more upon public perceptions and interest rather than any particular scholarly activity. Proust has his own section in the monumental work of Pierre Nora, Les Lieux de mémoire (Realms of Memory, 1984‑1992), a large collection of events, personalities, and objects that together constitute the cornerstones of French history (an article by Antoine Compagnon that can be read on the site of the Collège de France).35 A further criterion, one that concerns more directly the literary influence, can be found in the presence of Proustian elements in the work of major authors of succeeding generations. Authors whose works engage with the realm of memory almost invariably include references to the Recherche, even if only to contest the validity of Proust’s (supposed) idealism. For example: the 2014 Nobel Prize winner for literature, Patrick Modiano (from La Place de L’Étoile, 1968, to Pedigree, 2005), insists on the lack of liability and the fading out of memory. Georges Perec tried incessantly to circumscribe the tragic void that the Shoah left in twentieth-century history (especially in W, 1975). Pierre Bergounioux shows how the past of rural France has disappeared and for Richard Millet melancholy colours every souvenir. Maryse Condé, the famous Caribbean Francophone author, opens her collection of memories (Le Coeur à Rire et à

34 Le Figaro 2015. 35 Nora 1984‑1992. See also http://www.college-de-france.fr/site/antoine-compagnon/ seminar-2013‑01‑15‑17h30.htm, last accessed 5 November 2015. See also http://www.bnf.fr/fr/ evenements_et_culture/ anx_conferences_2012/a.c_120329_compagnon.html, last accessed 5 November 2015.

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Pleurer, 1999, translated as Tales from the Heart) with a reference to Proust that accentuates how time and subjectivity interfere in reminiscence. Let us now turn to the most famous of French authors of the second half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the 21st. In this context we think of Nobel Prize winners (besides Beckett and Modiano, already mentioned above) such as Claude Simon (1985) and J.M.G. Le Clézio (2008). Simon’s oeuvre, from Le Vent (The Wind, 1957) and La Route des Flandres (The Flanders Road, 1960) up to Le Tramway (The Trolley, 2001) constitutes, as with the Recherche, a vast cycle where geology, history, family, and the individual subject meet. Memory seems to function in this work as a large composition of things remembered where documents and facts are important, but where involuntary memory figures as a starting point and as a lasting constituent. So if a cycle is elaborated that outpaces historical time in its aspiration to gain a transtemporal level, this route can only be followed by fragments where the subjectivity of observations and the inevitable failure regarding any attempt to arrive at wholeness and unity are manifest. In its initial period, the link with Proust is principally based on this concern with memory. However, from the 1970s onward, questions relating to textual composition and the attention given to the relative autonomy of words and phrases will become predominant. In Simon’s critical texts the importance of description plays a significant role. Simon even affirms that this is really the most groundbreaking input from Proust, one that he associates with his preoccupations concerning the construction of the story (and for him it is the progress of description that puts fiction in order). In ‘Le poisson-cathédrale’ for instance Simon explains that the description of the fish served at the table of the Grand Hôtel in Proust’s Balbec constitutes both the basis and the organizing formula of the whole chapter that follows. The description of a horse, for instance, in La Route des Flandres, functions similarly. They partake of what he defines as a ‘a subtle whole of networks and grilles that are superimposed and play on different registers, but that conserve certain common points of anchorage’.36 Simon suggests that the fish of Balbec opens on to the splendour of the sea and on to Albertine, but also on to its frightening aspects and its mythical origins. In this way the adventure of words opens life and its tragic dimensions, as Simon tries to realize in novels such as Les Géorgiques (The Georgics, 1981, for instance the description of the swamp) or L’Acacia (The Acacia, 1989, tree and battle-fields).

36 Simon 2014, 16.

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Simon’s literary testament, Le Tramway, is very Proustian.37 Stories that stem from different moments in life are associated with the work of memory, with reflection, with echoes, and (or) with linguistic impulses, just as in Proust’s work where these elements are often inextricably interwoven. The concatenations in Le Tramway generally depend on loss, absence, and default. Loss of father and mother, the insistent presence of the victims of the Grande Guerre, and painful hospital stays. The most elaborated reference to the Recherche regards also the suffering caused by the relation with Albertine, exemplary for all human relations. There seem to be only two ways to find a euphoric dimension capable of softening this negativity. First of all there is poetic practice, the transformation of negative experiences in a literary work as during a voyage (by tramway here, by coach, train or automobile in central passages of Proust). Simon’s ‘magic’ night on the sardine boat resembles Proust’s evocations of the sea where memory reaches a rare completeness as once and forever experienced in the amniotic waters. This experience is expressed through the comparable length of textual waves overflowing absence and disunity. Beyond the kinship between Proust and Simon a literary family emerges where the existential affect that unites glory and distress both nourishes the writing, and is fostered by it. The Swedish Nobel Prize committee may have made its award to Le Clézio primarily on behalf of his transcultural themes, the fruitful confrontation in his texts between different cultural scenes; he is also a superior creator of images and a sublime stylist.38 Again, the images of the ocean and the sea are the most important ones for a comparison, as are the repetitive constructions parallel to the movement of the waves. In his recent publication Tempête (Storm, 2014) we read the story of a young girl, June, living on the isle of Udo. Hers is a love story with an elder man trying to forget a tragic past. When she discovers that he has abandoned her she tries to commit suicide in the sea yet in this tragic moment she also finds her salvation. In the following passage Le Clézio’s style is near the prose of the Recherche: I go away, far away, in the deeps, I’ll go and find the young girl that lies under the water, I’ll go and find again her open eyes, I will meet all those 37 Simon 2001. 38 The Nobel Prize committee (Nobel Prize 2008) described Le Clézio as ‘the author of rupture, of poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, the explorer of a humanity beyond and below society as we know it’ [‘l’écrivain de la rupture, de l’aventure poétique et de l’extase sensuelle, l’explorateur d’une humanité au-delà et en dessous de la civilisation régnante’]. My translation. See http:// www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/ laureates/2008/clezio-facts.html, last accessed 5 November 2015.

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girls who once disappeared […]. And I feel a skin that touches me, a tender and grey skin, tepid, familiar, that envelopes me and brings me into her, a very soft and very powerful skin, a smooth body that embraces me and leads me to the daylight, to the light of the sun, and when I leave the sea, I hear a cry, raspy, sharp, the cry of my mother, and I push my head back in my turn and I scream, I open my throat, I vomit the water of the sea and I cry my name, my only name. Eeeaaarh-yaar.39

This is the same tone Proust uses to discover the sea, at the beginning of his stay at Balbec for instance, whilst he adds a further dramatic dimension when he uses the language of passion to describe the waves at the Creuniers. Here appears the deepest level of our instinctive affection for Proust, his principal claim of glory, this entrance in the universe of semiotic experiences (as Julia Kristeva defines them), the direct opening to the lost paradise of utopian symbiosis, and the mastery and the genius to reconquer the symbolic world of language and signs and, in doing so, to obtain a place in it and through it for this ecstatic and euphoric movement. 40 We may prefer this kind of celebrity, one based on transcultural, mythical and stylistic elements to a more superficial kind of fame that regards the presence of Proust in everyday life – especially in tourism. However, should you wish to experience this aspect of his work you have to travel to IlliersCombray near Chartres. An imagined Illiers was the village where Proust situated the first part of his novel and to honour the author the French authorities decided in 1971 (the centenary of his birth) to combine the ‘real’ name with the literary one (a unique case in France; Ferney-Voltaire is a different combination for instance). The House of Aunt Léonie (showing the same mixture of text and reality) has become a museum, a hotspot of Proust adoration. You can stay for a night in the Hotel des Aubépines, named after the hawthorns of the Recherche and walk to the Pré Catelan, a park that an uncle of Marcel founded and where he situated some episodes of his novel. Additionally, boulangerie Le Panier Gourmand d’Illiers, rue

39 Le Clézio 2013, 132: ‘Je m’en vais loin, profond, je vais retrouver la jeune fille étendue au fond de l’eau, je vais retrouver ses yeux ouverts, je vais rejoindre toutes celles qui ont disparu […]. Et je sens une peau contre moi, une peau tendre et grise, tiède, familière qui m’enveloppe et me porte en elle, une peau très douce, très puissante, un corps lisse qui m’embrasse et me conduit vers le jour, vers la lumière du soleil, et lorsque je sors de la mer, j’entends son cri, rauque, aigu, le cri de ma mère, et à mon tour je renverse la tête et je pousse un cri, j’ouvre ma gorge, je vomis l’eau de mer, et je crie mon nom, mon seul nom. Eeeaaarh-yaar’. My translation. 40 Kristeva 1969.

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Saint-Hilaire, offers a large choice of madeleines (and of course you should recognize those flavoured with real orange blossom).

In Conclusion In this chapter we were able to distinguish between two sorts of celebrity: as the collected correspondence shows, Marcel Proust was really a child of his time, and he aspired to gain public fame – to become another Victor Hugo. However, in the Recherche he defined with subtlety the vanity of this position, particularly for that which concerns the life of young Marcel. He became aware of ‘real’ values in two different yet complementary ways: by the discovery of the real nature of the aristocracy he at first blindly adored, and above all by the encounter with a series of masters in art. Bergotte the writer teaches him finally how important it is not to be disturbed as an author and to concentrate on what is essential in art: this is what he reveals as he contemplates Vermeer’s View of Delft and glorifies the famous little patch of yellow wall. Elstir the painter seems to achieve this sort of perfection in his ‘metaphorical’ paintings where the sea and the landscape interfere. However, the most important master will be Vinteuil the composer: beginning with his sonata, he shows a specific evolution that goes via the quartet to the sublime septet, ‘rouge’ – red in his superior emotive –, a spiritual and aesthetic composition. Thus he retraces the discovery made as a boy that the artistic realization of the actress (la Berma) is of another nature than her social role. Towards the end of the Recherche the narrator decides to retire from social life and to pledge all his remaining time to his oeuvre. Only the work of art makes it possible to experience a glimpse of eternity, of extratemporal celebrity. 41

Bibliography R. Barthes, Proust et les noms (La Haye: Mouton, 1967). S. Beckett, Proust (London: Chatto and Windus, 1929). S. Beckett, Company (New York: Grove Press, 2012a). S. Beckett, Krapp’s Last Tape (New York: Grove Press, 2012b). P. Bénichou, Le sacre de l’Écrivain (Paris: Gallimard, 1996). M. Beugnet & M. Schmid, Proust at the Movies (London: Ashgate, 2005). 41 I thank Adam Watt for correcting my English where necessary.

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P. Bourdieu, Les règles de l’Art (Paris: Seuil, 1994). M. Bowie, Freud, Proust and Lacan: Theory as Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). M. Bowie, Proust Among the Stars (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). J-M.G. Le Clézio, Tempête (Paris: Gallimard, 2013). A. Compagnon, Proust entre deux siècles (Paris: Seuil, 1989). G. Deleuze, Proust et les signes (Paris: PUF, 1968). Le Figaro, ‘Le top 50 des auteurs classiques les plus vendus’, http://www.lefigaro.fr/​ livres/2012/03/14/03005‑20120314ARTFIG00604-le-top-50-des auteurs-classiques​ -les-plus-vendus.php, last accessed 23 September 2015. G. Genette, Figures III (Paris: Seuil, 1970). N. Heinich, Être écrivain: Création et identité (Paris: La Découverte, 2000). S. Houppermans, Proust constructiviste (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002). S. Houppermans, ‘A la recherche des images perdues’, Relief, revue électronique de littérature française 2 (2008), 398‑423. J. Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The life of Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Press, 2004). J. Kristeva, Semiotikè (Paris: Seuil, 1969). F. Leriche, Lettres de Proust 1879‑1922 (Paris: Plon, 2004). Nobel Prize 2008, ‘The Nobel Prize in Literature 2008’, http://www.nobelprize. org/nobel_prizes/ literature/laureates/2008/press_fr.html, last accessed 23 September 2015. P. Nora, Les Lieux de mémoire. 7 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1984‑1992). M. Proust, Correspondance, ed. by P. Kolb, 21 vols. (Paris: Plon, 1970‑1993). M. Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu, 4 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1987‑1989). M. Proust, Contre Sainte-Beuve (Paris: Gallimard, 1971a). M. Proust, Jean Santeuil (Paris: Gallimard, 1971b). R. Roussel, Comment j’ai écrit certains de mes livres (Paris: Lemerre, 1935). C. Simon, Le Tramway (Paris: Minuit, 2001). C. Simon, Quatre conférences (Paris: Minuit, 2014). J-Y. Tadié, Marcel Proust: Biographie (Paris: Gallimard, 1996). J-Y. Tadié, Le Cercle de Marcel Proust, 2 vols. (Paris: Champion, 2013‑2015).

Figure 25 Ezra Pound at the Home of William Carlos Williams, Rutherford, New Jersey, 1958

Picture by Richard Avedon Private collection (www.liveauctioneers.com)

7

The National Skeleton Ezra Pound (1885‑1972) Peter Liebregts

It is possible that the enduring image of the American poet Ezra Pound, both in literary history and the popular imagination, was defined in a single gesture, one that was to cast a long shadow over not only his innovative contributions to English-language poetry, but also his energy in helping to shape what we now call Modernism. In 1945, Pound was found guilty of treason by an American court for broadcasting on behalf of Mussolini’s Italian government during the war. He escaped execution on grounds of insanity and was sent to St Elizabeth’s in Washington, a mental hospital where he would stay for more than twelve years. In April 1958, the indictment for treason was dismissed, and in June Pound boarded a ship to take him to his beloved Italy. On his arrival in Naples, journalists and photographers came on board the Cristoforo Colombo. Pound made anti-American and anti-Semitic statements and when photographers asked him to pose, with a smile he put his left hand on his hip and raised his right arm to give the fascist salute.1 It was this gesture that both confirmed and sealed Pound’s public image as an American traitor. The exact nature of Pound’s anti-Semitism and racism, and the extent of his active support of Mussolini’s fascist regime, have rightly been a recurrent source of debate in Poundian scholarship. However, the general image of him as ‘a fascist poet’ has inevitably become an important element in any general evaluation of Pound’s position in literary history.2 The assessment of his artistic importance and the huge impact Pound has had on developments in poetry has been less of an issue amongst scholars and critics. In Lives of the Poets (1998), a general history of poetry, Michael Schmidt neatly summarizes this in clear terms: ‘After Pound, we read poetry differently. If, that is, we read Pound at all. Without him, it is hard to know how we could read Basil Bunting, Louis Zukofsky, Charles Olson, Charles Reznikoff, 1 Carpenter 1988, 848. 2 For some contrasting views on both sides of the entire spectrum, see Casillo 1988, who sees Pound’s personality and work infected with anti-Semitism from beginning to end and Moody 2014, who sees Pounds anti-Semitism more as a political ploy and part of his economic thought. For a nuanced middle way, see Hatlen 2005.

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Robert Duncan and a host of others. […] Without Pound, much of the most innovative poetry looks like nonsense’.3 Pound’s undeniable literary importance makes the political element of his work an issue to be confronted by anyone wishing to engage with him. The question to what degree his espousal of fascism has tainted his magnum opus, the modern epic The Cantos (published between 1925 and 1969), is an essential one which has produced a set of very different and mutually exclusive answers. This essay will explore how Pound’s fascist image has become so dominant by looking at the ways in which the author consciously determined his image, as well as the manner in which his image started to develop independently of him. In his Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity (2005), Aaron Jaffe has shown how Modernists used various strategies when creating markets for their work. In this context, he has defined ‘modernist self-fashioning’ as ‘the instrumentality of signs of “authorship”’, and has used this term ‘not only for modernist projects and idioms but also for its critical posterity’. 4 However, in this chapter I will use the term ‘self-fashioning’ differently and employ it alongside ‘autofabrication’, thereby adopting a distinction made by Sara Polak in her work on the development of the image of Franklin Delano Roosevelt during and after his lifetime. She correctly notes that the term self-fashioning was coined by Stephen Greenblatt in Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980), where it is used to describe the fashioning of a self by a self. However, there is a difference between the fabrication of a self and the fashioning or fabrication of an image or persona. Self and image need not necessarily coincide. Autofabrication, then, may be used to indicate the fabrication of an image or persona, rather than a self, by its owner.5 As we will see, the notions of the self and of a persona are complex in the case of Pound due to his ambiguous and changing attitude towards the nature of the relationship between man and work.

3 Schmidt 1998, 694. 4 Jaffe 2005, 9. 5 I am grateful to Sara Polak for allowing me to use this distinction that she herself is currently applying in her PhD dissertation on Franklin D. Roosevelt at the University of Leiden, the Netherlands,.

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The Pink Coat of Ezekiel Ton Throughout his life Pound always had a flair for the dramatic, for the grand gesture and the sweeping self-aggrandizing statement. In his autobiographical sketch Indiscretions (1923), for example, written when he was 35, Pound gives us selected fragments of family history while implying that they offer the history of the United States in microcosm. In this piece of myth-making, the poet describes himself as Baby Gargantua and how one day a large strawberry was dangled in front of him ‘to teach the infant Gargantua to look about; to look “up” and to be ready for the benefits of the gods, whether so whither they might come upon him’. Apparently they did, because Baby Gargantua was a gifted child who at the age of two ‘spoke the English tongue and used syntax and eschewed the muliebria of diminutives’.6 We witness here through Pound’s self-promoting eyes the depiction of the birth of the man predestined to become a poet. This autofabricated image of a man who seemed to have no other options in his self-fashioning is one that keeps recurring in Pound’s memories of his formative years. He entered the University of Pennsylvania in 1901, at the age of fifteen. Twelve years later in ‘How I Began’ (1913) he wrote: ‘I knew at fifteen pretty much what I wanted to do. I resolved that at thirty I would know more about poetry than any man living, that I would know the dynamic content from the shell, that I would know what was accounted poetry everywhere’.7 For Pound, the study of arts and languages, and poetry in particular, became a means to an end. As he claimed in 1930, he had ‘entered U. Penn at 15 with the intention of studying comparative values in literature (poetry) and began doing so unbeknown to the faculty’.8 Pound repeatedly made such statements with variations, as in Make It New (1934): ‘I began an examination of comparative European literature in or about 1901; with the definite intention of finding out what had been written, and how’.9 This recurrent claim makes it an important and self-advertising thread in the autofabricating pattern. In a 1960 interview Pound continued to present this idea combined with, from a youthful perspective, an as yet unknown rendezvous with destiny, to be bestowed upon him by divine favour: ‘I did have the idea, at fifteen, of making a general survey. Of course whether I was or wasn’t a poet was a matter for the Gods to decide, but at 6 7 8 9

Pound 1958, 42. Pound 1913, 707. Pound 1963, 15. Pound 1935, 8.

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least it was up to me to find out what had been done’.10 Taken together, these statements present a life-long consistent self-portrait of the artist as a young man. Having graduated from university and after a mediocre career as a teacher, Pound left for Europe in 1908. His first stop was Venice where he had his first volume of poetry, A Lume Spento (1908), printed privately. The collection drew some reviews, some of which may have been written by Pound himself – a not uncommon feature of literary market strategy. He left for London in September 1908 with the intention to meet one of the greatest poets of the time, William Butler Yeats, and to try to forge a career there. Although he did not know anybody on arrival, within a few months he became acquainted with leading artistic figures and became part of their circles, including Yeats. From the start, as all the various biographies attest, Pound acted the part of a self-assured and knowledgeable poet, with the desire to control any artistic group in which he found himself, even the gathering of poets around Yeats. As Douglas Goldring writes in his memoir, South Lodge (1943): ‘[Pound] dominated the room, distributed Yeats’s cigarettes and Chianti, and laid down the law about poetry’.11 Pound’s tireless self-promotion resulted in having some of his work printed in influential magazines and in the publication of several volumes of poetry, such as Personae (1909), which was reviewed in England, but also the United States, France, and Australia, with some of the reviewers spurred on by Pound. His rapidly increasing reputation, fame and celebrity even resulted in a lampoon in the leading satirical magazine Punch as ‘the new Montana (U.S.A.) poet, Ezekiel Ton’: Mr Ton, who has left America to reside for a while in London and impress his personality on English editors, publishers and readers, is by far the newest poet going, whatever other advertisements may say. He has succeeded, where all others have failed, in evolving a blend of the imagery of the unfettered West, the vocabulary of Wardour Street, and the sinister abandon of Borgiac Italy.12

As this sketch makes clear, it was clearly not only the poet’s work that drew attention. Pound’s theatrical behaviour and his need to impress is a recurrent theme in descriptions of him during these early years in London. 10 Pound 1977, 45. 11 Quoted in Ackroyd 1987, 21. 12 Quoted in Moody 2007, 94.

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There is the apocryphal anecdote about Pound eating the floral decorations at a supper party attended by, amongst others, D.H. Lawrence, Ford, and Yeats.13 Pound often took particular care to be seen in what he regarded as a poet’s outfit, which ‘consisted of a shirt (preferably of a striking colour) worn with its very large collar half open and a broad tie knotted loosely as if it were a cravat. Spats were added over the shoes, and the whole was topped with a velvet jacket, or sometimes with a grey overcoat whose buttons had been replaced by squares of lapis lazuli. When he required glasses […] he now used a pair of pince-nez. Most significant of all, he abandoned his clean-shaven features for a thin moustache, swept outwards, and a small goatee beard’.14 Variations on this outfit would consist of the wearing of a sombrero and the handling of a cane, all of which were meant to contribute to the self-fashioned image of the bohemian artist. Perhaps the most famous description of Pound has been given by Ford Madox Ford, who sketched a morning encounter: ‘[Ezra] would approach with the step of a dancer, making passes with a cane at an imaginary opponent. He would wear trousers made of green billiard cloth, a pink coat, a blue shirt, a tie hand-painted by a Japanese friend, an immense sombrero, a flaming beard cut to a point, and a single, large blue earring’.15 For some years this eccentric but conscious histrionic behaviour may have compensated for the lack of certainty of tone in his early poetry and the lack of a strong sense of self. In this early verse, self-expression is made subservient to experimentation with a variety of forms and technical discipline. With hindsight the gods did bless Pound with poetic talent, but the poet also repeatedly made clear that talent by itself is not what makes a good writer. In ‘How I Began’ he claimed that ‘the “Impulse” is with the gods’, but that ‘technique is a man’s own responsibility’.16 Thus knowledge and practice of poetic technique must be added to the ‘Impulse’ of the gods. Poets are not born fully fledged, but must make or fashion themselves, and Pound would throughout his life claim that good poets (re)make themselves after the image of others. In his view, the best way of doing this is to imitate and emulate those great writers of the past who have become famous for their sublimity. In his essay ‘Prolegomena’ (1912) Pound insists on a thorough knowledge of – and experimenting with – older poetry, 13 14 15 16

See Carpenter 1988, 134; Wilhelm 1990, 8. Carpenter 1988, 129. Ford 1932, 356‑357. Pound 1913, 707.

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as well as the conscious absorption of a multiplicity of divergent influences, because only then may one get to see one’s own place in the tradition and development of poetry. In The Spirit of Romance (1910), which many call his seminal work, Pound describes what was to become the quintessence of his view of literary history: ‘The history of an art is the history of masterwork’. 17 He defined a masterwork of poetry in ‘How to Read’ as ‘an invention, a definite contribution to the art of verbal expression’.18 This discovery may be found ‘in only a line or in two lines, or in some quality of a cadence’ but it is something that will change the development of art.19 Pound’s criticism of other works and a large part of his own poetic oeuvre attempt to present these, in his view, literary masterpieces, such as the Latin poem Pervigilium Veneris or the Italian poetry of Guido Cavalcanti. Knowledge of these innovative masters and their special techniques enable the scholar-critic-reader to develop a balanced overview of past and present literary works, whilst the poet will be able to perfect his craft by mastering these techniques and thus finding a way in which he may become such a master. Pound’s tribute to these innovators in his own poetry takes the forms of quotation, allusion, persona, translation, and imitation, the latter being a work in the style of a particular author without being an actual translation. The quotation or allusion can consist of a single line, as Pound believed that often a single line might be representative of what he called the virtù of an author or an individual work. Virtù is that quality which differentiates a man or a poem from others: It is by reason of this virtù that we have one Catullus, one Villon; by reason of it that no amount of technical cleverness can produce a work having the same charm as the original. […] So far as mortal immortality is concerned, the poet need only discover his virtù and survive the discovery long enough to write some few scant dozen verses – providing, that is, that he have acquired some reasonable technique, this latter being the matter of a lifetime – or not, according to the individual facility.20

Pound’s early poems are often built around ‘luminous details’ as the keys to the disclosure of a particular virtù. Pound recycles the past in his work 17 18 19 20

Pound 1952, 7. Pound 1954, 17. Pound 1954, 19. Pound 1952, 28‑29.

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to present an ideal standard, and to stress its ongoing relevance for the present and future (to ‘Make It New’), while frequently evoking the dead poet as a persona for himself. He recognized in other writers a description of congenial experiences and saw in their works aspects of his own self already expressed. By mixing fact and fiction in his imaginative recreation of historical characters, and by combining the archaic and the modern in his language, his personae could thus serve as ‘masks of the self’.21 The same can be said about his translations, which are both personal exercises in the study of literary craftsmanship and masquerades of self-fashioning. Translation is then literally a transposition of the experience of a past poet in one language, the experience shared by the poet and Pound, into the terms of the language of Pound. In this respect Pound uses both his original work and his many translations to link himself as an individual talent to the literary tradition, thereby not only paying tribute to his poetic predecessors, but consciously putting himself and his own work on the same level. The implicit result is the autofabrication of himself as a poet in whose output the literary tradition has found a culmination.

Marketing Modernism Besides his taste for the exceptional in poetry, Pound also possessed a keen entrepreneurial talent for knowing whom to befriend or ask for support, or where to find an outlet for his poems, reviews, and essays. He used this talent not only to promote himself, but also to champion the work of other aspiring authors.22 It was Pound who in his tireless search for the ‘new’ discovered in 1912 the work of H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) and Richard Aldington, had their work published in the American magazine Poetry, and on the basis of their work founded the Imagist movement that would leave long traces in the history of English poetry. At the same time he promoted the work of William Carlos Williams and Robert Frost, who were at that time relatively unknown. Having substituted Vorticism for Imagism, Pound, together with Wyndham Lewis, created another short-lived but influential art movement in 1914 that sought to bridge the gap between the verbal and the visual. The first of the two Vorticist manifestoes, Blast (1914), perhaps the most famous of all such Anglophone Modernist texts, not only contained the first part of 21 Pound 1970, 85. 22 For a detailed description and analysis of Pound as a ‘marketeer’ of Modernism, see Materer 1996.

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what would become Ford Madox Ford’s masterpiece The Good Soldier (1915), but also pictures of the work of a young sculptor, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, who would die in the trenches in 1915, but whose work would have a great impact on the plastic arts. It was also Pound who, with his work on the manuscripts of the scholar Ernest Fenollosa, which contained translations of Chinese poetry and Japanese Noh plays, helped to open up Western literature to the influx of Asian writing and art. This provided Yeats with the impetus to break new ground in his development as a dramatist by producing plays – an amalgam of Noh form with Irish mythological lore – after he spent some time in the company of Pound working on the Fenollosa material in 1913. Yeats brought Pound into contact with James Joyce, who by that year had not yet published much. Pound included a poem by Joyce in his Imagist collection Des Imagistes (1914), and arranged for the English magazine The Egoist to serialize Joyce’s novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in 25 instalments in 1914‑1915, after which it was published in book form in 1916. Pound would continue to support Joyce not only artistically but also financially. He was successful, for example, in persuading the British government in 1916 to award Joyce £100 from the Civil List. On Pound’s instigation, the Little Review began to serialize Ulysses in 1918, however this ceased when in 1920 obscenity charges were brought against the journal’s editors. Although Pound gradually lost his enthusiasm for Joyce’s work and would dismiss Finnegans Wake (1939), he would continue to support him. In 1920, Pound helped Joyce to relocate from Trieste to Paris so that he could finish Ulysses. Had Pound not become a recognized leading writer in his own right, he still would have secured his name in literary history by being a spider in the Modernist web. Of course, the most famous case of Pound’s involvement is T.S. Eliot, whom he met in 1914 and recognized immediately as a staggeringly original poetic voice. Thanks to Pound, Eliot had several poems published in magazines before Pound managed to bring out Pufrock and Other Observations in 1917 through the Egoist Press. When in November 1921 Eliot showed Pound in Paris a manuscript of a long poem he was unable to finish, the latter recognized the remarkable quality of the text and began to edit it. He thus gave The Waste Land (1922) the shape it needed to become the most influential English-language poem of the twentieth century. Eliot gratefully dedicated the poem to Pound as il miglior fabbro, ‘the better craftsman’. In 1922, Pound also created a subscription called ‘Bel Esprit’, a sort of crowdsourcing enterprise that aimed at supplying Eliot with an additional £300 per year so that he could give up his job as a bank clerk. Although the scheme came to nothing since Eliot decided to retain his position, the plan was

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yet another example of Pound’s energy and readiness to come to the aid of those he recognized as gifted geniuses who should be enabled to fully focus on their work, and not be distracted by financial concerns. Through these various acts, he fully deserved the tag of the ‘midwife of Modernism’, a title sometimes granted to him in literary history.23 Without Pound, 1922 – the annus mirabilis of Anglo-American Modernism – might have become a far less important year in literary encyclopedias. During the 1920s, Pound would begin to direct his energies less towards literary matters on behalf of others, and more towards realizing the first of several parts of his own modern epic, A Draft of XVI Cantos (1925), with subsequent parts in the 1930s. By that time he had moved from Paris to Rapallo on the Italian coast, where he would organize a series of concerts together with his mistress, the violinist Olga Rudge. Together they would unearth a large number of unknown Vivaldi manuscripts and thus kickstart renewed recognition of the Venetian composer. In the 1930s, alongside his poetic work, Pound published not only literary essays and books, such as Guide to Kulchur (1938) and ABC of Reading (1934), but also texts on economic topics, such as ABC of Economics (1933) and Social Credit: An Impact (1935). This latter title indicates Pound’s interest in the economic basis of societies and what he considered the injustice of the distribution of wealth and money in Western society. It is here that we find the roots for his enthusiasm for Benito Mussolini and his fascist regime. It is hard to imagine how anyone living in Italy in 1922 could have been blind to the violent manner in which Mussolini had managed to become the sole leader of the Italian state. Pound, however, chose to ignore this in favour of what he saw as the strength of Italy in comparison to Western democracies, namely the Duce’s intentions to take control of the state so as to bring about a reform of its economic means for the welfare of the people. Here was a man who in Pound’s eyes would not only talk about economic justice, but also had the will and power to put his ideas into practice. (It must be noted in this respect that unlike Wyndham Lewis, Pound never held Hitler’s National Socialism in high regard.) Pound’s increasing interest in economics shows in the 1930s instalments of The Cantos, in which more and more pages are devoted to poetical expositions of just societies and enlightened leaders of the past, held up as models for a debased present. Canto XLI includes a description of a brief audience with Mussolini, granted in 1933, during which he promoted his ideas about economic reforms and presented the Duce with a copy of 23 See Reid 1968, 199; Tytell 1988, 115.

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A Draft of XXX Cantos (1930), which the Italian leader called ‘divertente’, ‘amusing’.24 Economics and politics are the main subjects in The Fifth Decade of Cantos (Cantos XLII-LI, 1937), focusing on usury, while Cantos LII-LXXI (1940) presents Chinese history and the life of the American president John Adams as guides for an ideal government. Many critics, including Pound’s friends, such as Eliot, Yeats, Lewis, and Joyce, felt that his poetry had become subservient to the hammering home of a moral message, and that Pound the poet was squandering his artistic talents. Here we may see the widening gap between Pound’s self-fashioning and others’ perception of him. Pound’s growing obsession with the need for economic reform in the 1930s also led to a maniacal output of articles, as well as thousands of letters to politicians, bankers, and anyone involved in the monetary system, often addressed in an aggressive and hyper-didactic tone to make his point. This belligerence increasingly alienated him from his friends, making him more isolated from the world. Towards the end of the 1930s, Pound became so convinced of the rightness of his own ideas and his own authoritative power as a poet-thinker that in 1939 he went to Washington to speak with President Roosevelt himself in the hope of persuading him to keep the United States out of the war, but he had to satisfy himself with lecturing several senators about Social Credit. Frustration born of his inability to effect any real changes made him lash out even more and led to publications of an anti-Semitic nature in various Italian magazines and newspapers, in which he tried to expose what he saw as the Jewish control of the financial world. After the attack on Pearl Harbor Pound tried unsuccessfully to return to the United States. Had his application been granted, he might not have become so involved in the pro-Italian and anti-American broadcasts for Rome Radio from 1941 onwards, a move which ultimately led to his public and personal undoing – yet perhaps one that made him better known than his poetry alone. His radio speeches increasingly consisted of incoherent rambling attacks on Jews and denunciations of America for having betrayed its own principles by fighting against the Axis. In 1943, he was indicted for treason. In April 1945, he was arrested and a month later transferred to the American Disciplinary Training Center in Pisa. There he spent a short period in a reinforced cage exposed to light day and night, which eventually led to a breakdown. Pound then was transferred to the medical compound of the Center where he would write the eleven Cantos that would constitute The Pisan Cantos 24 Pound 1987, 202.

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(1948), in the eyes of many critics one of the best sections of The Cantos and the one that would make him even more famous than before. As previously stated, after the war Pound was sent to St Elizabeth’s in Washington. Whilst there he received visits from his friends as well as his admirers, some of them racist and anti-Semitic, many of whom would publicly declare that the poet was held captive because of his political beliefs. These declarations caused his critical reputation to rise. In 1949, he was awarded the first Bollingen Prize for Poetry for The Pisan Cantos, which resulted in an enormous uproar in the media.25 The New York Times of Sunday morning 20 February 1949, had as a headline: ‘Pound, in Mental Clinic / Wins Prize for Poetry / Penned in Treason Cell’. A more nuanced report was given the following day by the New York Herald Tribune, which quoted the jurors’ statement that they were aware that there might be objections, but ‘[to] permit other considerations than that of poetic achievement to sway the decision would destroy the significance of the award and would in principle deny the validity of that objective perception on which any civilized society must rest’.26 The award became world news and even led Radio Moscow to comment one month later: ‘One is prompted to ask how low and miserable must be the quality of modern bourgeois poetry in America if even the insane and verified ravings of a confessed madman could win a literary prize?’27 Members of the Bollingen jury, which included fellow poets W.H. Auden, T.S. Eliot, Allen Tate, and Robert Lowell, were accused of condoning anti-Semitism, while the Library of Congress, which had administered the Prize, was said to have been infiltrated by fascists.

The Pound Industry All of this put the spotlight back on Pound’s poetry, and marked the beginning of an academic interest in his work, with Hugh Kenner’s The Poetry of Ezra Pound (1951) a seminal work of this period. In the 1950s, Pound continued to write, adding more sections to The Cantos, whilst also publishing other work. He had now become a media object about whom opinion was very much divided. Leading intellectuals in the 1950s in both Europe and the United States began a campaign to effect Pound’s release from St Elizabeth’s, a cause taken up by several influential 25 On the Bollingen episode, see Carpenter 1988, 787‑793. 26 Quoted in Carpenter 1988, 792. 27 Quoted in Heymann 1976, 221.

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periodicals such as Life Magazine, which in February 1956 pointed out that the broadcaster ‘Tokyo Rose’ just had been released from prison: ‘Attention is surely due the case of Ezra Pound. […] Pound’s room at St Elizabeth’s has been called “a closet which contains a national skeleton”. […] The arguments for quashing the indictment […] should be publicly considered’.28 T.S. Eliot, generally recognized as one of the world’s leading poets, repeatedly spoke on Pound’s behalf, as did Robert Frost, by this time regarded as America’s national poet. At some point even the UN Secretary Dag Hammerskjöld weighed in, which would lead to President Eisenhower himself intervening in the discussion and making the US Attorney General drop all charges against Pound. His release in 1958 was front-page news in several leading newspapers. Following his return to Italy in June of that year, Pound received many invitations for interviews, but he increasingly fell silent, suffering from breakdowns and ill health. His public appearances became less frequent, and in 1972 he died in Venice. Pound’s arrest and incarceration temporarily overshadowed his artistic achievements, and even the awarding of the Bollingen Prize did not immediately restore his reputation. The f irst steps in the process of rehabilitation were marked by T.S. Eliot’s editing of Pound’s Liter‑ ary Essays in 1954, for which he also wrote an introduction in which he praised Pound’s literary criticism as ‘the most important contemporary criticism of its kind’, as he ‘has said much about the art of writing and of writing poetry in particular, that is permanently valid and useful. Very few critics have done that’.29 This endorsement followed three years after the first critical academic approach to Pound’s poetry by Hugh Kenner in The Poetry of Ezra Pound, which many scholars later regarded as a positive turning point in the appreciation of Pound as an artist. The ‘Pound industry’ that developed in the 1950s and 1960s, whilst Pound was still publishing new work, did sever the man from the poet, and the poet from the politics. Pound’s reputation became definitively secured when Hugh Kenner placed him at the heart of the Modernist project with The Pound Era (1971), and the University of Maine began Paideuma: A Journal Devoted to Pound Scholarship (1972). During these years, Pound’s poetry became the focus of aesthetic attention, whilst the uproar over his fascism and anti-Semitism receded. However, in the 1980s, new critical approaches found their way 28 Quoted in Cornell 1967, 121. 29 Pound 1954, x.

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into universities, and departments of literature became politicized. There was a renewed academic interest in the connection between life, context, and work, and Pound’s ‘darker sides’ were taken into account again. This scholarly debate has not abated, perhaps, as poet and critic Charles Bernstein already noted in a talk he gave in 1985, because: ‘The irresolvability of the problem is Pound’s legacy’.30 By this reading, Pound’s life and ideas are inextricably linked to his work: they are two sides of the same coin, forcing the reader to consider them both. Pound is more than simply the sum total of his political allegiances and ideologies, which is why his influence on contemporary poetry has been enormous. As leading critic Marjorie Perloff stated: ‘What poet writing in England or America since World War II has not learned from Pound?’31 Outside of academia, however, Pound continued to be better known for his fascist leanings than for his poetry. A clear example of this popular image can be seen in the 1987 TV mini-series Echoes in the Darkness, directed by Glenn Jordan and written by Joseph Wambaugh. It tells the true story of what came to be known as the ‘Main Line’ murder case in Philadelphia. In 1979, a teacher from an affluent Philadelphia suburb was found dead in the trunk of a car, while her two young children disappeared and eventually were declared officially dead. It took a massive, seven-year homicide investigation before two men were brought to justice in separate trials. One of these was William Bradfield (played by Peter Coyote in the TV series), a womanizing, charming, incredibly manipulative teacher of English and the classics. In the series he is presented as a would-be poet who idolizes Ezra Pound, whom he envies for having lived alone in a locked room in an asylum so that he could focus on his work. On occasion the TV character of Bradfield quotes Pound and asks why he was incarcerated for treason: ‘What is treason to an artist, to a genius?’32 Needless to say, the use of Pound in this context did not really help to overcome his negative popular image, which had become far removed from his own autofabricated presentation. More recently in 2012, Pound’s daughter, Mary de Rachewiltz, was forced to launch a lawsuit against an Italian fascist organization that had named itself after the poet. The far-right group CasaPound, which began in Rome in 2003 and has about 5,000 members, apparently took its lead from Pound’s 30 Bernstein 1999, 160. 31 Perloff 1985, 196. 32 See http://www.nytimes.com/1987/10/30/arts/tv-weekend-wambaugh-s-echos-in-thedarkness.html, last accessed 1 December 2015.

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fascist ideals and denouncement of usury. As its leader Gianluca Iannone said in an interview about naming his group: ‘Ezra Pound was a poet, an economist, and an artist. Ezra Pound was a revolutionary and a fascist. Ezra Pound had to suffer for his ideas, he was sent to jail for ten years to make him stop speaking. We see in Ezra Pound a free man that paid for his ideas; he is a symbol of the ‘democratic views’ of the winners’.33 Although CasaPound ostensibly campaigns for cheap public housing, it has become known for attracting violent supporters – a CasaPound sympathizer went on a shooting spree in Florence on 13 December 2011, killing two Senegalese men and wounding three others before killing himself. A month earlier a Rome member was arrested on suspicion of assaulting left-wing activists. The group has distanced itself from these events and claims Pound’s daughter has no reason to object to CasaPound’s name. ‘We are very sorry about this. She doesn’t really know about us. We are not racist or violent’, said Simone di Stefano: ‘We would like to resolve this out of the courts – Pound is not a trademark and anyone can refer to his ideas’.34 In The Guardian of 14 January 2012, we read how De Rachewiltz rebuffs the suggestion that CasaPound’s lionization of him is no more than he deserves. ‘Pound just quoted what Mussolini said’, she said. ‘This organization is hiding behind Pound’s name for intellectual cover’, she added. ‘He made mistakes and we have to take the good part of him, just as he did with others. He fell into certain anti-semitic clichés that were rampant in Europe and the US at the time’.35 The item is followed by a heated debate, pro and contra ‘Pound the man’ and ‘Pound the poet’, with De Rachewiltz’s views either accepted, or dismissed as naïve by the sparring voices. Reading this discussion demonstrates all too clearly how Pound is still alive in the minds of (non-) readers, for better or for worse.36 The debate seems a clear indication that currently the image of Pound the racist and anti-Semite has overtaken that of Pound the Modernist poet, and that the adjective ‘Poundian’ now connotes the image of him fashioned by his peers and critics, rather than the self-fashioned image he promoted.

33 See Liddell 2012. 34 The Guardian, 23 December 2011. 35 The Guardian 14 January 2012. 36 See http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/jan/14/ezra-pound-daughter-fascism, last accessed 1 December 2015.

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Bibliography P. Ackroyd, Ezra Pound (London: Thames & Hudson, 1987). C. Bernstein My Way: Speeches and Poems (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). H. Carpenter, A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound (London: Faber, 1988). R. Casillo, The Genealogy of Demons: Anti-Semitism, Fascism, and the Myths of Ezra Pound (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988). J. Cornell, The Trial of Ezra Pound (London: Faber, 1967). F.M. Ford, Return to Yesterday (New York: Liveright, 1932). R. Hatlen, ‘Racism and Anti-Semitism’, in The Ezra Pound Encyclopedia, ed. by D.P. Tryphonopoulos & S.J. Adams (Westport/London: Greenwood Press, 2005), 251‑254. C.D. Heymann, Ezra Pound: The Last Rower (London: Viking, 1976). A. Jaffe, Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). C. Liddell, ‘In the House of Pound’, The Magazine, 5 February 2012, http://www. radixjournal.com/altright-archive/altright-archive/main/the-magazine/in-thehouse-of-pound/, last accessed 1 December 2015. T. Materer, ‘Make it Sell! Ezra Pound Advertises Modernism’, in Marketing Modern‑ isms: Self-Promotion, Canonization, Rereading, ed. by K.J.H. Dettmar & S. Watt (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 17‑36. D.A. Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet, vols. 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007‑2015), I (2007). D.A. Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet, vols. 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007‑2015), II (2014). M. Perloff, ‘The Contemporary of Our Grandchildren: Pound’s Influence’, in Ezra Pound Among the Poets, ed. by George Bornstein (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). E. Pound, ‘How I Began’, T.P.’s Weekly XXI, 6 June 1913. E. Pound, Make It New (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1935). E. Pound, The Spirit of Romance (London: Peter Owen, 1952). E. Pound, Literary Essays (London: Faber, 1954). E. Pound, Pavannes & Divagations (New York: New Directions, 1958). E. Pound, EP to LU: Nine Letters Written to Louis Untermeyer by Ezra Pound, ed. by J. A. Robbins (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963). E. Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir (New York: New Directions, 1970). E. Pound, ‘Ezra Pound: An Interview with Donald Hall’, in Writers at Work (The Paris Review Interviews, ed. by G. Plimpton (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977). E. Pound, The Cantos (London: Faber, 1987).

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B.L. Reid, The Man from New York: John Quinn and His Friends (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968). M. Schmidt, Lives of the Poets (London: Phoenix, 1998). J. Tytell, Ezra Pound: The Solitary Volcano (New York: Anchor Press, 1988). J.J. Wilhelm, Ezra Pound in London and Paris (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990).

Part 3 The Popularization of Literary Celebrity

Figure 26 ‘Harry Mulisch Comes Home’. Mulisch: ‘Thanks, old boy, for keeping my seat warm.’

Cartoon by Jean Gouders, published in NRC Next, November 2010

8

Playing God Harry Mulisch (1927‑2010) Sander Bax

In a cartoon from November 2010, we see Dutch literary writer Harry Mulisch in heaven, having seated himself on God’s throne. The title of the cartoon is ‘Harry Mulisch Comes Home’. God looks a little surprised at being chased out of his chair. An approximate translation of Mulisch words to God reads: ‘Thanks, old boy, for keeping my seat warm’. This cartoon by Jean Gouders provides us with a telling representation of the ‘dead author’. The dead author, an important topos in literary theory from the 1970s onwards, appears here in a slightly paradoxical manner, being combined with an older topos, namely the Romantic cliché of the literary writer as a godlike figure and a genius. Mulisch has been for decades – and remains – one of the most famous Dutch literary celebrities. In the 1950s, he debuted as a young rebellious writer of experimental prose. In the course of time, he became one of the Netherlands’ most famous authors. In the 1960s, he wrote a groundbreaking essay on the 1961 Eichmann trial and became a prominent figure during the cultural revolution in Amsterdam.1 From the 1970s onwards, Mulisch was a regular guest on Dutch television shows and even more present in Dutch newspapers and weeklies. With novels such as Twee vrouwen (Twice a Woman, 1975) and De aanslag (The Assault, 1982) he was nationally and internationally successful, although he is best known internationally for his novel De ontdekking van de hemel (The Discovery of Heaven, 1992). At the beginning of the 21st century Dutch media considered Mulisch a viable Nobel Prize for Literature candidate.2 As a celebrity author, Mulisch succeeded in creating a coherent and recognizable ‘star image’.3 He structured his public identity along the lines of the ‘success myth’ that we come across in media texts so often. However, this mythical status as a celebrity author did not really fit the literary identity Mulisch had created for himself in several of his theoretical essays. In these texts, Mulisch formulated ideas comparable to Roland 1 2 3

Bax 2012; Bax 2016. Bax 2013. Dyer 1998.

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Barthes’ theory about ‘The Death of the Author’. In fact, the disappearance of the author as the mythical creator of the literary text appears to be a fundamental principle of Mulisch’ poetics. Yet, how then should we interpret Mulisch’ ‘anti-mythological’ conception of literature in the context of his ‘mythological’ presence as a public figure? We might speak here of a paradoxical self-fashioning of the author in his attempts to both combine and reconcile his economic success with his artistic integrity. Mulisch’ public performance results in the intriguing paradox of the ‘dead author’ becoming a famous public figure, saturating the media with autobiographical information. The paradoxical position of Mulisch seems to be the result of his attempts to manage the different force fields in which a celebrity author operates: the traditional literary field on the one hand, and the public media on the other. These force fields can be characterized by two different forms of readership. In the literary field it is mostly literary criticism that creates the norms (which are often regulated by the autonomist conception of literature), in public media writers are confronted with what media intermediaries frame as ‘the normal reader’, which is a highly fictive figure, although one that nevertheless informs the narratives of media texts quite heavily. In this chapter, I want to elaborate on the ways in which Mulisch deals with these two kinds of reception when building his paradoxical star image.

The Myth of Mulisch From the 1960s onwards, Mulisch was a public personality who was regularly featured in Dutch newspapers, on the radio and on television. Not only did Mulisch enjoy the media spotlight; he also seemed to possess a degree of talent for it. He knew what to say in order to court controversy, he was always well dressed, and he created a coherent ‘media personality’. Over the years, he developed into a real literary celebrity. This media personality was characterized both by discursive patterns (recurring phrases in interviews) and by visual patterns (characteristic looks and presentation, such as a big nose, a big forehead, a tiny and skinny body, very large glasses, waving hair, and a pipe). We can tell from the many cartoons that have been drawn of him that it was this presentational coherence that turned the writer into an icon of Dutch authorship. In 2007, De Bezige Bij published Lachspiegel: Harry Mulisch’ spotprentenportret (Distorted Mirror: Harry Mulisch’ Book

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of Cartoons).4 It contained a wide selection of the many cartoons that had appeared over the years. Leafing through the book, one notices that the early cartoons are all quite different, while from the 1970s onwards, a standard way of drawing Mulisch appears to be emerging. Increasingly, cartoonists portray Mulisch as a sphinx, a god, or as a venerable classical philosopher. Invariably, Mulisch is depicted looking very serious and a bit arrogant. What I tend to call ‘the Mulisch Myth’ is a construction built by Mulisch himself and by the people who position him in the Dutch media.5 In reviews, author portraits, television documentaries, and other publications, critics, journalists, and television-makers create a portrait of Mulisch as a writer and a celebrity. Gradually, in the course of the years, a coherent pattern emerged from this construction, one that can be summarized as follows: Mulisch is the Netherlands’ most important classical writer; in his novels he is the godlike figure who controls everything; outside his novel he is also a very extraordinary man. During the 1990s, word spread that Mulisch might be a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature – with a predictable increase in commentary to that nature during interviews. Mulisch became a ‘literary Olympian’, as we can tell from several headlines in Dutch newspapers following his death in October 2010: ‘The Olympian That Appeared to Be Mortal After All’.6 ‘Invulnerably Striving Towards the Unknown’.7 ‘Mulisch, Phenomenon’.8 ‘The Stubborn God of Dutch Literature’.9

These headlines all speak of Mulisch as an exceptional being, a ‘phenomenon’, a ‘sorcerer’, the ‘Big 1’ (of Dutch Literature of course), someone who made contact with ‘higher things’, created his ‘own universe’, and appeared to be ‘immortal’ (although his death obviously proved otherwise). I think it is quite clear that Mulisch is portrayed as a mythical figure: the human being, turned into an extraordinary character resembling God.

4 Saal 2007. 5 For the construction of the figure of the author, see Foucault 1984. For ‘self-positioning’ and/or ‘posture’, see Dorleijn 2010; Meizoz 2010. 6 Koppes & Terpstra 2010. 7 Peters 2010. 8 [Editorial board] 2010. 9 Leyman 2010.

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In many of Mulisch’s obituaries we find references to the writer as a god or a creator.10 Mulisch constructed an oeuvre that was believed to be perfect, in fact so perfect that the idea of coincidence being a factor in its creation became unthinkable – everything worked just the way the writer had planned. In many pieces we find references to the writer as creator. Illustrative of this Romantic, autonomous writer are ‘Harry Mulisch: Creator Without God’, ‘A Literary Olympian with an Obsession for the Third Reich’, ‘The Creator Has Withdrawn’, ‘The Olympian that Proved Mortal After All’ and ‘Cocksure God of Dutch Literature’.11 In another famous cartoon, this time by cartoonist Jos Collignon, the title is a reference to the famous 1992 novel, reframing it as a literal statement: Mulisch discovering heaven. The cartoon depicts Mulisch freshly arrived in a heaven-like surrounding, looking around and saying to a clearly disgruntled God: ‘I think the book was better’.12 In the course of time, the name ‘Harry Mulisch’ acquired the iconic function of what Richard Dyer has coined as the ‘star image’, or what P. David Marshall conceptualized as the ‘celebrity function’.13 In the remainder 10 In terms of content, they pointed at the importance of imagination, mythology, and alchemy for Mulisch’ authorship (nine times in total). The conclusion was that Mulisch was a ‘creator’, a qualification more often replaced by the term ‘literary Olympian’ (both mentioned ten times in total). 11 The anonymous critic of the protestant daily Reformatorisch dagblad (s.n. 2010) also emphasized this point. He makes clear how seriously we are to take this situation: ‘It is a forced, horrifying, and renewed attempt to be like God. It is the tragedy of the original sin in paradise that is locked in the human genes. And seeing as writers are the seismographs of society, it is a telling thing that Mulisch in particular is considered one of the greatest and most popular writers in our country. […] Not hindered by the weight of a Christian reformed upbringing, he presents to the reader a world in which God disappears from view in a subtle, cunning manner. Mulisch was not reacting against anything [i.e. a religious tradition that he was born into], he created in a self-assured and convincing manner a reality of his own, which the reader is sucked into […] because Mulisch could write, let there be no mistake about that. But that makes it all the more poignant that, gifted with such talents, he should have played with fire in such a cheerful manner’. [‘Het is een krampachtige, huiveringwekkende en hernieuwde poging om als God te zijn. Het is de tragiek van de oerzonde uit het paradijs die in de menselijke genen zit. En aangezien schrijvers de seismografen van de samenleving zijn, is het veelzeggend dat juist Mulisch als een van de grootste en populairste auteurs van ons land geldt. […] Niet gehinderd door de ballast van een gereformeerde opvoeding, schotelde hij de lezer een wereld voor waarin God op een subtiele, listige manier uit het zicht verdwijnt. Mulisch zette zich niet af, hij schiep op een zelfverzekerde, overtuigende manier een eigen werkelijkheid, waarin de lezer wordt meegezogen. […] Want schrijven kón Mulisch, daarover mag geen misverstand bestaan. Maar juist daarom is het aangrijpend dat hij, met zulke talenten begiftigd, zo opgetogen met vuur speelde’.] 12 Collignon 2010. 13 Franssen 2010; Dyer 1998; Marshall 1997; Glass 2004.

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Figure 27 Harry Mulisch and the Discovery of Heaven. Mulisch: ‘I think the book was better.’

Cartoon by Jos Collignon, published in de Volkskrant, 2 November 2010

of this chapter, I will analyze this ‘star image’, using the concept of myth that we can trace back to important texts on authorship by Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’ (1968), and Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’ (1969). In the process of becoming a celebrity, the human Harry became the myth of Mulisch, precisely in the way Foucault frames it in his text. The name ‘Harry Mulisch’ is a proper name, normally referring to a single concrete referent (the human being named as such).14 However, when the author becomes public property, the proper name becomes ‘a classificatory function’ in the narrative discourse on authorship. ‘Such a name permits one to group together a certain number of texts, define them, differentiate them from and contrast them to others. In addition, it establishes a relationship among the texts’.15 The author’s name thus functions as a means to give a certain discourse more prestige:

14 Foucault 1984. 15 Foucault 1984, 107

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The author’s name serves to characterize a certain mode of being of discourse: the fact that the discourse has an author’s name, that one can say ‘this was written by so-and-so’ or ‘so-and-so is its author’, shows that this discourse is not ordinary everyday speech that merely comes and goes, not something that is immediately consumable. On the contrary, it is a speech that must be received in a certain mode and that, in a given culture, must receive a certain status.16

We might say that the author’s name still refers to the individual named, but that the individual in question is reduced to an image that has a certain status. Yet when this authorship is functioning within celebrity culture – as is the case with Mulisch – then we must conclude that this image has to be ‘immediately consumable’ as well.

Mythology and Mass Media For authors to become successful in the mass media, different skills and activities are required than for those involved in establishing a reputation in the literary field.17 Today literary writers not only find themselves having to deal with the ‘laws of literary autonomy’, but also with the necessity of manifesting themselves in the mass media and living up to the expectations prevalent in that context.18 One of the ‘rules’ is that the public figure has to be – or at least appear to be – commercially successful: he has to be ‘normal’ and ‘approachable’ on the one hand, but special and ‘extraordinary’ on the other. Hard work and professionalism are important, but the celebrity must make it look like it all comes easy and naturally.19 The format of television, still influential in contemporary mass media culture, is focused on creating a ‘reality effect’, which in the case of public figures means that there is a great deal of attention for their personal lives, for example as ‘the man behind the book’.20 Finally, it is important to note that the narrative structures of most media discourses are organized around clear binary oppositions.21 The laws that govern the mass media are dominated by what 16 Foucault 1984, 107 17 Collins 2010; Moran 2005. 18 Van Rooden 2012; Ruiter & Smulders 2013. 19 For insights into the conventions adhered to by the mass media, see Dyer 1998; Galow 2010; Glass 2004; Franssen 2010; Marshall 1997. 20 Fiske 2011; Bourdieu 1998; Langer 2006. 21 Bignell 2004, 90‑101.

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Barthes called ‘mythical language’: however complex the reality may be, media culture turns it into a universal and mythical narrative.22 In his Mythologies (1957), Barthes laid the foundation for analyzing media culture in terms of myth. In Barthes’ case, a myth is not a symbolic story about ‘being human’, but a discourse, one that he observed in the French media culture of the 1950s. Mythology is associated with a certain way of speaking that has the connotation of being ‘mystifying’ speech. 23 In Mythologies, Barthes gives many examples from media events in which mythical speech was prominent. Time and again, he demonstrates how this mythical narrative makes the ‘original’ meaning of the phenomenon represented disappear and replaces it with a new, universal, and eternal narrative.24 In ‘Changing the Object Itself’ (1971) he summarizes his concept of myth as follows: Myth consists in overturning culture into nature or, at least, the social, the cultural, the ideological, the historical into the ‘natural’. What is nothing but a product of class division and its moral, cultural and aesthetic consequences is presented (stated) as being a ‘matter of course’; under the effect of mythical inversion, the quite contingent foundations of the utterance become Common Sense, Right Reason, the Norm, General Opinion, in short the doxa (which is the secular figure of the Origin).25

The most important mechanism of myth is that it changes ‘history’ into ‘nature’.26 Different, historically grounded, and socially influenced phenomena become part of one universal structure that is presented as the ‘natural way’ to frame them.27 When the sign is an individual – for instance a literary writer – mythical speech makes the individuality of this human being disappear behind the mythical image. This becomes clear from Barthes’ short text on Greta Garbo, who is transformed into an image of ‘quintessential beauty’: ‘She herself knew this: how many actresses have consented to let the crowd see the ominous maturing of their beauty. Not she, however; the essence was not to be degraded, her face was not to have any reality except that of its perfection, which was intellectual even more than formal’.28 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

Barthes 1972; Barthes 1977; Dayan & Katz 1992. Calvet 1995. Barthes 1975, 259. Barthes 1977a, 165. Barthes 1977a, 165‑169. Barthes 1972. Barthes 1972, 57.

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One of the great paradoxes of mass media is that they try to create the illusion of authenticity by using mythical speech. In their book on ‘media events’, Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz claim that television-makers (in glorifying people) have a tendency to opt for one of three possible ‘scripts’, which can be labelled as ‘contest’, ‘conquest’, and ‘coronation’. The first script uses the narrative of a sports game (the contest between two rivalling parties). The second script is about someone being successful after having overcome many difficulties (‘conquest’). The third is called ‘coronation’ and revolves around the ritual and ceremonial moments in which we honour or bury important people. These three scripts might in fact become three phases of one and the same ‘celebrity myth’. It would seem that we have stumbled upon some very old story patterns here that have a great influence on the ways in which contemporary media shape their stories.29 The media image of Mulisch functions as a myth, concurrent with Barthes’ interpretation. The individuality and reality of the human being disappear behind an image referring to the notions of universality and eternity. Mulisch himself delivered the material for this image, as we can infer from several statements made at the end of his life. He repeatedly stated that he had remained the seventeen-year-old boy that started writing in 1945. He presented himself as an unchangeable person who had always stayed the same. The unchangeable image that Mulisch portrays in the first decade of the 21st century is a careful composition of everything that had happened to him in the course of his career: the provocative statements of the young writer, his political commitment in the 1960s, and the personal myth of his biography all became part of the interview story of the older Mulisch. The essence of this media myth is the portrayal of the human being known as Mulisch as a demigod. Rather than a normal person he is a genius, an extraordinary man, someone that time cannot touch, because he is unchangeable. A collection of interviews that appeared in 2007 was called Onsterfelijk leven (Living Immortally). Interviewer Onno Blom says: ‘Harry Mulisch lives his life as if he were immortal. Death, that is something for others. Mulisch, also in interviews, has always behaved in accordance with his absolute age: seventeen’.30 Another interviewer refers to him as ‘arrogant 29 See Dayan & Katz 1992, 28: ‘In adopting these forms, societies invest them with religious meaning and use them to accumulate and boast of honor through heroic deed and display, to promote unity and collective memory’. 30 Blom 2007, 11: ‘Harry Mulisch leeft zijn leven alsof hij onsterfelijk is. De dood, dat is iets voor anderen. Mulisch heeft zich altijd, óók in interviews, gedragen naar zijn absolute leeftijd: zeventien’.

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smart aleck, utterly vain and full of himself’ with a ‘well-nigh godlike status, deigning to come down from Mount Parnassus for an interview on his most conspicuous quality, snickered at by friend and foe alike: his vanity’.31 His being compared to God and his own references to his ‘absolute age’ form the basis of the myth of Mulisch’ authorship: how time and history change into eternity and universalism. This is not far removed from what Barthes says in his piece on the ‘writer on holiday’. He reflects on the image of the writer in a series of photographs in Le Figaro. In these journalistic portrayals of literary writers – in this case of the writer as a human being on holiday, but meanwhile also working in literature – they tend to be presented as ‘superhuman’. Whilst we as ‘mere readers’ should be glad that we are allowed to participate in the daily life of such geniuses. The emphasis on daily life might give the impression that the writer becomes more like a normal human being, but in fact ‘the balance of the operation is that the writer becomes still more charismatic, leaves this earth a little more for a celestial habitat where his pajamas and his cheeses in no way prevent him from resuming the use of his noble demiurgic speech’.32 This is exactly what happened to Mulisch in the course of the 1970s. His appearances as a well-known public figure, one who reveals much of his private life to the public, made him more and more charismatic. Thus, by becoming more and more human in public, he turned himself forcefully into the Author-God. That was exactly how the mass media constructed his celebrity image, as we have seen in the earlier cartoons.

The Death of the Author-God The most important text with which to gain insight into Barthes’ ideas on authorship is ‘The Death of the Author’. It is most revealing, I would argue, when read in the context of the mythologies. In this text, Barthes shows how the desire for the Author functions as a form of ‘mythical speech’ that reduces the ways in which the literary text multiplies meaning. Mythical speech reduces every element of the text to one meaning: the intention or the biography of the author. This way of interpreting literature hinders the

31 Fransen 2007, 312‑321: ‘arrogante kwast, ijdeltuit, kapsoneslijder’, ‘welhaast goddelijke status […] om van de Parnassus af te dalen voor een gesprek over zijn door vriend en vijand begniffelde en meest in het oog springende karaktertrek: zijn ijdelheid’. 32 Barthes 1972, 29.

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reader in freely understanding the text and portrays the intentionalist or biographical interpretation as the only ‘natural’ one: To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing. Such a conception suits criticism very well, the latter then allotting itself the important task of discovering the Author (or its hypostases: society, history, psyché, liberty) beneath the work: when the Author has been found, the text is ‘explained’ – victory to the critic.33

This way of dealing with authorship dominates the way media deal with literature: The image of literature to be found in ordinary culture is tyrannically centred on the author, his person, his life, his tastes, his passions, while criticism still consists for the most part in saying that Baudelaire’s work is the failure of Baudelaire the man, Van Gogh’s his madness, Tchaikovsky’s his vice. The explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it, as if it were always in the end, through the more or less transparent allegory of the fiction, the voice of a single person, the author ‘confiding’ in us.34

In ‘The Death of the Author’ Barthes confronts the Author with his modern equivalent, which he names ‘the scriptor’. It is the figure that fills in the empty spot that the Author has left behind since modern writers – like Barthes himself in Writing Degree Zero (1953) – have theorized literature in a new, more complex way.35 What Barthes makes clear is that once the writer has written the first word he has lost full control over the text and the biographical figure begins to disappear behind it. It is not the writer that does the writing; it is language that takes over. Writing literature therefore is an impersonal act, Barthes says, referring to a conception of literature that goes back to Stéphane Mallarmé, Marcel Proust, and Gustave Flaubert: ‘We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single “theological” meaning (the “message” of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash.

33 Barthes 1977b, 147. 34 Barthes 1977b, 143. 35 Barthes developed this conception of literature in Barthes 1988.

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The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture’.36 Barthes’ essay provides an important bridge towards gaining an understanding of what is going on in Mulisch’ early work. In the 1956 essay volume ‘Voer voor Psychologen’ (‘Food for Psychologists’), the first text in which he laid bare his conception of literature, Mulisch constantly speaks of the ‘absent author’. He describes himself as ‘nobody’, as an ‘invisible eye’. In daily life, the literary writer operates as a chameleon. He says something different to every single individual he is speaking to and he claims: ‘Every time I mean it’. He suffers from an overload of characters inside him: ‘As for me, I have become a saint, a criminal, a dope, a madman, and a psychiatrist. In other words: nothing, nobody’.37 Furthermore, Mulisch states that he as a writer has the ambition to become ‘nothing entirely’ and that he wants to get rid of the ‘misunderstanding that I actually exist’.38 Mulisch speaks of himself as a writer using the words ‘the unique, inexchangeable stigma of someone who does not exist’.39 What Mulisch does in ‘Voer voor psychologen’, continuing the tradition of Mallarmé, Proust, and Flaubert, is present his own authorship as an ‘absent authorship’. There is another key statement from ‘The Death of the Author’ that finds its analogy in Mulisch’ work. Barthes claims that we should not reduce the interpretation of literary texts to ‘deciphering’ the message of the ‘AuthorGod’, and that instead we have to consider the text as a ‘multiple space’, in which different meanings are interacting, without any one of them being the original one: In the multiplicity of writing, everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered; the structure can be followed, ‘run’ (like the thread of a stocking) at every point and at every level, but there is nothing beneath: the space of writing is to be ranged over, not pierced; writing ceaselessly posits meaning ceaselessly to evaporate it, carrying out a systematic exemption of meaning. In precisely this way literature (it would be better from now on to say writing), by refusing to assign a ‘secret’, an ultimate meaning, to the text (and to the world as text), liberates what may be 36 Barthes 1977b, 146. 37 Mulisch 1961, 18: ‘Ik voor mij ik ben een heilige, een misdadiger, een sufferd, een krankzinnige en een psychiater geworden. Dat wil zeggen: niets, niemand’. 38 Mulisch 1961, 39: ‘geheel niets’, ‘de dwaling, dat ik besta’. 39 Mulisch 1961, 39: ‘het unieke, onverwisselbare stigma van iemand, die niet bestaat’.

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called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases – reason, science, law. 40

There is a telling similarity between this quotation from Barthes and a passage from Mulisch’ ‘Voer voor Psychologen’ about the oeuvre of the writer. Mulisch claims that the different books he wrote during his life are all interconnected. The connections create a body, which he calls ‘the new body’ of the writer. The biographical writer has ceased to exist, and his oeuvre takes over instead. However, when one starts looking for the essence of the oeuvre, in search maybe of its Author, one stumbles across ‘the pituitary gland, invisible for good’: The oeuvre of a writer is, or ought to be, a totality, one big organism, in which all parts are interconnected by countless threads, nerves, muscles, strings and channels, keeping them tuned and enabling mysterious messages being sent back and forth, currents, signals, codes… If it is touched in one place, it responds in another; a colossal blood circulation is going on and an all-encompassing metabolic process, governed by sheer untraceable glands, and at the centre the pituitary gland, invisible for good. The oeuvre is the new body of the writer, – a body that he has created for himself, tighter, more durable than that which his mother gave him. It is destined to outlive him on earth on his departure from there: not ‘eternally’, but for some time after. With this new body he will still breathe when he has long stopped breathing; speak when he has long since become speechless. 41

Mulisch describes his literary oeuvre as an organism – as a ‘life form’. This life form can grow, can change, but the elements within it are in constant 40 Barthes 1977b, 147. 41 Mulisch 1961, 108: ‘Het oeuvre van een schrijver is, of behoort te zijn, een totaliteit, één groot organisme, waarin elk onderdeel met alle andere verbonden is door ontelbare draden, zenuwen, spieren, strengen en kanalen, waardoor onderling voeling gehouden wordt en geheimzinnige berichten heen en weer worden gezonden, stromingen, seinen, kode… Raakt men het ergens aan, ergens anders reageert het; een kolossale bloedsomloop is er in gaande, en een alles omvattend stofwisselingsproces, geregeerd door haast onvindbare klieren, en in het midden: de hypofyse, voorgoed onzichtbaar. Het oeuvre is het nieuwe lichaam van de schrijver, – een lichaam, dat hij zichzelf geschapen heeft, hechter, duurzamer dan hetwelk hij van zijn moeder heeft meegekregen. Het is bestemd, hem bij zijn verdwijning op aarde te overleven: niet ‘eeuwig’, maar enige tijd. Met dit nieuwe lichaam zal hij nog ademen, wanneer hij al lang heeft opgehouden te ademen; al lang sprakeloos geworden, zal hij er nog uit spreken’.

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communication. When the biographical author has died, the oeuvre lives on, still breathing. When the author himself can no longer speak, the oeuvre will speak for him. Yet one who thinks that this organism has an essence, will be disappointed, as at the heart of the oeuvre, one finds an empty spot. There is no ‘master signifier’, no ‘final meaning’. Further, there is definitely no final meaning that can be reduced to the intention of the author. Aside from the ‘absent author’ and the ‘invisible essence of the oeuvre’ Mulisch also emphasizes the importance of the reader. We know that Barthes saw the reader as the most important creative element: ‘The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination’. 42 Barthes states that literary criticism had ignored the reader for many years. That is why we have to get rid of the myth of the Author first: ‘The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author’. 43 Just like Barthes, Mulisch claims that with writing the artistic process is far from finished. The writer may produce the text, however, it is the reader who fulfils the artistic creation by reading it: ‘It is not the author but the reader who has to have imagination. The reader is not the spectator of a play, but the actor portraying all roles. What he reads is his own supremely personal creation. The writer supplies lines – but it is only the reader’s talent that makes it an artistic piece of work’. 44

The Pupil: A Case Study This image of the ‘absent writer’ in Mulisch’ conception of literature – in accordance with Barthes’ attack on the Author – does not seem to fit in well with the Mulisch Myth we considered earlier, for that would be an exact representation of ‘the myth of the Author-God’ that Barthes wants to deconstruct. How is it possible to be the mythological figure and its deconstruction at the same time? How can these theories of the absence of the writer be relevant to a cultural field in which authors have to be very present media celebrities? I would claim that Mulisch’ paradoxical self-fashioning in the public media illustrates the central dilemma of the 42 Barthes 1977b, 148. 43 Barthes 1977b, 148. 44 Mulisch 1961, 75: ‘Niet de schrijver, de lezer moet fantasie hebben. De lezer is niet de toeschouwer van een toneelstuk, maar de akteur die alle rollen uitbeeldt. De lektuur is zijn hoogsteigen kreatie. De schrijver levert tekst – maar een artistiek werkstuk wordt het pas door het talent van de lezer’.

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public writer in the 1980s and 1990s. How can a writer position himself on the threshold between the field of literary criticism (in which the Death of the Author became a dogma) on the one hand, and the sphere of mass media on the other (in which the desire for the author was and still is tangible)? To tackle this problem, I will present a small case study of The Pupil. In February 1987, Mulisch published the novella De Pupil (The Pupil). In the weeks thereafter, the book was reviewed intensively in newspapers and weeklies. On 22 March, the author appeared on the famous television show ‘Van Dis in de Balie’, a literary talk show hosted by the Dutch author and interviewer Adriaan van Dis, held in the Amsterdam venue De Balie. The novella, its reviews and the television interview offer us an interesting case to show how Mulisch’ authorship had become a public authorship in the 1980s and will serve to investigate which dilemmas Mulisch had to face as a public author. More specifically, I would like to show how Mulisch positioned his authorship in such a way that it enabled him to gain a reputation both in the field of literary criticism and in the field of the mass media. Interestingly, he managed to do so by performing in each of these domains the opposite of the role expected. In this case study we encounter a number of interesting paradoxes. The main character in The Pupil is an eighteen-year-old writer that is explicitly constructed as a semi-autobiographical image of the author. This character was not only born in the same year as Mulisch; he also has a father who got imprisoned shortly after the Second World War and a mother who has left the family. 45 In the central scene of the novel, ‘the pupil’ finds himself in a chairlift on his way to Mount Vesuvius, sitting alongside a rich Italian woman, Mme Sasserath. At that moment, he sees several people coming down from the volcano. The reader recognizes in them the main characters of the novels and stories that Mulisch published before 1987. On the last page of the novel the narrator makes this connection explicitly: ‘I remembered all these familiar and lost characters that I had seen coming down in the funicular from the crater – now, more than forty years later, 60 years old myself, I know that they were the characters that lived in my literary work: Mme Sasserath’s reward, for which she didn’t pay by way of a will, but with her own person. It feels like yesterday’. 46 45 Mulisch 1987, 44‑45; Mulisch 1975, 83‑87. 46 Mulisch 1987, 132: ‘Ik dacht weer aan al die vertrouwde en verdwenen personages, die ik in de funiculaire naar beneden had zien komen van de krater – en van wie ik nu, meer dan veertig jaar later, zelf in mijn zestigste levensjaar, weet wie zij waren omdat zij mijn werk bevolken: Mme. Sasseraths beloning, waarvoor zij niet testamentair maar met zichzelf had betaald. Het is alsof het gisteren was’.

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In this quotation the I-narrator presents himself as the 60-year-old writer Mulisch. The narrator creates an autobiographical connection that is also suggested on the back cover: the picture on the back cover shows us the author looking at Mount Vesuvius in the distance. Underneath the picture we read: ‘From left to right: Harry Mulisch, Mount Vesuvius (summer 1985)’.47 On the back cover the author, or the publisher, suggests that The Pupil is an autobiographical text that reveals to the reader a secret about something that happened to the author in 1945: ‘Sixty years old, the writer recollects a childhood memory – but one of a different kind than is common in our literature. Italy 1945. The old lady and the volcano. The revelation of a mysterious secret’. 48 This back cover is clearly influenced by the language of mass media commercials. Whereas the literary critics spoke of a ‘clever literary construction’, the back cover presents the novella as a ‘childhood memory’ and as the ‘revelation’ of a ‘secret’. It is all ‘intentional fallacy’ on the back cover: the I-narrator is identified as the writer of the novella. It would seem that the publisher and/or the author wrote this text to address the ‘general public’. The implication then is that this general public will be interested in recognizable stories that present revelations (rather than in ‘clever literary constructions’). We can see a pattern here that we also recognize among television-makers and the expectations they seem to have of their audiences. 49 These expectations come to the fore in the Van Dis interview mentioned previously. At the start of the show, Mulisch is introduced by Van Dis. The interviewer’s first remarks immediately reveal that he wants to mix autobiography and fiction: ‘It took Harry Mulisch three weeks to write The Pupil. A story about, or a book, about a young man preparing for an important authorship. Harry Mulisch will be 60 this summer. How does this writer look back on his life? I will ask him: Harry Mulisch’.50 Van Dis first mentions the novel as being the main reason for the interview. Then he makes a connection between art and life (by implying that the important authorship is Mulisch’) and subsequently he makes explicit 47 See Mulisch 1987, 8‑9, 71‑75. 48 Mulisch 1987, book cover: ‘In zijn zestigste levensjaar haalt de schrijver een jeugdherinnering op – maar die is anders van aard dan men gewend is in onze literatuur. Italië 1945. De oude dame en de vulkaan. De onthulling van een wonderbaarlijk geheim’. 49 Hermes & Reesink 2003; Bignell 2004. 50 Van Dis 1987: ‘In drie weken schreef Harry Mulisch De pupil. Een verhaal over, of een boek, over een jongeman die zich gereed maakt voor een groot schrijverschap. Harry Mulisch wordt zestig jaar deze zomer. Hoe kijkt de schrijver terug op het eigen leven. Ik ga het hem vragen: Harry Mulisch’.

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that he intends to ask the writer how he looks back on his life. In a mere two sentences we have travelled from text to life. The rest of the interview will indeed revolve around The Pupil most of the time, but Van Dis is constantly looking for autobiographical traces, asking questions such as: ‘The Pupil. Cheers. Story, as I said, about a young man who is aware very early on of his authorship, and above all of his talents. He wants to gear his entire life to this life as a writer. Is that the way it went with you?’51 In the course of the interview, Van Dis keeps looking for autobiographical connections, probing, for instance, if there might be a link between the character of ‘Mme Sasserath’ and Mulisch’ mother Alice Schwartz. Mulisch’ response is reluctant, to say the least: Sasserath is the name of my great-aunt. She is the sister of my greatgrandmother. She was called madam Mathilde Netter and she was married to a Mr Alphonse Sasserath. My mother told me so recently. And I liked the name so much that I used it. But I’ve already read interpretations like: ‘You see, Sasserath, that’s got to be read as “ça sera”, meaning “that will be”’. You know, because he sees these characters in the lift. And someone else read ‘SA/SS’ in it. There are all kinds of such interpretations of the name of my great-aunt.52

Mulisch’ first answer is striking for several reasons. First, he denies the autobiographical connection suggested by pointing at another, far less important autobiographical connection: the name Sasserath has nothing to do with his mother, so he says, but it is the name of his great-aunt. Second, he points at two interpretations that seem rather ridiculous when we take the real autobiographical connection into account. At this point, Mulisch seems to mock the academic interpreters of his works. Later on, he will modify his position by claiming that people formulate all kinds of interpretations he himself never thought about, let alone intended, but that these are correct nevertheless. 51 Van Dis 1987: ‘De pupil. Op uw gezondheid. Verhaal, zoals ik zei, van een jongeman die zich vroeg bewust is van zijn schrijverschap, vooral ook van zijn talenten. En hij wil zijn hele leven daarop inrichten. Is dat bij u ook zo gegaan?’ 52 Van Dis 1987: ‘Sasserath is de naam van mijn oudtante. Dat is de zuster van mijn overgrootmoeder. Die heette mevrouw Mathilde Netter en die was getrouwd met een meneer Alphonse Sasserath. Dat hoorde ik onlangs van mijn moeder. En dat vond ik zo’n mooie naam dat ik hem genomen heb. Maar ik las al interpretaties van “Ja kijk, Sasserath, dat moet je zien als ‘ça sera’, ‘dat zal zijn’”. Weet je wel, omdat hij die personen uit die lift ziet komen, hé. En iemand had gelezen “SA/SS’er” erin. Zo zijn er al allerlei interpretaties van de naam van mijn oudtante’.

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In the television interview, Mulisch constantly refers to an autonomist conception of literature: he emphasizes that there ought to be a radical demarcation line between the author and his text. To gain information on the interpretation of the text, it would be better not to turn to the author. This conception of literature is the exact opposite of what television-makers and television viewers expect from the author: almost all the questions concern autobiographical references. We are confronted, then, with the awkward situation in which Mulisch repeatedly denies any autobiographical connection in the television interview, while he does establish this connection in the novella itself. In The Pupil, this paradox is pushed one step further. The young author in the novel repeatedly formulates a poetics that revolves around the text’s ability to write itself: I wasn’t interested in what was close by, I was only interested in what was far away, so far away that I couldn’t even see it. That was precisely the reason I wanted to write. I had the feeling, that the white emptiness in which I tried to perceive something was the whiteness of the paper, on which the words had to appear: from the depths of the paper itself, so to speak.53

This statement about the author making the words appear on the white paper is closely related to statements Mulisch himself made in his 1956 volume ‘Voer voor psychologen’, often characterized as containing an objectivist (autonomist) conception of literature.54 For instance: ‘The mystical image of the white paper: an atmosphere. The writer sets himself in front of a piece of paper and he perceives white in white his meteorology. […] The writer fills in. The paper writes’.55 In other words, in the novella The Pupil Mulisch constructs an I-narrator that formulates a conception of literature that closely resembles the conception of literature he himself formulated at the beginning of his career. Of course this observation provides us with more clues for the autobiographical connection. 53 Mulisch 1987, 35: ‘Ik stelde geen belang in wat dichtbij was, alleen in wat veraf was, het verste – zo ver, dat ik het zelfs niet kon zien. Precies daarom wilde ik schrijven. Ik had het gevoel, dat die witte leegte waarin ik iets probeerde te ontwaren, de witheid van het papier was, waarop de woorden moesten verschijnen: als het ware uit de diepte van dat papier zelf’. 54 Kraaijeveld 1986; De Rover 1987, 43‑62. 55 Mulisch 1961, 79: ‘Het mystieke beeld van het witte papier: een dampkring. De schrijver gaat voor een vel papier zitten en ontwaart wit in zijn meteorologie. […] De schrijver vult in. Het papier schrijft’.

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Yet we are faced with another paradox when we look at the characteristics of this programmatic statement. Mulisch’ conception of literature can be categorized as autonomist (or objectivist): a literary work is not an expression of feelings and ideas, nor is it an attempt to win the reader for your worldview, nor is it a description of reality. The literary work is an object in itself, an autonomous organism.56 In ‘Voer voor psychologen’ Mulisch formulates these conventions as follows: ‘All that matters is what happens on the paper, in the construction, that which he had not foreseen, which he did not know, which he was not, that which he finds: that alone is creation’.57 Mulisch opposes the idea that the author reproduces everyday life experiences or emotions. Writing literature is about the experiences one encounters during the writing process. During that process the writing is able to change the writer. That is why Mulisch claims that writing ‘happens: on the paper, in the writing. It is reality’.58 In the 1950s, the writer Mulisch formulates the same autonomist conception of literature as his character ‘the pupil’ (who lives in 1945, but is created in 1986). Both characters adhere to the autonomist convention of the intentional fallacy: in the literary work the author ought to be absent. By creating this character, however, Mulisch violates this rule, because there is an autobiographical connection between Mulisch and the pupil. It is this paradox that Mulisch will carefully play up when he appears on television and reflects upon the critical reception of his novella. Mulisch, then, formulates the building blocks of an autonomist conception of literature, while at the same time undermining the very essence of this conception of literature in his work. Taking the historical context into account, this paradox turns out to be even more intriguing, for the autonomist conception of literature dominated the Dutch academic literary field in the 1970s and 1980s.59 The convention of the intentional fallacy is of great importance. In The Verbal Icon (1954), Wimsatt & Beardsley state: ‘Critical inquiries are not settled by consulting the oracle’.60 Similar quotations can be found in Wellek and Warren’s Theory of Literature (1942). They formulate this convention as if it were a law. They claim it is not possible to draw any valid conclusions about the relation between text and author 56 De Rover 1987, 62; Abrams 1953. 57 Mulisch 1961, 80: ‘Van belang is alleen wat er op het papier gebeurt, in de vormgeving, datgene, wat hij niet had voorzien, datgene, wat hij niet wist, datgene, wat hij niet was, datgene, wat hij vindt: dat alleen is kreatie’. 58 Mulisch 1961, 75: ‘dat gebeurt: op papier, in het schrijven. Het is werkelijkheid’. 59 Van Rooden 2012; Goldstone 2013. 60 Wimsatt & Beardsley 1954, 18.

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from examining fictional statements. Even when a work of art contains biographical elements, these elements will be organized and constructed in such a way that they lose their specific biographical meaning. In a literary text, material of biographical nature is transformed into elements that form an integral part of the work. To interpret the text one does not need any biographical information.61 These quotations from prominent works of literary theory demonstrate that Barthes’ conception of the Death of the Author did not appear out of the blue, but was based on thorough foundations in postwar literary theory and literary criticism. When one looks at the critical reception of The Pupil, one finds that the majority of the literary critics stick to the conventions of autonomist literature. They have great difficulties with explicit autobiographical references and they tend to regard them as integral elements of the literary work. In most cases, they regard the autobiographical elements as superficial, hiding the deeper level that is the essence of Mulisch’ text. They believe there is a more essential dimension to the novel, structured as it is like many other Mulisch novels: it seems to be a realistic story, yet beneath the surface one can find a deeper structure that lays bare the real meaning of the text. However, the critics notice that in The Pupil this deep structure is not very carefully hidden. Indeed, it is so clearly visible that one wonders whether Mulisch is perhaps being ironic about his own type of literature, or the way his literature was interpreted by critics and academics. Two conceptions of literature are constantly competing in this case study. Whilst the literary critics neglect the autobiographical dimension in favour of the deep structure of an autonomous literary text, the television interviewer ignores, or fails to capture, that deeper structure in order to read the text as an autobiographical revelation. In contrast to the autonomist reading method of the critics, we find in the mass media an autobiographical reading method. In the Van Dis interview, Mulisch tries to lay bare the interpretative strategies of the interviewer and places them contrary to the strategies of the academics and critics that analyze and interpret his texts. By placing these two conceptions of literature in opposition to each other, Mulisch creates room for himself to carefully manoeuvre in the middle ground that lies between them. On the one hand, he emphasizes the autonomist norms that are important in the field of literary criticism, whilst on the other hand playing the autobiographical game that is central to mass-media television shows. In this interview, Mulisch uses the same strategy as in his novella: he confuses the critics by adding a ‘forbidden’ 61 Wellek & Warren 1949, 67‑74.

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autobiographical dimension to his complex and structured novella. By doing so, he stages the same field of tension between an autobiographical reading method and an autonomist reading method. The effect of this staging process is of course that it is impossible to pin down this writer to one of the two categories – and that is exactly what he wanted to achieve.

Conclusion This leaves us with a rather paradoxical picture of Mulisch’ authorship: how is it that on the one hand this writer is so critical about the power authors have over their work, whilst on the other hand, in the public space, he poses as the Author-God? On closer inspection we can conclude that the way in which Mulisch shapes his authorship shows the same paradox we found in the reception of The Pupil. This paradox might be characteristic of the complicated role of literary authors in the ‘age of celebrity’: the public author has to deal with two sets of classification and canonization. The first set abides by the rules of the normative system that takes place inside the literary field, whilst the second is in line with the rules of the normative system of the public media. More often than not, these two normative systems tend to exclude each other. The processes of literary production and reception increasingly take place outside the literary field, in newspapers, on television, and in social media. This development results in a clash between the traditional conventions within the literary field and the conventions of the popular media.62 To garner success in the mass media, an author has to find different strategies than those that ensure his reputation in the literary field.63 This new way of operating thus means that the literary writer has to perform his own specific version of public authorship whilst simultaneously dealing with the specific tensions that come with public authorship.64 Mulisch’ paradoxical endeavours involving the Author-God might be analyzed as a role that allows him to function in two different discourses at the same time. In the course of time, Mulisch started to complicate his self-presentation even further. On the one hand, he created fictional characters that were increasingly based on his own life. On the other hand, he fictionalized and 62 Dorleijn, Grüttemeier & Korthals Altes 2007; Ruiter & Smulders 2013. 63 Galow 2010; Glass 2004; Franssen 2010; Marshall 1997; Smith 1998. 64 Meizoz 2010.

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satirized his public image, fashioning himself as a loosely constructed, ironic embodiment of what Barthes calls the ‘Author-God’. This resulted in an ambivalent and paradoxical self-narrative aimed at pleasing two different audiences – the broader public of the mass media and the specialists in the literary field. Analyzing Mulisch’ self-presentations, then, might shed light on a theoretical problem that is elementary in studying literary celebrity: the tension between modernist conceptions of literature (‘the Death of the Author’) and the conventions of celebrity culture (the public performance of authorship and autobiography).

Bibliography M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953). R. Barthes, Mythologies, trans. by A. Lavers (New York: Hill & Wang, 1972). R. Barthes, ‘Change the Object Itself: Mythology today’, in Image, Music, Text, trans. by S. Heath (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977a), 165‑169. R. Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, in Image, Music, Text, trans. by Stephen Heath (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977b), 142‑148. R. Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, trans. by A. Lavers (New York: Noonday Press, 1988). S. Bax, ‘The Loneliest Spot on Earth: Harry Mulisch’s Literary Experiment in Criminal Case 40/61’, in Werkwinkel: Journal of Low Countries and South African Studies 7 (2012), no. 1, 33‑60. S. Bax, ‘The Nobel Prize and the European Dream: Harry Mulisch’s European Authorship from a National and an International Perspective’, in Journal of Dutch Literature 4 (2013), no. 2, 4‑26. S. Bax, ‘Harry Mulisch Witnessing the Sixties: Looking Through the Eyes of the Public Intellectual and the Literary Celebrity’, in Witnessing the Sixties: A Decade of Change in Journalism and Literature, ed. by I. van den Broek, M. Broersma & F. Harbers (Forthcoming 2016). J. Bignell, An Introduction to Television Studies (Londen: Routledge, 2004). O. Blom (ed.), Onsterfelijk leven: interviews met Harry Mulisch (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 2007). P. Bourdieu, On Television, trans. by P. Parkhurst Ferguson (New York: The New Press, 1998). L.J. Calvet, Roland Barthes: A Biography, trans. by S. Wykes (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995). J. Collignon, ‘Het boek was beter’, in: de Volkskrant, 1 November 2010.

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J. Collins, Bring on the Books for Everybody! How Literary Culture became Popular Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). D. Dayan & E. Katz, Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992). A. van Dis in de Balie (Nederlands Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid Document ID 87392), VPRO, 22 March 1987, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5N9lGsEBSsw, last accessed 1 December 2015. Transcription by the author. G.J. Dorleijn, R. Grüttemeier & L. Korthals Altes (eds.), The Autonomy of Literature at the Fins de Siècles (1900 and 2000) (Leuven: Peeters, 2007). G.J. Dorleijn, ‘Poetry Doesn’t Pay: On the Income Position of Prominent Dutch Poets, 1900‑1942’, in Authorship Revisited: Conceptions of Authorship around 1900 and 2000, ed. by G.J. Dorleijn, R. Grüttemeier & L. Korthals Altes (Leuven: Peeters, 2010), 53‑80. R. Dyer, Stars (London: British Film Institute, 1998). [Editorial board], ‘Mulisch, fenomeen’, NRC Handelsblad, 1 November 2010. J. Fiske, Television Culture (New York: Routledge, 2011). M. Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’, in The Foucault Reader, ed. by P. Rabinow, trans. by J.V. Harari (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 101‑120. A. Fransen, ‘Ik ben toch ook een koning’, in Onsterfelijk leven: interviews met Harry Mulisch, ed. by O. Blom, (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 2007), 312‑321. G. Franssen, ‘Literary Celebrity and the Discourse on Authorship in Dutch Literature’, Journal of Dutch Literature 1 (2010), no. 1, 91‑131. T.W. Galow, ‘Literary Modernism in the Age of Celebrity’, in Modernism/Modernity 17 (2010), no. 2, 313‑329. L. Glass, Authors Inc.: Literary Celebrity in the Modern United States, 1880‑1980 (New York: New York University Press, 2004). A. Goldstone, Fictions of Autonomy: Modernism from Wilde to De Man (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). J. Hermes & M. Reesink, Inleiding televisiestudies (Amsterdam: Boom, 2003). D. Koppes & A. Terpstra, ‘De Olympiër die toch sterfelijk bleek te zijn’, Metro, 1 November 2010. R.A.J. Kraaijeveld, ‘Harry Mulisch en het symbolisme: een inleidende verkenning’, Bzzlletin 14 (1986), no. 135, 33‑40. J. Langer, ‘Television’s Personality System’, in The Celebrity Culture Reader, ed. by P.D. Marshall (New York: Routledge, 2006), 181‑195. D. Leyman, ‘Eigenwijze God van de Nederlandse letteren’, De Morgen, 2 November 2010. P.D. Marshall, Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).

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J. Meizoz, ‘Modern Posterities of Posture: Jean-Jacques Roussau’, in Authorship Revisited: Conceptions of Authorship around 1900 and 2000, ed. by G.J. Dorleijn, R. Grüttemeier & L. Korthals Altes (Leuven: Peeters, 2010), 81‑94. J. Moran, Star Authors: Literary Celebrity in America (London: Pluto Press, 2005). H. Mulisch, Voer voor psychologen (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1961). H. Mulisch, Mijn getijdenboek (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1975). H. Mulisch, De pupil (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1987). A. Peters, ‘Onkwetsbaar streven naar het onbekende’, de Volkskrant, 1 November 2010. A. van Rooden, ‘Magnifying the Mirror and the Lamp: A Critical Reconsideration of the Abramsian Poetical Model and its Contribution to the Research on Modern Dutch Literature’, Journal of Dutch Literature 3 (2012), 65‑87. F.C. de Rover, De weg van het lachen (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1987). F. Ruiter & W. Smulders, ‘The Aggressive Logic of Singularity: Willem Frederik Hermans’, Journal of Dutch Literature 4 (2013), no. 1, 4‑42. K. Saal (ed.), Lachspiegel: Harry Mulisch’ spotprentenportret (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 2007). [s.n.], ‘Harry Mulisch. Schepper zonder God’, Reformatorisch dagblad, 1 November 2010. R. Wellek & W. Warren, Theory of Literature (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1949). W.K. Wimsatt & M.C. Beardsley, ‘The Intentional Fallacy’, in The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry, by W.K. Wimsatt (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954), 3‑18.

Figure 28 Haruki Murakami at the ceremony for the Franz Kafka International Literary Award, 2006

AP Images/Hollandse Hoogte

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Literary Stardom and Heavenly Gifts Haruki Murakami (1949) Gaston Franssen

‘The scale of the celebrity of the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami is impossible to convey’, reflects Philip Hensher in his review of the Japanese writer’s novel 1Q84 (2009‑2010).1 The illustrations of Murakami’s fame that follow this remark indicate that Hensher is referring both to the author’s phenomenal commercial success and global popularity. For example, 1Q84 sold 1,5 million copies in the month after its publication in Japan. English translations of Murakami’s work are usually also bestsellers, as fans queue up in front of bookstores into the evening in order to purchase their copy at midnight launches.2 His novels have been turned into feature films and multimedia theatre productions, there are Murakami festivals and fan clubs, and there is even a growing group of readers who have Murakamiinspired tattoos – a bird with a wind-up key lodged in its back, inspired by the author’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994‑1995), is apparently a tattoo-parlour favorite. There is, however, something else about Murakami’s celebrity that is more difficult to convey: its many antinomies. The author is in the news constantly, but at the same time he is portrayed as a media-shy recluse, even a ‘Japanese J.D. Salinger’.3 He has been attacked in his home country for his supposed American tastes, even to the extent that some critics suspect Murakami of being a ‘cynical entrepreneur’ who ‘custom-tailors his goods to his readers abroad’, whilst others label his work as ‘a mandatory read for anyone trying to get to grips with contemporary Japanese culture’. 4 Such tensions are characteristic of Murakami’s authorial self-fashioning as well. At times, he presents himself as a media-savvy careerist, strategically planning his continuing push for fame and success; on other occasions, he takes on a pose of artistic reticence and criticizes the workings of the publishing industry. In a similar vein, Murakami alternates between a vision 1 Hensher 2011. In-text references to Murakami’s works refer to the publication years of the original Japanese editions. 2 O’Brien 2014. 3 Lyons 2014, 342. 4 Rubin 2012, 8‑9; Chozick 2009. See Fisher 2002; Miura 2003; Chozick 2008; Suter 2008, 35‑61; and Hillenbrand 2009 for critical readings of Murkami’s supposed ‘Americanism’.

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of the act of writing as a day-to-day job, requiring skill and planning, and a conception of authorship as a gift from the heavens, beyond the control of the writing individual. Whilst his literary universe seems inhabited by a plethora of faceless characters, paradoxically, the author himself appears to be a man with many different faces. This chapter will argue that Murakami’s authorial image stems from his personal investment in several different value systems. Like many of his characters, the author lives in different worlds simultaneously: Japanese culture and a global popular culture; the restricted field of literary production and the general cultural industry; the world of divine talent and the world of entrepreneurship. However, these are neither fixed oppositions, nor do they operate in parallel: in our contemporary, democratized and pluralized culture, they are inextricably intertwined, converging at times whilst colliding at others. There exists a strong tradition of scholars offering insightful analyses of these complex dynamics, from the romantic era of Lord Byron, to the modernist times of Ezra Pound and Norman Mailer, right up to the present days of Don DeLillo and Zadie Smith.5 Today, authors can choose from a variety of attitudes and postures, but in the public evaluation of literature, as argued by Lorraine York, such traditional oppositions remain influential and often re-emerge, manifesting themselves as critical conflicts and in literary polemics.6 Throughout his literary career, Murakami has been repeatedly confronted with these culturally deep-rooted oppositions. This chapter will outline how he has navigated such tensions by crafting a versatile celebrity image, one that combines a Japanese focus with Western values, celebrity status with a posture of artistic reticence, and a professional attitude with an ethos of the vocational. Drawing upon Nathalie Heinich’s theory on the construction of authorial identity, the following sections analyse how Murakami’s star image has come into being. The first section charts Murakami’s self-perception and self-presentation. The author regards himself as an ordinary person who prefers to write in solitude rather than frequenting literary circles or engaging in public performances. In his rare public interviews, Murakami presents himself as an author who is somewhat embarrassed by the ‘flashy’ business of being a fiction writer. Simultaneously he projects the image of an author who operates strategically, aiming at mainstream success and public recognition. In the second section, the focus is on Murakami’s reception. Readers confirm the many facets of Murakami’s authorship and have come 5 Moran 2000; Glass 2004; Mole 2007; Goldman 2011; English and Frow 2011. 6 York 2016, 52‑54.

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to describe the author’s impact as ‘The Murakami Effect’, associating his work with particular characters, motives, and references – faceless villains, talking cats, parallel worlds, and allusions to jazz and the Beatles. For fans, recognizing these elements is part of the pleasure of reading Murakami’s celebrity sign. The third section consists of a thematic reading of 1Q84, a novel that offers critical reflections on different forms of authorship. In the novel, the character Tengo, a ghostwriter with the gift to create a literary world that becomes a reality in itself, is contrasted with Eriko Fukada, an attractive, mediagenic bestselling author whose celebrity is largely a media construct. 1Q84, it is argued, can be read as a negotiation between the value of literary stardom and those of authentic writing, thus addressing the tensions inherent of Murakami’s celebrity authorship in a fictional manner.

Becoming a Celebrity Murakami’s literary career is a remarkable success story. In Haruki Mu‑ rakami and the Music of Words (2012), translator and self-acclaimed ‘fan’ Jay Rubin gives an entertaining description of the author’s early years. Running a small Tokyo jazz club named Peter Cat, Murakami started working on his debut novel Hear the Wind Sing (1979) in the spring of 1978. He submitted the novel to the influential journal Gunzō and was awarded the ‘Newcomers Award for 1979’.7 He continued to write and publish, but it was only with the publication of Norwegian Wood (1987) that Murakami ‘was transformed from a writer into a phenomenon’.8 The book had sold 3,5 million copies by the end of the following year and the author was recognized by star-struck fans everywhere.9 The success as well as the media’s intrusion into his private life sent the author into a mild depression: looking back, Murakami realized ‘that I was not suited to be in such a position. I didn’t have the personality for it, and I probably wasn’t qualified for it, either’.10 As Murakami continued to publish his fame increased. To date the author has published a dozen bestselling novels, accompanied by an impressive list of other stories and translations. As early as 1990, an eight-volume Complete Works was published in Japan, later to be supplemented with works such as Kafka on the Shore (2002), After Dark (2005), 1Q84 and Colourless Tsukuru 7 8 9 10

Rubin 2012, 31. Rubin 2012, 160. Rubin 2012, 162. Quoted in Rubin 2012, 173, emphasis in original.

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Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (2013). In 2015, Murakami opened up a website, ‘Murakami-san no Tokoro’ (Mr Murakami’s place), where visitors could send in any question they had – on the author’s work, or simply on life in general. The publisher Shinchosa has released an eight-volume ebook containing all the 3,716 questions that the author responded to (after receiving 37,465 queries in total).11 Furthermore, the author has won a series of literary prizes, including Japan’s greatest, the Yomiuri Prize, and is often mentioned as a potential Nobel Prize winner.12 Whilst the facts of Murakami’s career may give a good indication of his success as a writer, they do not offer insights into how he has actually be‑ come an author. Becoming an author, as the French art sociologist Nathalie Heinich argues, is a socio-psychological process, a form of ‘identity work’, in which the writing individual, the audience and literary institutions interact: the process requires seeing oneself as an author and presenting oneself as such, whilst also being publically recognized and acclaimed.13 In order to better understand this process, Heinich introduces a useful set of terms that allow for a closer analysis of the dynamics of literary authorship – and that of Murakami in particular. The first distinction proposed by Heinich is between three dimensions of the work regarding identity: self-perception, designation of authorship, and self-presentation.14 Self-perception, according to Heinich, is the dimension that relates to an author’s self-image. Of course, a person’s true self-perception is difficult to determine: one has to rely on private journals, correspondence or (assumedly) candid statements in interviews. Designation of authorship is the work of others, who have the power to label the writing individual as a ‘true’ author. This dimension is accessible through publications (confirming the author’s status in print), public responses, critical reviews, and media attention (judging the writer as either a good or a bad, an important or a marginal author), and institutions (such as publishers, writers associations, and universities). Self-presentation, finally, is the dimension of identity work that confirms or transforms the relation between the author’s self-perception and the perception of others. This dimension is partly beyond intentional control, as it includes the effect of one’s looks, style of dress or manner of speaking. Acts of self-presentation, however, can very well be strategic interventions, in the form of well-timed 11 12 13 14

Rubin 2012, 8; Flood 2015. Wray 2004. Heinich 1996, 72. Heinich 1997, 81.

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public statements or interviews in which authors attempt to rectify, enhance or otherwise modify their public image. Heinich goes on to argue that fame, commercial success and intense media attention can disrupt the relation between the three dimensions of authorial identity work, leading to an authorial identity crisis.15 For example, the author can experience a rift between self-perception and the perception of fans, or between self-perception and the author’s public construction of that image in interviews or on talk shows.16 In this sense, Heinich’s observations tie up with psychological insights such as David Giles’, who points out the existential concerns of being famous, such as the perceived loss of one’s authenticity and the dissemination of one’s self-image beyond individual control.17 A second valuable distinction put forward by Heinich is between two authorial regimes: one conceiving of authorship as a profession, another depicting it as a gift or vocation. In the ‘regime of the professional’, authorship is understood as a matter of skills, training, and planning. One becomes an author through hard work, self-discipline or forms of apprenticeship. As the product of dedicated efforts and sustained discipline, being an author is a position that is in principle available to anyone. Conversely, in the ‘regime of vocation’, authorship is conceived as a calling or personal inclination – the result of an innate talent or a divine gift – manifesting itself in a sudden revelation, marking the author as a unique, chosen individual.18 According to Heinich, the regime of vocation is paradoxically both democratic and elitist at the same time: on the one hand, elite status in this regime is no longer tied to social status at birth (as was the case, or instance, with the pre-revolution French aristocracy), yet on the other, excellence is now defined by singularity and isolation, as the literary artist is conceived of as a uniquely gifted individual.19 The two regimes discerned by Heinich coincide with two value systems: in the regime of the professional, literary writing is appreciated for its effectiveness and loyalty to existing writing practices, whereas in the regime of the vocation it is valued for its originality and innovative qualities. When applied to the case of Murakami, Heinich’s terminology offers revealing insights into the construction of his authorship. For Murakami, becoming an author was indeed a challenging form of identity work. 15 16 17 18 19

Heinich 1996. Heinich 1995, 503‑519. Giles 2000, 72‑108. Heinich 2000, 63‑65. Danko 2008, 248.

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Confronted with the criticism of his Japanese peers, international success and constant media attention, he began to doubt whether he was ‘qualified’ to be an internationally bestselling author: his self-perception as an author became affected. Simultaneously, others questioned whether he could – or should – be designated as an author at all. Rubin cites several critics who implied that Murakami’s popularity signalled that there ‘was something wrong’ with ‘all of contemporary Japanese literature’: they argued that he was writing ‘for the passing tastes of a young audience’ and warned that it would be ‘silly’ to engage in a serious reading of his work.20 Using Heinich’s terminology, Murakami’s self-doubt can be described as a crisis of identity: a sudden rift between self-perception and the designation of authorship by others. According to Heinich, what connects these two dimensions is the author’s self-presentation. How, then, did Murakami present himself in response to his authorial crisis? Giving interviews is one way in which authors can modify their public image. Reflecting on the function of literary interviews, Bruce Bawer suggests that they afford readers ‘a glimpse of the author in the act of “self-creation”, of fashioning his own image’. 21 Likewise, John Rodden argues that the written interview is a literary performance in itself: it is a form of authorial ‘self-presentation’, offering insights into how ‘writers “craft” [themselves]’.22 Bawer and Rodden both emphasize the importance of The Paris Review’s interview series (1953-present), that turned the literary interview into a respectable genre in itself. So when The Paris Review approached Murakami for an interview in 2004, he was, in effect, given a chance to present himself in a highly authoritative journal, one with broad international impact. No wonder then that the interviewer found Murakami to be an author who ‘spoke fluently, but with extended pauses between statements, taking great care to give the most accurate answer possible’ to his questions. 23 The resulting interview is a remarkable feat of well-balanced self-presentation and merits a closer analysis.24 In the first place, Murakami is careful, as he answers John Wray’s questions about his life and work, to navigate between Western and Eastern influences. He is quick to admit that he is indebted to Western literature. As a beginning author, Murakami recounts, he felt he had to ‘escape’ from 20 21 22 23 24

Rubin 2012, 8‑9. Bawer 1988, 429. Rodden 2013, 402. Wray 2009, 337. All following quotes, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from Wray 2009.

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‘Japanese culture’, which he thought to be ‘boring’. He turned ‘towards Western culture: jazz music and Dostoyevsky and Kafka and Raymond Chandler’. He acknowledges being influenced by Western literature: ‘I borrowed the style, structure, everything, from the books I had read – American books or Western books’. However, at the same time Murakami objects to the idea that he would cater for a Western audience. ‘I want to write about Japan, about our life here’, he insists: ‘That’s important to me. Many people say that my style is accessible to Westerners; it might be true, but my stories are my own, and they are not Westernized’. The author goes on to discuss his admiration for Japanese fellow authors such as Ryū Murakami and Banana Yoshimoto, and is open to Wray’s suggestion that a character like Super-Frog (from the story ‘Super-Frog Saves Tokyo’, 2000) is taken from a ‘reservoir’ of Japanese folklore stories.25 Secondly, the interview gives Murakami the opportunity to offset his celebrity status against his image of being a modest, withdrawn author. On the one hand, he confirms that he is often recognized in the streets and that he finds this fame ‘annoying’ at times. ‘To become a writer is kind of flashy’, he admits. He prefers cities such as Tokyo or New York because he can remain anonymous there: ‘Nobody recognizes me; I could go anywhere. I can take the train and nobody bothers me’. On the other hand, he underlines that he is no different than anyone else. ‘I’m not intelligent’, he says: ‘I’m not arrogant. I’m just like the people who read my books’. In a similar vein, the author stresses that he does not want to be a member of an elite group. Presenting himself as a ‘loner’ who shirks away from ‘literary circles’, the author prefers to have no ‘writer friends’ at all, ‘because I just want to have… distance’. Elsewhere, Murakami has corroborated this unassuming image by presenting himself as ‘a kind of ordinary guy’ who does not think of himself ‘as an artist’, but simply ‘likes’ to write: ‘I like to choose the right word, I like to write the right sentence’.26 Thirdly, Murakami’s self-presentation in The Paris Review interview proves to be compatible with the two authorial regimes as discerned by Heinich. In line with the regime of the professional, the author presents himself as a ‘hard worker’. When asked about his typical workday, he describes a schedule that can hardly be called bohemian or strikingly artistic: ‘I get up at four a.m. and work for five or six hours’. In the afternoon, he runs or swims, ‘then I read a bit and listen to some music. I go to bed at nine p.m. I keep to this routine every day without variation’. Moreover, 25 Collected in Murakami 2002. 26 Pool 2014.

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Murakami strikes the reader as an author not averse to career planning and well aware of the workings of the literary marketplace. Discussing the success of his novel Norwegian Wood, he characterizes his decision to publish a realistic novel – unusual for him at that time – as a ‘strategic choice’: ‘I wanted to break into the mainstream, so I had to prove that I could write a realistic book […]. It was a bestseller in Japan and I expected that result’. His publishing strategies anticipate the demands of his audience in more ways than one, for the author also details how he takes into account that many of his Japanese fans read his books while commuting by train. ‘That’s why my big books are printed in two volumes’, he explains: ‘They would be too heavy in one’. Yet this commercial inclination is only one side of Murakami’s image, for other elements in his self-presentation fit better into a regime of vocation. Writing, for example, is a creative, mysterious process, as the author explains to Wray, one that cannot be planned in advance. ‘When I start to write, I don’t have any plan at all. I just wait for the story to come’, he states. He even maintains that his authorship has simply ‘happened’ to him: ‘I didn’t want to become a writer – it just happened. It’s a kind of gift, you know, from the heavens’. In another interview, the author has detailed how this gift manifested itself. Attending a baseball game in 1978, the author watched as the leading hitter of his favourite team scored a double. Murakami recounts: ‘And that’s when the idea struck me: I could write a novel. It was like a revelation, something out of the blue. There was no reason for it, no way to explain it. It was just an idea that came to me, just a thought. I could do it. The time had come for me to do it’.27 These conceptions of writing as a mysterious creative process and of the talent required for it as a gift – something out of the blue – align themselves with the regime of vocation. Statements like these suggest that Murakami’s self-presentation cannot be reduced to that of a literary careerist, but is in fact a composite of authorial identities – a professional identity as well as one that revolves around writing as a calling and the singular gift of inspiration. The Paris Review interview offers a unique insight into the author’s attempt to regain control over his authorial identity. By negotiating between cultural traditions, celebrity, and modesty, and different authorial regimes, Murakami appears to respond to the criticisms of his peers and the tensions inherent to becoming a star author. However, the question remains to what extent the author’s self-presentation has found a resonance with his

27 Rubin 2012, 30.

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audience. As will become clear, the perception of the author by his readers and fans is just as paradoxical as the self-presentation of their literary idol.

Playing Murakami Bingo Murakami’s impact on his global readership has been so profound that some even refer to it as ‘The Murakami Effect’.28 This effect can be traced through scholarly sources, media comments about his personality, and the reading experiences of day-to-day readers. This section charts different aspects of that effect, mapping the different components of Murakami’s public image. The f irst observable effect of the author’s self-presentation, as he navigates Western and Eastern traditions, is that critical and academic responses to his work have developed along two different lines: a historical line, in which he is read as in the context of Japanese history and culture, and an allegorical line, in which he is presented as a global author, addressing more general developments such as modernization, urbanization, and globalization.29 Of course, it is beyond the scope of this single chapter to explore all literature examining Murakami’s work in minute detail, but telling examples include publications by scholars such as Michael Seats and Rebecca Suter, who interpret the author’s work in the context of the post-war cultural and political developments of Japanese society.30 Whilst authors such as Carl Cassegard and Matthew Strecher approach the author from a transnational perspective, reading his novels as allegorical stories about modernization at large or framing them in general poststructuralist and psychoanalytic terminology.31 Although this oppositional view does not do justice to the scope and nuances of these scholars, it can be argued that these examples illustrate two main perspectives on Murakami’s authorship, mirroring both the author’s national and transnational interests. A second intriguing effect of Murakami’s self-presentation, one that can be viewed as a result of his attempt to straddle an ethos of creative reticence with the posture of a literary entrepreneur, is that he has become a ‘modest celebrity’ in the eye of the public. Murakami’s status as a celebrity brand seems to be beyond doubt. Despite his self-effacing attitude, he is perceived as a bestselling writer, a ‘literary superstar’ with his own ‘trademark blend 28 29 30 31

Paul 2014. I borrow this distinction from Strecher 2011, 861‑863. Seats 2006; Suter 2008. Cassegard 2001; Strecher 2014.

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of the alluring and the bleak’.32 Wray’s introduction to The Paris Review’s interview with the author is revealing in this sense as well. Wray meets Murakami in the author’s office, ‘the nerve centre for the business end of Murakami’s career’: it is a space with swivel chairs, ‘Mylar-covered desks’ and assistants, striking the interviewer as ‘deeply incongruous with the notion of a writer’s studio’.33 Clearly, the author is perceived as somewhat of a literary business magnate. That ‘Murakami’ has become a trademark is further illustrated by the author’s success as a translator: the publisher Chuokoron-Shinsha has introduced a popular series of his translations under the heading of the ‘Murakami Translation Library’, with the translator’s name often printed in a larger type than that of the source author.34 Clearly Murakami has become a brand name. The author’s humble selfpresentation, however, as a writer who is ‘just like the people who read my books’, has become part and parcel of his celebrity image.35 In the media, Murakami is repeatedly portrayed as a ‘modest and unassuming’ person.36 Rubin observes that ‘the note of “ordinariness”’ comes through in ‘Murakami’s comments on himself and what others have said about him’: in person, Rubin affirms, ‘he does seem quite ordinary, easygoing, a beer-and-baseball kind of guy’.37 Thus, the image that the author has established for himself is that of a ‘modest celebrity’. A third and final aspect of ‘The Murakami Effect’ is that the author’s willingness to anticipate his audience’s expectations, combined with his ‘heavenly gift’ for original story plots, has resulted in a strangely standardized perception of his work, in particular by non-academic readers. Murakami appears to be appreciated by regular readers and fans as an original and intriguing author precisely because he plays into audience expectations and repeats himself. His works, as Wray observes, ‘almost demand to be read as variations on a theme’.38 Some readers express disappointment about this, but most of Murakami’s readership takes great pleasure in the repeated occurrence of particular themes, plots, and characters.39 A telling illustration 32 Powers 2001. 33 Wray 2009, 337. 34 Hadley & Akashi 2015, 14. 35 Wray 2009, 342. 36 Martin 2014. 37 Rubin 2012, 40. 38 Wray 2009, 355. 39 In a post on The Guardian’s book blog, for example, former Murakami fan Stephen Emms (2009) laments that Murakami’s ‘surreal tales about lost souls, with their inevitable choices between two different women, rather blur together’.

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Figure 29 ‘Murakami Bingo’

Illustration by Grant Snider, in: The New York Times, 1 June 2012

of this appreciation is Grant Snider’s comic ‘Murakami Bingo’, published in The New York Times in 2012. The illustration depicts a bingo card with 25 squares, each depicting familiar Murakami obsessions: a ‘Mysterious Woman’, ‘Something Vanishing’, ‘Running’, an ‘Old Jazz Record’, ‘Parallel Worlds’, and so on. ‘If you have yet to experience the genius of Murakami’, Snider writes in a note explaining the comic, ‘keep this Bingo card handy as you delve into his work’. 40 The implication of Snider’s comment is that the predictability of the author, and thus the reader’s anticipation of meeting with the expected, is constitutive of the pleasure of reading his work. Paradoxically, Murakami’s 40 Snider 2012.

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style has become in itself an easily recognizable trademark, and it is this aspect of his work that readers perceive as a valuable quality. By his willingness to cater for his audience and their expectations, in combination with his unusual plot twists, the author has created an authorial image that reconciles the business strategies of the literary entrepreneur with the divine inspiration of the vocational artist. In the reception of Murakami’s work, then, the author’s contradictory faces meet in fascinating ways. His literary work, as the next section will argue, offers another space in which the conflict between these two authorial identities is addressed.

Navigating Literary Worlds: 1Q84 Although the novel consists of approximately a 1000 pages in the 2011 English translation, Strecher observes that Murakami’s 1Q84 ‘may be summed up quite simply as the story of two soulmates, Kawana Tengo and Aomame Masami, who are separated at the age of ten, and the process by which they are reunited as adults some 25 years later’. 41 When one reads 1Q84 with Snider’s bingo card at hand, the novel reveals itself as vintage Murakami: there is a mysterious woman, supernatural powers manifest themselves, and the two protagonists travel through parallel worlds. The novel opens with Aomame stuck in a traffic jam on one of Tokyo’s highways. As she exits her taxi and climbs down an emergency ladder, she finds that she has left the familiar world of the year 1984 and has ended up in a parallel dimension, which she decides to call ‘1Q84’. Aomame’s narrative, centred around her struggle to find her way back to 1984 and to be reunited with her soulmate, is transected by the story of Tengo, who gets involved in a literary scam involving his ghostwriting of a debutant’s manuscript. The fictional universe evoked in the manuscript, mysteriously enough, is identical to that of 1Q84. In its most general sense, 1Q84 is a novel about love’s power to turn dreams into reality. The book’s motto is taken from the 1933 popular song ‘It’s Only a Paper Moon’, written by Billy Rose and E.Y. ‘Yip’ Harburg. The lyrics state that the world is ‘as phony as it can be’, but ‘it wouldn’t be make-believe / if you believed in me’. 42 1Q84 develops along a familiar Murakami scenario, in which Tengo and Aomame, without realizing it themselves, move through 41 Strecher 2014, 57. 42 Murakami 2011, unpaged.

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parallel yet strangely connected dimensions as they attempt to be reunited. Before they finally get to meet, after a long and hazardous quest, they are confronted with a grubby private investigator, a secretive religious cult, mysterious ‘Little People’ and ‘air chrysalises’ – glowing cocoons that appear out of thin air. Other readers have offered insightful and more encompassing interpretations of 1Q84’s rich storylines, interpreting it as a journey into the unconsciousness, a gender-critical plea for the female narrative voice, or as a reflection on changing perspectives on masculinity in Japanese society. 43 For the purpose of this chapter, however, with its focus on the authorial identity of Murakami, it is enough to foreground the novel’s representation of literary authorship. 1Q84 provides a sustained reflection on the different ways of becoming an author. In the novel, two different types of literary authorship are juxtaposed: the mediagenic one-hit-wonder on the one hand, and the paper-pushing ghostwriter, more at ease with anonymity, on the other. The narrative of 1Q84 works through the tensions between these two types of authorship, juxtaposing them without reducing them to an unambiguous opposition. Moreover, the fact that Murakami has incorporated details from his literary career in the narrative – as will become clear – invites his readers to understand the novel not only as a reflection on literary authorship in general, but also as an act of self-presentation by the author himself. An interpretation of 1Q84 as a commentary on the publishing industry begins by acknowledging that its main characters are all professionally involved in the literary business. The character of Tengo is introduced as a prep-school math teacher who works on the side as a copywriter and proofreader for literary magazines. He has been writing his whole life, but he is unsure whether he really has ‘the talent to write fiction’.44 In the opening scene of the novel, the reader finds him sitting in a bar, discussing a manuscript with his friend, an editor called Komatsu who is described as ‘a dedicated editor of literary magazines’ with ‘a certain reputation as one of the top people in the industry’. 45 The manuscript is entitled Air Chrysalis and was written by the seventeen-year-old girl Eriko Fukada, who has submitted it to a ‘new writer’s prize’ magazine contest under the pen name of ‘Fuka-Eri’. 46 The editor is not convinced by the quality of the manuscript. He finds the style to be bad and the writing ungrammatical, but he is taken 43 44 45 46

Hansen 2010; Nihei 2013; Strecher 2014, 57‑67. Murakami 2011, 21. Murakami 2011, 19. Murakami 2011, 16‑17.

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in with the storyline. His unusual proposal is that Tengo should rewrite the manuscript as a ghostwriter: ‘Change the language – a total remake’, Komatsu explains to Tengo, ‘just use the framework of the story as is’.47 After the rewrite, he intends to re-submit the manuscript under Fuka-Eri’s name. The experienced editor is sure she will win the new writer’s prize and is even aiming for another award: the Akutagawa Prize, one of Japan’s most prestigious literary awards. Tengo questions his friend’s ‘professional ethics as an editor’, as the young copy editor feels the proposed rewrite essentially to be a ‘scam’, and demands to know why Komatsu believes he should be the person to ghostwrite the novel. 48 The editor points out that although Fuka-Eri has ‘something special’ – stunning looks, an intriguing pen name, and an unusual imagination – she lacks something that Tengo, however, does possess. ‘You don’t cut corners’, Komatsu tells him: ‘You’re very modest when it comes to the act of writing. And why? Because you like to write’. 49 He continues: ‘Your story lines are good. You have taste. You may be built like a lumberjack, but you write with intelligence and sensitivity. And real power. Unlike Fuka-Eri, though, you still haven’t grasped exactly what it is you want to write about. Which is why a lot of your stories are missing something at the core’.50 Unable to make up his mind, Tengo finds himself getting caught up in Komatsu’s plans. He agrees to rewrite Fuka-Eri’s novel, which goes on to take the new writer’s prize and becomes a much acclaimed work. Ultimately, however, its supposed author does not win the coveted Akutagawa Prize. Later in the novel it is mentioned that ‘because the book was so widely discussed, the selection committee for the Akutagawa Prize, the most prestigious literary award, kept their distance from it’.51 By this point, however, Komatsu has lost his interest in critical acclaim and has become preoccupied with the novel’s commercial potential. ‘Gotta sell ’em while they’re hot!’, he confides in Tengo: ‘And make no mistake about it, this is going to be a bestseller, I guarantee you’.52 In a commercial respect, the editor’s plan succeeds as Air Chrysalis becomes an instant success and its author the literary sensation of the year. 47 48 49 50 51 52

Murakami 2011, 24. Murakami 2011, 24‑25. Murakami 2011, 18. Murakami 2011, 24. Murakami 2011, 581. Murakami 2011, 229‑230.

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The relevance of 1Q84 for Murakami’s self-presentation is clear from the outset. As the plot is set into motion, striking similarities with the story of the author’s own literary career come to the fore. Both Fuka-Eri and Tengo, each in their own way, evoke the authorial image of Murakami as previously described. As with Fuka-Eri, the author made his debut by submitting his f irst work to a new writer’s contest organized by a literary journal (Gunzō, in his case); like Tengo, he is perceived to be a modest, unassuming writer, who simply ‘likes to write’.53 In the light of these similarities, 1Q84’s referencing of the Akutagawa Prize proves to be somewhat risqué, for the prize is considered to be reserved for authors of junbungaku, a form of ‘pure literature’ in the tradition of the Japanese literary canon. Moreover, the prize has not been awarded to the so-called ‘Americanized’ Murakami so far.54 The pointedness of the characters’ comments on the Akutagawa Prize reveals itself all the more when Komatsu explains his motivation for the intended hoax. ‘I’d be doing it to screw the literary world’, the editor says: ‘Those bastards all huddle together in their gloomy cave and kiss each other’s asses, and lick each other’s wounds, and trip each other up, all the while spewing this pompous crap about the mission of literature’. He argues that the production of literature, in his view, is ‘not much different from the way a factory makes clocks’: publishers hire writers to create stories to cater for a specific audience. Tengo’s co-authorship, in Komatsu’s opinion, would therefore not be anything out of the ordinary. Yet, the editor points out, ‘in the self-conscious world of literary fiction’ such production methods ‘are not openly sanctioned, so as a practical strategy we have to set Fuka-Eri up as our single author’.55 The ultimate goal of the scheme would be to expose the hypocrisy of the world of the literary connoisseurs. It is tempting to read Komatsu’s comments as the author’s jab at the literary establishment, especially as not winning the award, according to Rubin, has become ‘something of a point of pride’ for the author.56 This parodistic portrayal of the contemporary literary scene develops further as the novel’s plot unfolds itself. An ironic touch, for instance, is manifest in the descriptions of the public reception of Air Chrysalis. Critics 53 Pool 2014. 54 Rubin 2012, 202, 230. See Kawakami 2002 for a sustained reflection on Murakami’s relation to junbungaku. 55 Murakami 2011, 25. 56 Rubin 2012, 234.

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fail to see through Komatsu’s hoax and Fuka-Eri, despite her unworldly, taciturn character and inability to speak in long, continuous sentences, turns out to be a media success. When she has to conduct a press conference, she stuns the audience: she is ‘downright witty’ and makes ‘a great impression’.57 In other words, the fact that she is not the real author of Air Chrysalis in no way prevents her from being a literary sensation. Furthermore, it is telling that the fraudulent process of ghostwriting Fuka-Eri’s novel serves to awaken Tengo’s slumbering literary talents. After finishing his work as a ghostwriter, Tengo returns to his own stories and discovers that the rewrite has ‘dislodged a rock that had been blocking his wellspring until now […]. Air Chrysalis had probably stimulated something that had been deep inside him all along’.58 Finally, he has grasped what he wants to write about. Moreover, Tengo’s gift reveals itself to be so powerful that the f ictional reality he created in Air Chrysalis slowly but surely transforms his own reality. After writing about a world in which air chrysalises appear from nowhere and two moons hang in the sky, Tengo begins to encounter these elements in real life – as does Aomame, as she tries to find her way out of the alternative dimension that makes up ‘1Q84’. ‘What kind of reality mimics fictional creations?’ Tengo wonders: ‘Could I have somehow left the real world and entered the world of Air Chrysalis like Alice falling down the rabbit hole? Or could the real world have been made over so as to match exactly the story of Air Chrysalis?’59 Both explanations, the novel seems to suggest, are correct. While Aomame has fallen down the rabbit hole as she descended an emergency exit ladder, Tengo’s powerful imagination has proven capable of giving reality itself a makeover. In general terms, then, 1Q84 is an ode to the powers of imagination as well as to the power of love, confirming that the world ‘wouldn’t be makebelieve / if you believed in me’, as the book’s motto states. More pertinent for the purpose of this chapter, however, is that the novel can be read as a form of literary self-presentation. In 1Q84, Murakami takes aim at both the publishing industry and the literary establishment. The figure of Komatsu is a caricature of the literary entrepreneur, who views novels merely as marketable commodities, whilst the media success of Fuka-Eri exposes the general public’s superficial craving for mediagenic personalities. At the same time, literary critics and jury members are depicted as members of 57 Murakami 2011, 227. 58 Murakami 2011, 198. 59 Murakami 2011, 548.

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an elitist clique, disdainful of bestselling successes and focused exclusively on what they perceive to be ‘pure literature’. Along the way, Murakami also takes a pre-emptive swipe at critics who may find his work too private, as he has Tengo read a couple of Air Chrysalis reviews in which critics judge Fuka-Eri’s supposedly ‘deliberately cryptic posture’ to be a form of ‘authorial laziness’.60 With 1Q84, Murakami responds to the public perception of his authorship in similar ways as he does in his interviews, that is, by navigating between the two regimes of authorship highlighted earlier. In the literary industry, as seen through the eyes of Komatsu, the regime of the professional dominates. Here, authorship is perceived as a form of entrepreneurship, the collective and tailor-made product of publishers, ghostwriters and the media. For literary critics and connoisseurs, the regime of the vocation prevails: they expect the author to be a singular individual with an innate talent, writing for a select audience. Yet 1Q84 does not offer a straightforward opposition between these two authorial personas. The contrast between them is undercut, for instance, by the fact that Tengo starts out as a copy editor, a cog in the machinery of the literary industry, but ends up being an author with the powers to affect, in the most profound sense, the world. Conversely, Tengo would not have been able to discover his true potential without his involvement in that industry, as it is Fuka-Eri, the celebrity, who provides him with the storyline that allows him to tap into his talents. The two authorial regimes of the professional and the vocational artist are entangled from the very start, as is confirmed by Komatsu, when he reveals his literary scheme at the beginning of the novel. ‘We put the two writers together and invent a brand-new one’, the experienced editor explains to Tengo: ‘We add your perfect style to Fuka-Eri’s raw story. It’s an ideal combination’.61 Although Komatsu’s objective was first and foremost of a commercial nature, he indirectly confirms the novel’s main point: bestselling success can indeed be attained by combining a professional attitude with an authentic literary calling. The protagonists of 1Q84 thus dramatize Murakami’s authorial self-presentation as an author who combines business instinct with an innate creative gift.

60 Murakami 2011, 380; Rubin 2012, 377‑378. See also Masao Miyoshi’s often-invoked critique of Murakami’s supposed ‘symbol deciphering game’, quoted in Strecher 2011, 857. 61 Murakami 2011, 24.

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Conclusion: The Narrative Work of Identity Murakami’s oeuvre has been interpreted in a wide and growing variety of ways.62 Some scholars read the author’s work as an ongoing reflection on the perils of subjectivity formation under postmodern conditions, others as a magic-realist attempt to come to terms with the crisis of identity in contemporary Japan, or as an exploration of the individual’s struggle to form a sense of self in the face of larger homogenizing societal forces – to name just a few examples.63 Without exception, such readings start from the assumption that Murakami’s stories are about storytelling – specifically about how narratives shape identities. The forces at work in this complex process of identity construction are multiple, including unconscious drives, collective ideologies, and personal experiences. As an author, Murakami himself, as has been argued in this chapter, has been exposed to such narrative forces as well. Becoming an author is a process in which different stories intermingle: the private story of the writer himself, his public self-narration and the narrative of the audience – in which the author suddenly finds himself to be the protagonist. In the case of Murakami, these stories meet and clash, resulting in what Heinich characterizes as an authorial identity crisis. Murakami is described as a literary superstar, even though he considers himself to be quite ordinary. Critics find him Americanized, yet it is important to him to write about Japanese culture. Although he is perceived as a calculating entrepreneur who anticipates the demands of the market, Murakami himself sees his literary talent as a gift from the heavens. The author negotiates such tensions between his self-presentation and his public image through a balanced form of self-presentation: in literary interviews as well as in novels such as 1Q84, Murakami mediates between his local and his international audience, between celebrity and modesty, and between entrepreneurship and literary vocation. By doing so, he has succeeded in constructing a counter-narrative that allows him to escape from the stories of readers, critics, and fans, and to regain control of his identity.

62 See Strecher 2011 for an overview of the state of affairs in ‘Maruku Hurakami Studies’. 63 Seats 2006; Strecher 1999; Yamada 2009.

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Bibliography B. Bawer, ‘Talk Show: The Rise of the Literary Interview’, American Scholar 57 (1988), no. 3, 421‑429. C. Cassegard, ‘Murakami Haruki and the Naturalization of Modernity’, Interna‑ tional Journal of Japanese Sociology 10 (2001), no. 1, 80‑92. M.R. Chozick, ‘De-Exoticizing Haruki Murakami’s Reception’, Comparative Litera‑ ture Studies 45 (2008), no. 1, 62‑73. M.R. Chozick, ‘Why Murakami’s Best-Selling 1Q84 is Worth the Wait’, The Japan Times, 5 July 2009. D. Danko, ‘Nathalie Heinich’s Sociology of Art – and Sociology from Art’, Cultural Sociology 2 (2008), no. 2, 242‑256. S. Emms, ‘Falling Out of Love with Murakami’, The Guardian, 1 December 2009. J.F. English & J. Frow, ‘Literary Authorship and Celebrity Culture’, in A Concise Companion to Contemporary British Fiction, ed. by J.F. English (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 39‑57. S. Fisher, ‘An Allegory of Return: Murakami Haruki’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle’, Comparative Literature Studies 36 (2000), no. 2, 155‑170. A. Flood, ‘Haruki Murakami’s “Agony Uncle” Answers Become Eight-Volume Book’, The Guardian, 13 August 2015. D. Giles, Illusions of Immortality: A Psychology of Fame and Celebrity (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000). L. Glass, Authors Inc.: Literary Celebrity in the Modern United States, 1880‑1980 (New York: New York University Press, 2004). J. Goldman, Modernism is the Literature of Celebrity (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011). J. Hadley & M. Akashi, ‘Translation and Celebrity: The Translation Strategies of Haruki Murakami and Their Implications for the Visibility Paradigm’, Perspec‑ tives: Studies in Translatology 23 (2015), no. 3, 458‑474. G.M. Hansen, ‘Murakami Haruki’s Female Narratives: Ignored Works Show Awareness of Women’s Issues’, Japan Studies Association Journal 8 (2010), 229‑238. N. Heinich, ‘Façons d’“être” écrivain: L’identité professionnelle en régime de singularité’, Association Revue Française de Sociologie 36 (1995), no. 3, 499‑524. N. Heinich, ‘Prix littéraires et crises identitaires: L’écrivain a l’épreuve de la gloire’, Recherches en communication 6 (1996), 65‑85. N. Heinich, Être écrivain: Création et identité (Paris: La Découverte Armillaire, 2000). P. Hensher, ‘1Q84’, The Spectator, 22 October 2011. M. Hillenbrand, ‘Murakami Haruki in Greater China: Creative Responses and the Quest for Cosmopolitanism’, The Journal of Asian Studies 68 (2009), no. 3, 715‑747.

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C. Kawakami, ‘The Unfinished Cartography: Murakami Haruki and the Postmodern Cognitive Map’, Monumenta Nipponica 57 (2002), no. 2, 309‑337. S. Lyons, ‘Japanese Kafkaesque: Crossing Borders and Translating Haruki Murakami’s Celebrity Status’, Celebrity Studies 5 (2014), no. 3, 342‑347. T. Martin, ‘Haruki Murakami: I’m Kind of Famous, I Just Want to Find Out Why That Happened’, The Telegraph, 4 November 2014. R. Miura, ‘On the Globalization of Literature: Haruki Murakami, Tim O’Brien, and Raymond Carver’, Electronic Book Review, 2003, http://www.electronicbookreview.com /thread/internetnation/bungaku, last accessed 1 February 2016. T. Mole, Byron’s Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). J. Moran, Star Authors: Literary Celebrity in America (London: Pluto Press, 2000). H. Murakami, After the Quake, trans. by J. Rubin (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002). H. Murakami, 1Q84, trans. by J. Rubin & P. Gabriel (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011). C. Nihei, ‘Resistance and Negotiation: “Herbivorous Men” and Murakami Haruki’s Gender and Political Ambiguity’, Asian Studies Review 37 (2013), no. 1, 62‑79. D. O’Brien, ‘The New Harry Potter? Book-Lovers Queue for Midnight Launch of New Haruki Murakami Novel’, Evening Standard, 12 August 2014. P. Paul, ‘The Murakami Effect’, The New York Times, 8 August 2014. S. Poole, ‘Haruki Murakami: I’m an Outcast of the Japanese Literary World’, The Guardian, 13 September 2014. J. Powers, ‘The Enemy Below’, Los Angeles Magazine, April, 2001, 102‑105. J. Rodden, ‘The Literary Interview as Public Performance’, Culture and Society 50 (2013), no. 4, 402‑406. J. Rubin, Haruku Murakami and the Music of Words (London: Vintage, 2012). M. Seats, Murakami Haruki: The Simulacrum in Contemporary Japanese Culture (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2006). G. Sniders, ‘Murakami Bingo’, http://www.incidentalcomics.com/2012/06/harukimurakami-bingo.html, last accessed 1 February 2016. M.C. Strecher, Dances with Sheep: The Quest for Identity in the Fiction of Murakami Haruki (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Centre for Japanese Studies, 2002). M.C. Strecher, ‘Magical Realism and the Search for Identity in the Fiction of Murakami Haruki’, Journal of Japanese Studies 25 (1999), no. 2, 263‑298. M.C. Strecher, ‘At the Critical Stage: A Report on the State of Murakami Haruki Studies’, Literature Compass 8 (2011), no. 11, 856‑869. M.C. Strecher, The Forbidden Worlds of Haruki Murakami (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014). R. Suter, The Japanization of Modernity: Murakami Haruki Between Japan and the United States (Cambridge: The Harvard University Asia Centre, 2008).

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M. Yamada, ‘Exposing the Private Origins of Public Stories: Narrative Perspective and the Appropriation of Selfhood in Murakami Haruki’s Post-AUM Metafiction’, Japanese Language and Literature 43 (2009), no. 1, 1‑26. L. York, ‘Brand Names: A Brief History of Literary Celebrity’, in A Companion to Celebrity Studies, ed. by P.D. Marshall & S. Redmond (Malden: Wiley Blackwell, 2016), 39‑57. J. Wray, ‘Haruki Murakami: The Art of Fiction’, in The Paris Review Interviews IV, ed. by The Paris Review Staff (New York: Picador, 2009), 335‑370.

Figure 30 Dmitrii Vodennikov, 2015

Photograph by Olga Pavolga (http://www.pavolga.com)

10 Sincere e-Self-Fashioning Dmitrii Vodennikov (1968) Ellen Rutten In Russia as elsewhere, from the late eighteenth century onwards writers have acknowledged, reflected upon, and toyed with their status as public faces.1 In the late eighteenth century the famous court poet Gavriila Derzhavin ‘obsessively’ defended ‘the purity of his personal motives’ in response to accusations of public political flattery.2 In the first half of the nineteenth century, Mikhail Lermontov exploited hyper-stylized painted portraits to consolidate his status as a Great Romantic poet. And around the 1900s, Leo Tolstoi – in one of the many paradoxes that shape his biography – combined a persistent love for the unmediated with an unusually strong media presence. In the words of the renowned cultural historian Caryl Emerson, it is this author of Russian classics who became ‘the world’s first multimedia celebrity’.3 Scholarly attention for this intimate connection between Russian literature, media, and public fame is growing, but as yet a cultural history of Russian literary celebrity is still to be realized. 4 Of course, it lies beyond the scope of this chapter to repair this lack. However, my contribution does take Emerson’s reference to ‘multimedia celebrity’ as a basis for a narrower media-historical analysis, one that challenges the focus on ‘Western’ authors within existing literary-celebrity scholarship.5 Rather than famous writers from ‘the West’, the pages that follow explore post-Soviet literary stardom. More specifically, I track 21st-century practices of literary e-self-fashioning.6 This term refers to literary forms of self-fashioning that build upon, and take place within, information and communication technologies. Put somewhat differently, rather than literary self-representation as such, the notion of literary e-self-fashioning covers the ways in which writers present themselves 1 In taking the late eighteenth century as a departure point for Russian literary stardom, I follow the periodization that Mole (2007) offers in his groundbreaking study of Byron. 2 Klein 2010. 3 Emerson 2012, 132. 4 See among others Venediktova & Chernushkina 2008; Sidorova 2009; Dubin 2010. 5 See Moran 2000; Mole 2007; Easley 2011; Leick 2012. 6 In this article, I extend and theoretically sharpen insights that I first shared in Rutten 2014 (in Dutch) and in Rutten 2017.

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online, on social media and other digital platforms. In discussing these practices, I am indebted not only to Stephen Greenblatt’s famous study Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980), but also to existing studies of online lifelogging, self-documentation, and online or digital self-fashioning.7 The latter helpfully, if succinctly, theorize how, in the words of Geert Lovink, ‘elements of the self (diary, introspection)’ blend online with ‘the spectacle of the blogocratic few that fight over the attention of the millions’.8 Here, I apply the insights of Lovink and others to literary contexts by focusing upon the online presence of one particularly popular and digitally prolific post-Soviet writer. Dmitrii Vodennikov is a contemporary Russian poet who can safely be called a literary star. Vodennikov’s readers actively debate their idol’s public celebrity status, his behaviour on social media supplying powerful fuel for their debate. Is this poet eagerly sharing intimate details about his private life online out of a true desire for sincerity, or should his digital openness be read as mere postmodern play? As we will see, Vodennikov responds to this and similar sincerity anxieties with an e-self-fashioning strategy that is as sophisticated as it is confusing.

Vodennikov and ‘The New Sincerity’ Moscow-based writer Vodennikov is an esteemed contemporary Russian poets’ poet. As the fragment below illustrates, he writes poems that are both intertextually dense – the play with historical Romantic tropes is bound to catch the eye even of non-expert readers – and near-sentimentally openhearted: Yes, it is exactly so (there are no other versions) it all has left and burned all bridges, my protracted spring, and arrived – finally – my long awaited ripeness. Although, yesterday, why did you flicker and jump, why my satiated sly heart, why did you flicker and jump, as if you’d lost your mind?9

Vodennikov’s complex fascination for openness and intimacy in this and other poems has not escaped critics: they have repeatedly envisioned him as 7 See Greenblatt 1980; and, among others, Van Dijck 2004; Kitzmann 2004; Lovink 2008; Ferranto 2010. 8 Lovink 2008, 33. 9 Vodennikov 2008.

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the Russian leader of a so-called ‘new sincerity’ in contemporary literature. Rather than a matter of superficial labelling, new sincerity rhetoric is formative of the reception of Vodennikov’s work and life. In that capacity, the notion of a ‘new sincerity’ merits some separate discussion here. Today the concept of a revived or reborn sincerity is embraced as a late or post-postmodern philosophy of (cultural) life for people from a variety of social, geopolitical, and professional backgrounds.10 Definitions of ‘the new sincerity’ are contradictory and often conceptually foggy: they range from the theoretically densely defined ‘new sincere’ aesthetics of Russian theorist Mikhail Epstein to American blogger Roundhouse’s observation that Nike’s latest sneaker model is ‘so new sincerity that you can’t get sick of it’.11 As a rule, however, advocates use the phrase to refer to a specific cultural condition – one that they see as an alternative to postmodernism. A sincerity that disavows or outbraves postmodern logic: in advocating this vision, new sincerity aficionados fuel wider debates on our age as a late or post-postmodern era. Post-postmodernism, so proponents of this term claim, moves beyond the excessive relativism, cynicism, and ethical indifference of the postmodern. On what the new era offers instead, critics differ. Some argue that we are entering an age of renewed sincerity, authenticity or sentimentalism. Whilst others say that, after postmodernism, it is impossible to return to sincerity or seriousness as if nothing happened. For some, irony and relativism are taboo today. For others, they are precisely what make ‘post-postmodern sincerity’ or ‘the new authenticity’ valuable.12 Central to the debate concerning a post-postmodern age – and central to the case of Vodennikov – are critical reflections on mediatization. Theorists often position the late or post-postmodern squarely within our ‘mediated’ society.13 They ask: how do we talk, think, and write in a world of media data floods?14 In answering this question, more than one expert takes recourse to the language of sincerity and authenticity. Cultural analysts Ernst van Alphen, Mieke Bal and Carel Smith, for instance, argue that in the 21st century, sincerity is to an increasing extent a ‘media effect’.15 Literary scholars Wolfgang Funk, Florian Gross and Irmtraud Huber warn that in 10 Rutten 2017. 11 Epstein 1999; Roundhouse Kicks 2015. 12 For (overviews of) representative voices in this ongoing discussion, see Ziegler 1993; Epstein 1999; Kirby 2006; Gilmore & Pine 2007; Smith, Enwezor & Condeed 2009; Vaessens & Van Dijk 2011; Nealon 2012; Boyle 2013. 13 De Zengotita 2005. 14 Hayles & Gannon 2007; Boyle 2013. 15 Van Alphen, Bal & Smith 2009, 5.

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contemporary media, authenticity and performance never act as rock-hard opposites, since ‘authenticity is performative’.16 Literary historian Susan Rosenbaum observes a similar interconnection and traces it back in time. In her words, ever since the age of Romanticism ‘commercial culture combines sincerity and performance, rendering them indistinguishable practices’.17

Poet’s Poet or Pop Star? Rosenbaum and her colleagues use different terms to drive home a similar point: in a mediated world, sincerity (or authenticity) and performance (or commercial gain) are two sides of the same coin. How this intersection works in practice is a question that Vodennikov’s story helps to answer. Vodennikov is anything but a marginal name in post-Soviet literature, and is held in critical acclaim by his peers. In a 2002 poll by the renowned literary critic Viacheslav Kuritsyn he ranked among Russia’s ten most important living poets.18 He is also a public pet: in the words of one interviewer, Vodennikov is ‘more or less the key media face of contemporary poetry’.19 The poet himself actively feeds his fame: he writes columns for the popular online newspaper Gazeta.ru; he stars in multiple lengthy (print, online, TV) interviews; and he hosts well-attended live performances/concerts. Visitors of these public performances crave more than poetry alone: many a romance-seeking Russian woman has found in the tall, slender Vodennikov – ‘my beauty is my curse’ he once joked in an interview – a fiercely desired beauty idol.20 ‘I have loved Vodennikov ever since [his poem] “Any woman is like a fresh grave…”’; ‘he is some unbelievable creature’; ‘I am melting’.21 Female bloggers use these and other emphatically amorous terms to discuss the poet and his work. Vodennikov’s status as a media icon generates enthusiastic blog posts, but it has also sparked the attention of Russian critics and scholars. In an essay on poetry and stardom, the writer Miroslav Nemirov calls the poet an ‘[undoubted] pop star’, and his live performances full-fledged ‘rock concerts, 16 Funk, Gross & Huber 2012, 13. Emphasis added. 17 Rosenbaum 2007, 12. 18 Kuritsyn 2002. 19 Shchegolev 2013. All translations in this chapter, unless otherwise indicated in the references, are mine. 20 Prilepin 2007. 21 For the discussion – dating from February 2009 – between three female bloggers from which I took these citations, see Sestrra 2009.

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that include a mass-induced ecstasy of the audience’.22 Nemirov goes on to embed the poet’s public life in a longer tradition of Russian literary ‘pop stars’ and their fans, a tradition that he traces back to nineteenth-century literary celebrities such as Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Ivan Turgenev.23 Literary historian Tat’iana Aleksa similarly unravels Vodennikov’s case as part of a broader analysis of literary ‘communication’ strategies. In her words, this writer’s pro-active approach to media attention illustrates in a contemporary context how ‘an author’s public behavior becomes a new auctorial function’ whose ‘literary reputation and image are created as a dynamic text’.24 Although Aleksa and Nemirov helpfully theorize and historically contextualize Vodennikov’s public image, they say little about its outlines in digital media. Literary e-self-fashioning merits attention, however, in an age when digital media can make or break social reputations – of writers no less than of other visible public figures. In the analysis that follows the primary question will be: how is Vodennikov’s public identity constructed and read in digital media, and in social media in particular?

@vodennikov: Moving from Blog to Twitter Amongst post-Soviet Russian writers, social media are popular – and with good reason. These writers operate both in a literary environment in which the chances of publishing work in print are miniscule, and in a mediascape in which newspapers, periodicals, and radio and TV stations offer minimal space for critical voices.25 Within this confined literary and media landscape, online media – a site of relatively modest interference from the authorities that harbours numerous free publishing options – form a self-evident platform for intellectual and literary production. Unsurprisingly, the Rulinet, an insider abbreviation for the Russian literary Internet, has thrived since the moment Russians started using digital media. As early as 2004, literary expert Dmitrii Kuz’min argued that as far as the latest ‘literary generation’ is concerned, ‘practically all authors’ entered the scene ‘via the Internet’.26 Vodennikov is part of that generation, and his diligent 22 23 24 25 26

Nemirov 2005. Nemirov 2005. Aleshka 2010. For details, see among others Wachtel 2006; Beumers, Hutchings & Rulyova 2009. Kuz’min 2004.

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digital activities are an apt object for studies in what one could call – with a term borrowed from business spheres – online reputation management. Apart from a personal website, Vodennikov hosts a personal weblog, a Facebook page and a Twitter account.27 The latter he uses a maximum of a few times per week, primarily to share practical information: he posts references to his newspaper columns, for example, or links to interviews and upcoming performances. His website he uses even less (in September 2015, the last news item dated from June 2015), but it does treat visitors to a broad range of Vodennikov-related materials. Users of the website are granted access to poems, essays, and details about book publications, but also audio and video files of his live shows, extensive photo materials, press releases, and a link to his blog. Vodennikov updated his personal weblog frequently between its launch in July 2004 and the early 2010s. In these first years, his posts represented the ‘colloquial’, ‘semi-literary’ blend that cultural historians Irina Kaspe and Varvara Smurova have called emblematic for Russian writers’ blogs. If we must believe Kaspe and Smurova, Russian literary blogs display a tendency to share and collect ‘sympathetic responses, everyday advice, literary instructions, offers to help, to bring a few tangerines, to correct the second paragraph, and to replace some words’.28 Vodennikov’s blog neatly illustrates Kaspe’s and Smurova’s point. He has used it to post new poetry, photographs, reproductions of paintings, open questions to readers (‘what will you devour, er, sorry, eat on New Year’s Eve?’), lengthy discussions in which the poet eagerly participates, practical details about upcoming shows, and links to PR materials and his journalistic writings. In the summer of 2013, Vodennikov’s blog activities diminished radically: between then and September 2015 – the moment when this analysis was written – his blog was updated sparsely, with links to shows and columns only. The dwindling of his blogging activities in this period has a reason: from 2009 onwards, Vodennikov started exploring Twitter and Facebook. Just like many other Russian creative professionals, he first migrated part and, with time, most of his activities to this social media platform. According to Vodennikov, this was not a voluntary choice. In 2009, he told me that 27 The addresses of the four pages are: www.vodennikov.ru, http://vodennikov.livejournal. com, www.facebook.com/DmitryVodennikov, and http://twitter.com/vodennikov, last accessed 1 December 2015. 28 Kaspe & Smurova 2002. ‘Semi-literary’ is my translation of the okololiteraturnyi – literally, ‘revolving-around-the-literary’ – trend that Kaspe & Smurova discern in the blogs of Russian writers.

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he found his LiveJournal blog ‘more comfortable’ than other social media.29 In 2015, however, he explained to me that, in response to broader trends in media usage among peers, he felt more or less forced to transfer his social media activities. He wrote: ‘[It was] like in Paris. The nineteenth century. At some point all got up and transferred the location of their bohemian meetings from the boulevards to the Champs Elysées. The same happened with the web. Suddenly everyone gets up and moves to another space’.30 Of those new media to which Vodennikov migrated, Twitter failed to gain his favour: between May 2009 (when he joined the platform) and March 2015 he posted 375 posts (60 or so per year on average), and attracted no more than 440 followers. However, his shift to Facebook was much more successful. By 25 September 2015, Vodennikov had attracted 3,385 Facebook friends. Facebook does not quantify how many posts a user has shared in any given period, however, in recent years, whenever I have checked, his last post has rarely dated back more than a day, often being mere minutes or hours ago. Between 2009 and 2015, the poet had engaged in a range of Facebook practices whose diversity likens that of his blog in the 2000s. However, in his new digital home he opted for a near-teasingly insistent emphasis on sharing private information. The injection that his beloved dachshund Iosefina Taurovna had to undergo; the dishwashing technique that a friend from St Petersburg employs when visiting; the sleeplessness from which the poet suffers at night; his walks through Moscow with a pedometer (and the number of kilometres that the pedometer indicates when the walk ends) – loyal readers of Vodennikov’s Facebook page are fully informed about these and related developments in his daily life. They read about these developments, but they also see his life in minute detail, from unflattering selfies to close-up photographs of the blanket on which Vodennikov and his dog sleep.

Sincerity as Sales Ware? Slick-looking poet-performer and openhearted social media user: it will surprise few readers of this chapter that Vodennikov’s public profile is not met with unequivocal trust and reader approval. The poet is often accused of reducing himself to a commercial product. Both lay and professional

29 Vodennikov 2009. 30 Vodennikov 2015.

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critics argue that he uses tropes of sincerity and openheartedness to spawn public attention and commercial gain. Poet and critic Daniila Davydov is a case in point. He argues in a review that Vodennikov’s choice to embrace a ‘new sincere’ poetics enhances his star status among poetry lovers.31 In a long television interview with the poet, journalist Konstantin Shavlovskii follows an analogous logic: he sets himself the goal of using their conversation to find out from Vodennikov why ‘openness is used more and more [in the new sincerity] by creatives to transform their work into sales ware’.32 Neither in this interview, nor elsewhere does Vodennikov try to annihilate confusion about his public persona – quite the contrary. In interviews, he comments on his work in terms that inevitably evoke suspicions about the author’s integrity. ‘I simply try not to lie’, he answers when an interviewer asks him about his reputation as unreliable, only to then instantly add: ‘[That] is hard for me, as I am a rather insincerely inclined person’.33 In his poetry, Vodennikov similarly complicates his reputation as ‘new sincerity icon’ with lines that simultaneously undermine and embrace that reputation. Most notably, he does so in ‘Muzhchiny tozhe mogut imitirovat’ orgazm’ (‘Men Can Also Fake an Orgasm’) – verses whose title firmly puts the tension between sincerity and play on the agenda. In this 2001 poem, Vodennikov consciously exploits the border between irony and sincerity by summing up the sometimes near-pathetically sentimental labels that critics tag onto his poetry. ‘Dozens of articles have been written about me’, so the opening lines of this poem read: ‘Sense of an exalted cry’ ‘Stormy flower of an unconsolidated neomodernism’ ‘Word-subject in its polyphonic text’ … and even ‘The new sincerity, the new sensitivity, the new word.’ My God, on what have you wasted my invaluable life.34

The tone that Vodennikov adopts in this poem is representative of many of his lyrics, simultaneously expressing ironic distance and bemused affection. 31 32 33 34

Davydov 2009. Shavlovskii 2010. Sherb 2015. Vodennikov 2001.

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In his online writings Vodennikov uses a media-specific but comparable blend of mockery and attachment to both consolidate and subvert confusion about his unusual openheartedness. His social media behaviour demonstrates that online media are for him a perfect tool to trigger sincerity doubts among his readers. He evokes these doubts through a variety of activities. First of all, Vodennikov is ambivalent in meta-comments, both about sincerity and about digitization. In one blog post, he calls ‘the new sincerity’ with which critics identify him ‘rather funny of course’.35 In interviews, he insists on his preference for social seclusion, and when I interviewed him in the late 2000s, he claimed that for that same reason, he had long hesitated to open a blog. However, in that same interview he called blogging a means to ‘live in the centre of the world’ and to embrace ‘openheartedness’ – one that shows us that ‘the new sincerity has ended, and the new honesty has started’.36 If Vodennikov’s comments about social media are contradictory, so is his behaviour on social media. As we saw, he uses his blog posts to offer readers detailed glimpses into his private life. On both his blog and Facebook he shares self-revelatory autobiographic fragments, but their lyrical intonation is often emphasized to such an extent that it borders on exaggeration. In addition, Vodennikov treats his social media friends to dramatic, hyperromantic photographs and videos in which he performs poetic readings as if he shares the intimate confessions of a shy Einzelgänger. Just as Lermontov once strengthened his status as Russia’s Great Romantic poet with painted portraits, so Vodennikov adopts a cautiously (hyper-)stylized romantic pose in these photos and videos. The tension between the fake and the real in his online pictures and posts recurs in the profile descriptions for which Vodennikov opts across different media platforms – as indicated, at least, in a survey of these platforms on 20 March 2015. ‘Second real life’ is the name that he then displayed for his blog on its ‘personal information’ page. ‘D.V.’ is his cryptic Twitter username. His Twitter user picture (which to my knowledge Vodennikov never altered between the moment that he launched his blog and 2015) is no less cryptic: it consists of a photograph of the same dachshund that features to prominently in the poet’s Facebook posts, next to a person of whom we only see a leg, one hand, and part of his (or her?) body and hand. His Facebook profile page offers no unequivocal personal information about the writer either: it hosts a user picture with a set of six portrait photographs 35 Vodennikov 2010. 36 Vodennikov 2009.

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of Vodennikov (on each photo, he wears a different hair colour), and a joking reference to his home town as ‘Orphan town, Volgograd region, Russia’ (in truth, Vodennikov lives in Moscow). As with his critics, so Vodennikov’s social media readers are well aware of the ambivalence that resonates in both his online work and behaviour. They explicitly dwell on, and interrogate, the author’s self-fashioning strategies. Some claim to ‘dislike Vodennikov’ because he is ‘a master in self-PR’ who ‘is unreal somehow, phony’ and ‘mystifies himself’, or, on the contrary, to value him as a ‘media f igure in contemporary poetry [who] merits attention’. Others caricature his omnipresence in media (‘yes, i do not know who vodennikov is. and what now?. o.O / kill me, my dear ones. / update: gee, he probably hiccuped by now, already’) and yet others fail to believe his personal Facebook anecdotes (‘I am never going to believe that about the thousand rubles. Vodennikov is so greedy that he would not even leave ten’).37 ‘I noticed’, journalist Aleksei Morozov asks Vodennikov about his online activities in an interview in the newspaper Vzgliad, that as a skilled PR man, you maximally exploit the support that you need from social media. This is where your concerts, your radio shows, your interviews in glossy magazines, your professionally constructed site come from [...]. But does this not overlap with the poets of the 1960s? They had stadiums and the Internet offers that same stadium! Do you need this publicity, the stage appeal so badly?38

With these and analogous comments Vodennikov’s readers, fans, and critics probe questions such as: How truly private and (newly) sincere is the glimpse that this writer offers us into his life? To what extent does he really admit us, readers and online friends, into his life, and to what extent is he using intimacy and sincerity to acquire celebrity status? When is this writer serious, and when is he playing a (postmodern, media, or other) game? These questions are, of course, impossible to answer. A closer look at Vodennikov’s Facebook comments demonstrates that many followers accept and, in some cases, savour that impossibility: the writer’s ‘Facebook friends’ often respond by continuing the ambivalent tone of his posts, frequently 37 For the blogs and forums from which I took these citations, see, respectively, Gonch 2007; Clockworktoy 2008; Vodennikov Facebook 2015. All punctuation and lowercase as in original. 38 Here, Morozov (2007) is referring to popular Russian dissident poets like Evgenii Evtushenko and others, who performed in packed soccer stadiums.

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with tangible pleasure. Together, Vodennikov and these friends illustrate the claims that Van Alphen, Bal, Funk, and other stardom and media experts have now repeatedly made: in celebrity cultures there is no hard line between true and false, between authenticity and performance, or between image and a purported true ‘self’.39 The authors of a recent music study opt for an instrumental approach to the same insight, when they say: ‘Sincerity and autobiography are techniques one can employ in the service of personal authenticity’. 40 An author such as Vodennikov is aware of this instrumental potential of sincerity. Rather than a backdrop of public fame, he welcomes the tension between what is real and what is fake as part and parcel of that fame. For him, and for some of his followers, Facebook represents an ideal platform to toy with the same tension – with a devotion that is sometimes artificial, sometimes genuine, and sometimes both at the same time.

Conclusion That writers like Vodennikov construct such an emphatically openhearted self-image has a reason, and that reason cannot be reduced to a cheap hunt for commercial gain. In our (post-)postmodern, mediatized age – so cultural and media theoretician Boris Groys argues – media are by default ‘under suspicion’. 41 In this age, ‘the romantic image of the poète maudit is substituted by that of the artist as being explicitly cynical – greedy, manipulative, business-oriented, seeking only material profit, and implementing art as a machine for deceiving the audience’. Groys goes on to argue that such a suspicious social vision on artists creates a situation in which it is productive to present oneself as insincere: ‘Today, to decide to present oneself as ethically bad is to make an especially good decision in terms of self-design (genius = swine)’. 42 Damien Hirst is an artist who opts for such a contemporary optimal self-fashioning strategy, as do writers like Michel Houellebecq or, to mention an example in my home country, Arnon Grunberg. Vodennikov’s reputation-management strategy is similar to theirs. He chooses to use social media – and his Facebook page in particular – with maximal and willfully suspect openheartedness. 39 40 41 42

On the problematic status of that concept, see Metzinger 2010. Barker & Taylor 2007, x. Groys 2012. Groys 2009.

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Meta-comments, written posts, photos, profile descriptions: Vodennikov uses all these discursive and creative tools to generate an atmosphere in which readers continually wonder how upright this virtual intimacy really is. Vodennikov is not the first to make this choice, of course. Both in and outside Russia, writers have played for ages with the tension between sincerity and irony. In an upcoming publication, I explore the cultural history of Russian sincerity rhetoric, which part parallels, which part differs from that of other languages. 43 To understand Vodennikov’s online strategies, some knowledge of recent and historical Russian twists in this rhetoric is a prerequisite. One such twist was triggered by the radical postSoviet transition from socialism into hypercapitalism, and thus into an economic system in which poets and writers were forced again to live off their writings. In post-Soviet Russia, the writers’ need to ‘remain relevant after Communism’ has sparked intense debates about the nexus between artistic sincerity and pragmatic economic concerns.44 These debates cannot be isolated from discussions that question Vodennikov’s on- and offline honesty. They resonate with force in the discussion mapped throughout this chapter: as we saw, its participants frame the writer’s poetics of sincerity as ‘sales ware’, the poet as a ‘self-PR’ expert, and his online practices as ‘publicity’ stunts by a ‘PR man’. Discussions about Vodennikov exemplify the post-Soviet take on sincerity in one more respect, namely their politicized tone. In his poetry and social media posts, Vodennikov insistently evades politics, but his readers and interviewers just as insistently bring the political back into the discussion.45 In Vzgliad, Morozov at one point asks a tangibly reluctant Vodennikov to respond to the ‘Soviet-era opinion that poetry is a civic position’; to agree that ‘this is the time’ to foreground ‘warm’ characters; to explain his ‘sincere belief in honest politicians and honest journalists’; and to share his view on neo-imperialist trends in Russian politics. 46 Morozov’s attempts to blend sincerity rhetoric with politics are as abundant as they are understandable in the post-Soviet context. After all, Russian debates about sincerity and hypocrisy have been situated squarely in political spheres ever since the time of Stalin’s death. ‘On Sincerity in Literature’ (1953) was the title of an essay by Vladimir Pomerantsev that then 43 44 45 46

Rutten 2017. This citation I borrow from Wachtel 2006. See Rutten 2015. Morozov 2007.

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paved the way for critical reflection on the nation’s recent traumatic past. In this essay, Pomerantsev asked (albeit in slightly more cautious wording): How to revive sincerity in the face of a hypocritical national ideology? And how to employ artistic sincerity in an age of fraudulent state propaganda?47 Between the mid-1950s and the downfall of the Soviet Union, Pomerantsev’s questions remained intellectual hobbyhorses for Soviet-era critics, writers, and thinkers. In the age of Putin-era TV propaganda and online trolling, progressive journalists and critics revive the same questions.48 The life and work of ‘new sincerity leader’ Vodennikov form an ideal departure point for asking them, as Morozov’s interview illustrates. ‘Far from being dismissed’, so Van Alphen and Bal conclude their analysis of sincerity rhetoric, the concept of sincerity must today ‘be taken extremely seriously’. 49 Vodennikov’s literary e-self-fashioning confirms their claim. As we saw, his literary e-self-fashioning interrogates: first, the mistrust that is the inevitable social twin of stardom; second, the distrust that postsocialist capitalism has triggered in the Russian literary scene; and third, the skepticism that sincerity is bound to evoke in the political and media landscape of Putin-era Russia. Is Vodennikov a (post-)postmodern fraud or not? The answer to that question is not what really matters. What deserves to be taken quite seriously instead is his in-depth engagement with this threefold set of socially urgent suspicions.

Bibliography T. Aleshka, ‘Avtor i chitatel’ v novoi kommunikativnoi situatsii (na materiale poezii D. Vodennikova)’, in Russkaia i belorusskaia literatura na rubezhe XX-XXI vv.: sbornik nauchnykh statei v 2 ch. ed. by S. Goncharova-Grabovskaia (Minsk: RIVSh, 2010), 106‑114. E. van Alphen, M. Bal & C. Smith (eds.), The Rhetoric of Sincerity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). H. Barker & Y. Taylor (eds.), Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music (New York: Norton, 2007). B. Beumers, S. Hutchings & N. Rulyova, The Post-Soviet Russian Media: Conflicting Signals (New York: Routledge, 2009).

47 Pomerantsev 1953. 48 See among others Medvedev 2008; Pertsev 2014. 49 Van Alphen, Bal & Smith 2009, 15.

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D. Boyle, The Age to Come: Authenticity, Postmodernism and How To Survive What Comes Next (London: Endeavor Press, 2013). Clockworktoy, 20 May 2008, http://clockworktoy.diary.ru/p43674963.htm?oam, last accessed 1 December 2015. J. van Dijck, ‘Composing the Self: Of Diaries and Lifelogs’, The Fibreculture Journal 3 (2004), http://three.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-012-composing-the-self-ofdiaries-and-lifelogs/, last accessed 1 December 2015. B. Dubin, Klassika, posle i riadom: Sotsiologicheskie ocherki o literature i kul’ture (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2010). A. Easley, Literary Celebrity, Gender, and Victorian Authorship, 1850‑1914 (Lanham: Delaware University Press, 2011). M. Epstein, ‘Conclusion: On the Place of Postmodernism in Postmodernity’, in Russian Postmodernism: New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture, ed. by M.N. Epstein, A.A. Genis & S.M. Vladiv-Glover (New York: Berghahn, 1999), 456‑468. C. Emerson, Introduction to Russian Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). M. Ferranto, ‘Digital Self-Fashioning in Cyberspace: The New Digital Self-Portrait’, in A History of Visual Culture, ed. by J. Kromm &S. Benforado Bakewell (Oxford: Berg, 2010), 356‑367. W. Funk, F. Gross & I. Huber (eds.), The Aesthetics of Authenticity: Medial Construc‑ tions of the Real (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2012). J.H. Gilmore & B.J. Pine, Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2007). L. Glass, Authors Inc.: Literary Celebrity in the Modern United States (New York: New York University Press, 2004). A. Gonch, 7 October 2007, http://a-gonch.livejournal.com/151180.html, last accessed 1 December 2015. S. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980). B. Groys, ‘Self-Design and Aesthetic Responsibility’, e-Flux (2009), http://www.ef lux.com/journal/self-design-and-aesthetic-responsibility/, last accessed 1 December 2015. B. Groys, Under Suspicion: A Phenomenology of Media (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). A. Kirby, ‘The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond’, Philosophy Now 58 (2006), 34‑37. J. Klein, ‘Wahrheit und Aufrichtigkeit im Herrscherlob’, Zeitschrift fuer Slavische Philologie 67 (2010), 27‑50.

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D. Kuz’min, ‘Istoriia i nekotorye etapy russkogo literaturnogo Interneta’, Radio svoboda, 9 August 2004, http://archive.svoboda.org/programs/sc/2004/sc.080904. asp, last accessed 1 December 2015. V. Kuritsyn, ‘Reiting poetov’, Sovremennaia russkaia literatura s Viacheslavom Kuritsyn (2002), http://www.guelman.ru/slava/10/10%20poe.htm, last accessed 1 December 2015. K. Leick, Gertrude Stein and the Making of an American Celebrity (New York: Routledge, 2012). G. Lovink, Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture (New York: Routledge, 2008). K. Medvedev, ‘The Writer in Russia: Individualism and the “New Emotionalism”’, Dissent 55 (2008), no. 4, 13‑22. T. Metzinger, Der Ego Tunnel. Eine neue Philosophie des Selbst: Von der Hirnforschung zur Bewusstseinsethik (Berlin: Berlin Verlag, 2010). T. Mole, Byron’s Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). J. Moran, Star Authors: Literary Celebrity in America (London: Pluto Press, 2000). A. Morozov, ‘Dmitrii Vodennikov: “Poeziia – eto obuza”’, Vzgliad, 2 February 2007, http://vz.ru/culture/2007/2/12/67989.html, last accessed 1 December 2015. J.T. Nealon, Post-Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Just-In-Time Capitalism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012). M. Nemirov, ‘Poet kak pop-zvezda’, Vzgliad, 6  July 2005, http://www3.vz.ru/ culture/2005/7/6/1510.html, last accessed 1 December 2015. A. Pertsev, ‘Novaia iskrennost’: kogda propagandist ne vret’, Slon.ru, 10 March 2014, http://slon.ru/russia/novaya_iskrennost_kogda_propagandist_ne_vret-1166698. xhtml, last accessed 1 December 2015. V. Pomerantsev, ‘Ob iskrennosti v literature’, Novyi mir 12 (1953), http://vivovoco. rsl.ru/VV/PAPERS/LITRA/MEMO/POMER.HTM, last accessed 1 December 2015. Z. Prilepin, ‘Dmitrii Vodennikov: “Sredi novykh poetov ia samyi chitaemyi. Skorei vsego nikto prosto ne rubit v nikh…”’, APN Nizhnii Novgorod, 19 November 2007, http://www.apn-nn.ru/pub_s/1484.html, last accessed 1 December 2015. S. Rosenbaum, Professing Sincerity: Modern Lyric Poetry, Commercial Culture, and the Crisis in Reading (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007). Roundhouse Kicks, ‘Luchador Flyer Dunk High’, Roundhouse Kicks Blogspot, 5 September 2006, http://rhkicks.blogspot.com/2006/09/luchador-flyer-dunkhigh.html, last accessed 1 December 2015. E. Rutten, ‘De nieuwe oprechtheid? Russische schrijvers online’, Vooys 32 (2014), no. 4, 54‑59, http://tijdschriftvooys.nl/wp-content/uploads/32.4-VVZ-Rutten. pdf, last accessed 1 December 2015.

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E. Rutten, ‘Russische literatuur, protest en sociale media’, Tijdschrift voor Slavische literatuur 70 (2015), 13‑19. E. Rutten, Sincerity after Communism: A Cultural History (Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2017). Sestrra, Sestrra Livejournal (February 2009), http://sestrra.livejournal.com/profile, last accessed 1 December 2015. K. Shavlovskii, ‘Noch’ na piatom: Dmitrii Vodennikov’, 5-TV, 9 November 2010, interview, http://www.5-tv.ru/video/505807/, last accessed 1 December 2015. A. Shchegolev, ‘Dmitrii Vodennikov: “Ochen’ khochetsia rokk-n-rolla i ochen’ ne khochetsia biblioteki”’, rugrad.eu, 2013, http://rugrad.eu/af isha/interview/ dmitriy-vodennikov-ochen-khochetsya-rok-n-rolla-i-sovsem-ne-khochetsyabiblioteki/, last accessed 1 December 2015. M. Sherb, ‘Dmitrii Vodennikov: “Ia prosto staraius’ ne vrat’. Mne eto trudno”’, Emigrantskaia lira 2 (2015), http://www.promegalit.ru/numbers/emigrantskayalira_2015_2.html, last accessed 1 December 2015. A. Sidorova, Kommunikativnye strategii i kul’turnye praktiki v pole literatury (Barnaul: AGTU, 2009). T. Smith, O. Enwezor & N. Condeed (eds.), Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009). I. Toporova, ‘Dmitrii Vodennikov: “Poeziia ne dlia vsekh”’, Vedomosti 51 (2010), http://vedomosti.sfo.ru/articles/?article=34563, last accessed 1 December 2015. T. Vaessens & Y. van Dijk (eds.), Reconsidering the Postmodern: European Literature Beyond Relativism (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011) T. Venediktova & N. Chernushkina, ‘Literatura i media v poiskakh novogo adresata’, Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 90 (2008), conference review (Moscow: Literatura i media: meniaiushchiisia oblik chitatelia, October 24‑25, 2007), http://magazines. russ.ru/nlo/2008/90/ve33.html, last accessed 1 December 2015. D. Vodennikov, ‘Muzhchiny tozhe mogut imitirovat’ orgazm’, Vodennikov.ru, 2001, http://vodennikov.ru/poem/muzhchiny.htm, last accessed 1 December 2015. D. Vodennikov, ‘Draft [fragment]’, trans. by P. Golub, Jacket Magazine 36 (2008), http://jacketmagazine.com/36/rus-vodennikov-trb-yankelevich-golub-golub. shtml, last accessed 1 December 2015. D. Vodennikov, personal interview with the author (14 May 2009); transcript available upon request via [email protected]. D. Vodennikov, ‘Noch’ na piatom’, Vodennikov.Livejournal, 22 December 2010, http:// vodennikov.livejournal.com, date accessed 1 December 2015. D. Vodennikov, personal conversation with the author via Facebook (11 February 2015); screenshot available upon request via [email protected]. Vodennikov Facebook, visitor post (21 September 2015), https://www.facebook. com/DmitryVodennikov?fref=ts, last accessed 1 December 2015.

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A.B. Wachtel, Remaining Relevant After Communism: The Role of the Writer in Eastern Europe (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006). T. de Zengotita, Mediated: How the Media Shapes Your World and the Way You Live In It (New York: Bloomsbury, 2005). H. Ziegler, The End of Postmodernism: New Directions. Proceedings Of the First Stuttgart Seminar in Cultural Studies, 04.08‑18.08.1991 (Stuttgart: M&P, 1993).

Figure 31 Sofi Oksanen, without year

http://www.sofioksanen.com

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The Fame and Blame of an Intellectual Goth Sofi Oksanen (1977) Sanna Lehtonen

Imagine Finland – a small nation, less than a hundred years old, on the northeastern outskirts of Europe. A country where national identity is built on an eccentric mixture of celebratory discourses: its education system, its engineers (behind the Nokia wonder), its heroes of the Second World War, its world champions in ice hockey, and an innate perseverance that allows its people to survive where others might not. This is a place where education – at all levels – is free for everyone, where people’s general level of education is high, where the public-library network is well maintained, and where expert knowledge is trusted, although by a people educated enough to think they probably know better. Finland: the exemplary Nordic nation where women got the vote in 1906 – the first in Europe, a nation that features high in international gender equality comparison studies. Yet Finland is also a place where the number of women reporting domestic violence is amongst the highest in the European Union and where gender segregation in working life has become more – rather than less – pronounced during the last decade.1 A country where silence is golden and where dressing sensibly is the norm. Where everything too stylish, glamorous, sweet, joyful, or queer is Swedish and thus suspicious and where everything too tacky, cheap, sour, melancholic, or homophobic is either Russian or Estonian and thus equally suspicious. Enter a young Finnish-Estonian female author who wears feminine, glamorous Gothic outfits, states openly that she is bisexual, writes both bestselling and critically acclaimed novels that also turn out to be successful abroad, and eagerly shares her opinions in public discussions about the history and current political situation in Estonia and Russia, freedom of expression and censorship, gendered violence, and the rights of women and sexual minorities in Finland and elsewhere. The foregoing all work together to guarantee much attention from both the Finnish media, and Finnish audiences. 1

See EIGE 2013; EGGE 2009; FRA 2014.

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In Finland the roles of literary author, celebrity, and public intellectual are rarely combined. Celebrity status is seen as a threat to the seriousness of the author and their work, whilst the role of public intellectual is considered too challenging for a literary author who does not have the competence (i.e. expert education) to give general comments about societal issues. In general, a great deal of Finnish discussions on intellectualism starts from the assumption that there are no public intellectuals in Finland.2 In this context, the multiple-award-winning Finnish-Estonian author and playwright Sofi Oksanen is an exceptional media figure: a literary celebrity who actively engages in societal critique in her works and media performances both in Finland and abroad. In terms of her reception, Oksanen is controversial – both because of her discussion of delicate societal issues and because of the ways in which she participates in identity politics by performing her own public identity as a Finnish-Estonian intellectual Goth woman. This chapter, by employing the framework of feminist discourse analysis where identities are examined as both discursive and semiotic constructions, will investigate how Oksanen presents her public persona and work as a literary author and public intellectual in various media.3 Further, it will examine how her public performances are received and framed by audiences, both in traditional media contexts where the framing of the author is done by media professionals and in social media where the general public can have their say. Drawing on Judith Butler’s theorization of the performativity of subjectivity, the positions of author, public intellectual, and celebrity are considered here as discursive and embodied identities that are routinely and creatively performed in relation to social norms and other people. 4 Societal norms and one’s reception by others are central to the successful habitation of a particular identity position. As Butler writes, ‘recognition becomes a site of power by which the human is differentially produced’.5 Positive recognition by others is necessary for a person to become a socially viable being, whilst persons can also be ‘undone’ by negative recognition, either by labelling them with identities that devalue them or by attributing identities that do not correspond to their own sense of self.6 In her discussion of the intersubjective constitution of gendered identities through language, Clare Walsh makes a similar point by stating 2 See Karkama & Koivisto 1997; Kauppi & Sulkunen 1992. 3 Walsh 2001; Mills 1995. 4 Butler 2004. See also Turner 2004 and Lewis 2001, who discuss the discursive construction of celebrities. 5 Butler 2004, 2. 6 Butler 2004, 4.

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that the validity of one’s speech and identity performance is always judged by others, particularly so with public identities.7 Whilst for some the identities of public intellectual and literary author, or the identities of celebrity and intellectual, may already be incompatible or antithetical to each other, Oksanen also has to negotiate her intellectualism in relation to her gendered and ethnic sub- and multicultural identities that may be perceived differently by various audiences in specific contexts. It is understood that a public intellectual must have cultural authority based on their expertise acquired in a specific field, and, drawing on Edward Said, that ‘this role has an edge to it, and cannot be played without a sense of being someone whose place it is publicly to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma’.8 The title of a ‘public intellectual’ cannot be permanently achieved; it is a role performed by people with certain qualifications in certain communicative situations.9 This is particularly the case in contemporary new media spaces where traditional gatekeepers, such as newspapers, cannot regulate entry to publishing. This not only provides a larger number of people the possibility to assume the role of public intellectual, for instance on their blogs or Facebook pages, but also leads to situations where it is not always clear whether they are actually recognized by their audiences as intellectuals. Thus, whilst there might be wider access to public discussions for those individuals – coined by Patrick Baert and Josh Booth as ‘would-be intellectuals’ – in contemporary new media, social expectations related to the role of a public intellectual continue to regulate who can credibly perform the role.10 The key questions in this chapter are: How are Oksanen’s different roles as a literary author, a celebrity and a public intellectual performed by Oksanen herself and perceived by media and her audiences? Can a celebrity author whose self-presentation relies on a strong sub- and multicultural identity gain a position as a public intellectual in the discourse produced by the media and her audiences? To answer these questions, I analyse Oksanen’s interviews, her own websites, a recent documentary, and discussions about Oksanen in online newspaper comment sections of major Finnish newspapers. In the following, I will first discuss the ways in which Oksanen’s public persona has been constructed by both herself and the media around certain cultural authenticities, which add to her uniqueness and celebrity status, 7 8 9 10

Walsh 2001, 11. Said 1993, 4. See also Collini 2006, 47‑52. See Dahlgren 2012, 99. Baert and Booth 2012, 18.

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but also to her credibility as an author and a public intellectual. I will then briefly address audience reactions to Oksanen’s comments about domestic violence and racism in Finland, as these topics in particular have attracted almost continuous attention in social media and invited both ridicule and hate speech to be directed towards Oksanen. Finally, I will consider how recent international and national acclaim has affected Oksanen’s status as a celebrity author, one who is currently treated as an intellectual with a special expertise in women’s rights, but also on northeastern European politics.

A Gothic Beauty Reading Butler Oksanen, born in 1977 in Jyväskylä to an Estonian mother and a Finnish father, hit the Finnish literary scene in 2003 with Stalinin lehmät (Stalin’s Cows), a semi-autobiographical novel about a Finnish-Estonian family with a daughter struggling with bulimia. The novel addresses the status of women in Estonia and Finland in the recent past up to and including the present day. Stalinin lehmät was nominated for the Helsingin Sanomat Award for the best debut novel of the year, which made Oksanen better known to the reading public. Her second novel, Baby Jane (2005) thematized mental health care and domestic violence and further strengthened Oksanen’s role as a socially conscious writer, as well as paved the way for her as a literary celebrity. Both of these issues are mentioned in a 2005 interview for the women’s magazine Ellit. The piece is entitled ‘Sofi Oksanen: Society Can Be Changed By Art’ and starts rather tellingly by stating that while press conferences for books are rare, one has been arranged for the launch of Baby Jane.11 The real success story, however, began with Oksanen’s third work Puhdistus (Purge), which was staged as a play in 2007 and published as a novel in 2008. Puhdistus is a second work in the four-book series on the history of twentieth-century Estonia that continues the themes of Stalinin lehmät, exploring the fates of women in violent circumstances. In 2012, the series was expanded with Kun kyyhkyset katosivat (When the Doves Disappeared); a novel situated during the periods of the Nazi and Soviet occupations of Estonia in the 1940s and 1950s. Puhdistus remains the most influential book in the series. The novel has won all the major literary awards in Finland and was Oksanen’s first work to win international awards, including the Nordic Literature Award 11 Mitjonen 2005. All titles are translated by the author, Sanna Lehtonen, unless otherwise stated, as are all translations from the Finnish texts.

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and the European Book Prize in 2010. The translation rights of the novel have been sold to over 40 language areas, and the play was worked into a feature film as a Finnish-Estonian co-production in 2012. The success of Puhdistus cemented Oksanen’s celebrity status in Finland and started to build her literary fame abroad. It was also after 2007 that Oksanen became more active with her role as a public intellectual, writing newspaper columns for Sunnuntaisuomalainen (2007), Metro (2008) and Helsingin Sanomat (2009‑2010), and editing a collection of articles on the history of Estonia during the Soviet regime in 2009.12 In 2011, Oksanen was involved in the music theatre production Liian lyhyt hame (A Too Short Skirt), a performance focusing on domestic violence and women’s rights that consisted of songs composed by Maija Kaunismaa, and lyrics as well as an essay and brief narratives about women’s experiences of violence written by Oksanen. The theatre project was tied to a campaign targeting domestic violence against women, supported by the Bonnier publishing house, Anna magazine, the Finnish National Theatre and The Federation of Mother and Child Homes and Shelters. As a public intellectual, Oksanen has a significant amount of cultural authority in her specific field. However, what audiences readily recognize is her visual appearance, which, for some, seems to undermine her cultural authority. As a stylish, feminine Gothic intellectual she definitely stands out in the Finnish media sphere. Several critics on social media have called her a fake poser, an attention-seeking author or a foreign outsider and have thus tried to question the credibility of her public persona. However, Oksanen’s identity actually relies heavily on the construction of a sense of sub- and multicultural authenticity: her Gothic style is not a marketing trick but something more profound, as is her image as a hardworking author and her Finnish-Estonian ethnic and national identity. All of these authenticities have been reinforced in reviews and interviews over the years, but I will here focus on the 2013 documentary produced by the Finnish Broadcasting Company (YLE) and four interviews, one from 2007 and three from 2011 as representative examples of the ways in which Oksanen’s public persona has been built partly on stunning celebrity looks, and partly on authenticities that go beyond the skin-deep. Regarding Oksanen’s subcultural authenticity, her eccentric style is consistently portrayed as something into which the author has naturally grown, or alternatively as a reflection of her artistic persona. Throughout her publishing career, Oksanen has maintained her unique Gothic style 12 Oksanen & Paju 2009.

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and, according to the narratives told by Oksanen and her colleagues, this style is authentic in the sense that she has not invented it to market herself but has merely carried it with her from earlier times. The documentary in particular makes this very clear. While Oksanen’s remark about loving the colour purple already as a child so much that she ‘used to eat purple markers’ seems ironic when addressed to French journalists at the Paris Book Fair, elsewhere in the documentary we see a photo of a teen-aged Oksanen whose Gothic style seems to be in its rudimentary beginnings.13 Viewers also hear a witness-statement from her teacher at the Theatre Academy of Helsinki, who says that she remembers well the first time she encountered Oksanen, a young student ‘dressed up in an evening gown in the middle of the morning’.14 In fact, Oksanen has been part of the Gothic scene for a long time, which supports her sincerity in applying the style consistently. This subcultural authenticity is not something that the larger public is aware of, but there have been interviews associating Oksanen closely with the scene, including one in a small cultural magazine Kulttuurivihkot that ran a special issue on the Gothic subculture in Finland in 2007. In this interview readers learn that Oksanen got her first black jeans at eleven and, along with purple, black has remained her favourite colour.15 Again, her style is associated with consistent tastes and not with passing experiments fuelled by teenage angst; the latter an association that is linked to a wider discourse about middle-class respectability where subcultural looks are a sign of immaturity. Oksanen also laments that in the media her appearance tends to pull attention away from her work. This appears ironic in a piece that, with an apology from the journalist, focuses only on her Gothic style and is titled ‘Postmodern, not shallow’.16 It is suggested that the Gothic style itself is postmodern in its conscious, subversive play with heteronormative behaviours within a subculture that appreciates both femininity and feminism. The interview is wrapped up with Oksanen’s comment that for her the Gothic style, as well as womanhood, is drag – ‘I have read my Judith Butler’ – followed by the journalist’s response, ‘as have we all’.17 By referring to Butler, Oksanen makes it clear that she is aware of participating in identity politics through her embodied identity; thus the attention that her visual style gets is consciously sought. The journalist’s 13 14 15 16 17

YLE 2013. YLE 2013. Korvela 2007, 44. Korvela 2007. Korvela 2007, 45.

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remark that ‘we’ (people in the scene; the journalist is part of it) are also ‘in the know’ suggests that treating the subcultural style as a conscious, parodic performance may add to her Gothic credentials. Yet Oksanen’s lament about journalists only focusing on her looks is also understandable; as we will see, not everyone is prepared to read her looks as postmodern identity play.

Sexual Appearance and Natural-Born Identity It is not only the subcultural appearance that may put Oksanen’s credibility as a public intellectual in question, but also her overly feminine, sexualized style – or drag – that is exceptional for Finnish (female) intellectuals. There still exists a wide belief that rational people should dress sensibly, not sensually. In photographs and video clips, Oksanen is often sexualized through the ways in which she is visually portrayed – she is sitting or standing in feminine poses in exquisite outfits and wearing meticulously painted Gothic make-up. Often we see only parts of her, the magnificent hair, close-shots of her face, hands with silver rings and flawlessly polished nails, or feet in stylish high-heeled shoes. All of this builds into a heavily gendered and sexualized public appearance: representing a person in parts that all together make a beautiful whole is still one of the conventional strategies used to portray the female body.18 The three interviews from 2011 are representative examples.19 Two of the magazines, Ilona and Anna, are typical Finnish women’s magazines, while the third one, Image is marketed to young, urban, liberal readers; yet there are significant similarities in how Oksanen is represented in each. All interviews feature large pictures of Oksanen that rely on the representational strategies outlined above. For the article in Ilona special arrangements were made for the photo shoot, which are explicitly described in the article. The shoot took place at the Alexander Theatre in Helsinki, and Oksanen brought several evening gowns with her and provided the photographer with a plea: ‘No standard author photos, please. Like a thinker leaning on her hand, or something similar’.20 It seems as if her plea was heard: including the cover of the magazine, there are nine photos of Oksanen in different gowns and sensual poses. This sexualized image of a celebrity woman puts Oksanen in the same boat with beauty pageants, singers, and actors – their looks get a lot of attention but they 18 See Mills 1995, 124‑125. 19 Hiltunen, 2011; Kangaspuro 2011; Puhto 2011. 20 Kangaspuro 2011, 16.

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often struggle to be taken seriously. The credibility of a young, sexualized female intellectual may be under special scrutiny because in Finland the stereotypical figure of a public intellectual has historically been an elderly male.21 In Ilona, the journalist is actually supporting Oksanen by suggesting that she has had control over her visual representation. The same goes for the documentary, where we see her meticulously doing her own make-up before a photo shoot. Here too, it seems that the (re)presentation of her feminine identity may be postmodern drag – a performance which Oksanen has strong control over herself. In subcultural and (queer) feminist terms this makes her more credible; she is not an idle celebrity produced by a managing team. In contrast, with regard to her authorship and her ethnic and national identity credibility is constructed by completely different means: not through play but by presenting these identities as ‘natural’ and profound; hence, authentic. The documentary, titled ‘Sofi Oksanen – Born to Be an Author’, represents Oksanen as someone who has wanted to write for as long as she can remember.22 The focus is partly on Oksanen’s celebrity status and success: she is the centre of attention at various international book fairs where readers queue up for her autograph; she is interviewed by journalists from different countries; she is captured in stunning photographs during carefully planned photo shoots. Yet we are also presented with an author who is extremely dedicated – touring all around Europe at book fairs to promote her books and working long hours throughout the year. Apart from her childhood (especially the Estonian part of it), there is little discussion of Oksanen’s private life, something of which the public knows generally very little. Even the interview in Ilona, which talks about her recent marriage, says very few things about her relationship, apart from Oksanen stating that presently marriage is a choice rather than a necessity for women. Oksanen is represented as a busy wife who has no time for children because she works and travels all the time – Oksanen describes herself as a ‘full-time full-body author’.23 The article also mentions that her wedding was a private affair and not a celebrity event: her focus is strictly on work. The other articles have a similar approach: Anna highlights Oksanen’s role as an author who takes her social responsibility seriously both in her writing and other activities. This is unsurprising because the story was probably produced to

21 See Lappalainen 1997. 22 YLE 2013. 23 Kangaspuro 2011, 16.

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promote the campaign against domestic violence with which the magazine itself was involved.24 The Image article differs as it does not merely frame Oksanen as a hard-working individual, but also discusses the people with whom she collaborates. Nevertheless, the voices of Oksanen’s supporters only emphasize her protestant working ethics: the journalist summarizes some of these voices by describing Oksanen as ‘[e]xtremely reliable, focused, cooperative. Very professional despite her young age’.25 These media representations of Oksanen as a socially conscious author with a protestant working ethics correspond to the image created on both her personal website and Facebook page; Oksanen’s authenticity as an author is not in doubt. The same goes for the representation of her ethnic and national identity. The documentary sheds a lot of light on Oksanen’s childhood visits to Estonia, where her maternal grandparents lived. Her childhood – half-Finn, half-Estonian – and the memories she has of Estonia during the 1980s and 1990s are important for her authentic identity as a multicultural author. Oksanen’s Estonian credentials need highlighting because she was born in Finland and has spent the majority of her life there. Clearly what is at stake here are postcolonial politics of representation and authorship: who has the right to voice the experiences of Estonian people.26 Among some audiences on social media there has been suspicion of Oksanen’s ability to write about Estonian history and accusations of her appropriating suitable historical topics and people’s experiences to her own financial benefit. As if in response to these criticisms, the documentary makes it clear that Oksanen has not only done her historical research, but has lived through some of the experiences that she describes in her novels or, at least, heard stories of the past directly from people who experienced the Soviet regime. Oksanen’s memories are represented through her own stories, told while visiting places of her childhood trips to Estonia, as well as some historical sites associated with the KGB in Tallinn. A sense of authenticity is created through Oksanen’s accounts of small details associated with different senses, such as the smell of pickled vegetables, the visual image of people standing at bus stops, or the noise of Soviet soldiers. Readers of her novels recognize these details – those who have not read her works are aided by the documentary makers who provide viewers with quotes from her novels to link Oksanen’s memories and literary works. In the documentary, we 24 Puhto 2011. 25 Hiltunen 2011, 39. 26 For example, see Root 1996.

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also hear her talking in Estonian to local researchers and archivists in Tallinn. Her competence in Estonian contributes to both her authentic ethnic identity, and her credibility as an author doing her background research in the local language. All in all, Oksanen’s ethnic identity as an Estonian is represented as a significant, and authentic part of her personal, as well as authorial identity. In this context the documentary is not an exception, but rather reflects the mainly positive critical acclaim that praises instead of questions Oksanen’s ability to write historical novels about the Estonian past.

Echoes of Violence Whilst the traditional media has painted a rather favourable image of Oksanen, anonymous critics on social media have not been as kind. Among these voices, Oksanen is widely recognized as a feminist, multiethnic (or immigrant) author or, in a more negative sense, as a man-hater and a national traitor. This reputation is largely based on her interview on the Danish television in 2009 where she stated, among other things, that Finland is a violent country where domestic violence against women is a severe problem. The interview was met with outrage on social media – the heated discussions further supported by traditional media who reported Oksanen’s comments in their online news with provocative headlines. The sense of outrage continues among some commentators to the present day, which can be partly explained by the setup of the interview: a well-known Finn criticizing her own country abroad. In the Finnish media there exists a recurring debate about Finland’s reputation abroad – one that involves two distinct discourses, namely a nationalist discourse maintaining that it is a civic duty to only give positive accounts of one’s country abroad, and a counter-discourse suggesting that Finnish people have a low self-esteem which leads to hysterical reactions towards critical comments on Finland. The interview provided the Finnish media and audiences with perfect material to fuel the debate about Finland’s reputation, therefore it is unsurprising that it has become one of Oksanen’s interview ‘hits’ that some audiences still refer back to even now. Here also the traditional media has helped to keep the debate going: by 2011 the documentary had been rebroadcast four times on Finnish television. After each broadcast, Oksanen has, according to her own testimony, received hate mail and death threats.27 27 Puhto 2011, 18.

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The interview is symptomatic as it demonstrates how an author acting as a public intellectual can reach a larger audience by participating in societal discussion, for instance, on television, but with the caveat that new audiences may be ‘non-readers’ who pass judgment solely based on those discussions, with no prior, detailed knowledge of her background, literary work or credentials as an author. I will discuss here some of the main criticisms of Oksanen on social media, or more specifically, in the news comment sections on the websites of the two largest Finnish newspapers, Helsingin Sanomat and Aamulehti. I have provided elsewhere a detailed analysis of one specific comment thread, but will here characterize some of the main discourses in threads that I have collected.28 The threads are from 2009 (news reporting Oksanen’s comments in the interview for the Danish television) and 2011 (news reporting Oksanen’s criticism of the nationalism of the True Finns party, and news describing Oksanen’s theatre project Liian lyhyt hame). Together these threads include hundreds of comments. In all of the cited cases, the newspaper sites have framed Oksanen’s comments in a very specific way in order to increase audience attention. It therefore seems that, whilst longer interviews tend to represent Oksanen in a favourable manner, news reports of her public comments are often provocative and, although giving Oksanen publicity, invite audiences to react primarily in aggressive ways. Oksanen’s critics on the newspaper sites address various concerns regarding the two main topics that she discusses in the cases presented: domestic violence against women and ultranationalist discourses in Finland. Many of the commentators participate in a debate with Oksanen in a rational manner by focusing on the issues at hand, rather than on the author’s persona. Thus, in social media Oksanen is at least partly able to raise discussion on certain issues and to perform the role of a public intellectual. Nevertheless, I will here focus on the four recurring discourses that are used to undermine Oksanen’s credibility as a societal debater. These attack the very same cultural authenticities that were discussed previously as key parts of Oksanen’s public persona. First of all, there is the discourse of the author’s integrity that is threatened by commercialism, which is obviously not something specific to Oksanen or Finland. Oksanen’s credibility is questioned because of her status as a best-selling, celebrity author: commentators regularly suggest that whatever remarks she is making, these are only media stunts to market her works. Oksanen is not treated as a socially conscious author who is truly 28 Lehtonen 2013.

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interested in the issues that she raises; she is simply a businesswoman. This is the least disturbing discourse used to criticize her, since it focuses on her professional role rather than any specific embodied identity. The other three discourses are more upsetting, because they undermine her credibility on the basis of identity positions that are not mere roles that one can shift from one context to another: gender, ethnicity, and subcultural identity (linked with her ‘young’ age). On social media, debates on these identity positions are often interpreted as indicative of a lack of judgment and/or bigotry. Two of these three discourses are not only about Oksanen’s identities but also about the contents of her arguments, in the sense that she is a woman and a feminist addressing feminist concerns, and a Finnish-Estonian individual opposed to ultranationalism. Some commentators actually appreciate this and view these connections as a source of credibility and authenticity – that due to her own experiences as a female Finnish-Estonian writer, she knows what she is talking about. These commentators may be more receptive to the idea that an intellectual can be situated, involved, and interested. This goes against the traditional idea of an intellectual as detached, dispassionate, and disinterested – as someone looking at societal issues ‘objectively’ from the ‘outside’. Feminist intellectuals do not readily embrace the idea of detachedness, as they criticize notions of universalism and objectivity in general.29 However, most commentators question Oksanen’s objectivity and credibility because of her self-identification as a feminist. Oksanen is interpreted as a bigoted man-hater who is only spreading lies and who is, as a multiethnic writer, interpreted as a pseudo-Finn or an immigrant who should be thankful to Finland and swallow her bitterness – or go ‘home’. These comments are sometimes linked to speculations that Oksanen’s feminism or anti-racism must stem from her own, supposedly traumatic past as a woman with a hybrid ethnic identity. As already suggested, the discourse that associates a subcultural appearance with immaturity also surfaces regularly – several social media commentators ridicule Oksanen’s Gothic style and label her as a teenage girl throwing tantrums and seeking attention. These denigrating discourses that involve strategies of objectification are disturbing since the value of a person’s voice is seen as dependent on her ethnicity and gender, as well as her particular choice of clothing style. They also regularly occur online: ‘reduction to appearance’ and ‘denial of autonomy’ are typical objectification strategies in online misogynist attacks

29 See Showalter 2000, 132‑133; Delamont 1992.

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against women who participate in public discussions.30 Oksanen’s reception on social media certainly follows these patterns, at least on the basis of the few, selected cases that I have examined. Whilst it is impossible to draw general conclusions about Oksanen’s reception on social media – there are sites where she is surrounded by a group of fans rather than haters, such as her Facebook page that mainly attracts likes and positive comments – there definitely seems to be a difference between her reception in traditional media and on social media, the latter consisting of a more diverse range of voices. As Clive Barnett suggests, in the contemporary mediatized public sphere the ‘public’, or the audience, is not – if it ever was – something that is selfevidently ‘out there’ but rather open-ended and pluralized.31 New media environments in particular reflect the ‘fragmentation of public spheres’.32 There are different smaller publics in various media contexts and spaces, but, as Zizi Papacharissi points out, these ‘mini public spheres [...] are not equally powerful and serve to articulate diverse collective interests and concerns’.33 These diverse online spaces – including news comment sections – enable active audience participation and offer possibilities for researchers to look into audiences that were less visible before. Whilst the attitudes held by anonymous commentators may not be representative of the general public, but only of a handful of haters, they are part of a public discourse that is available to a wide readership and thus partly shapes the cultural climate in which Oksanen as a celebrity author and a public intellectual has to operate. For some audiences, the reception and representation of Oksanen in the comments on social media sites may even be more relevant and easily accessible than Oksanen’s novels, the printed interviews or the documentary, that is, representations of Oksanen and her works in traditional media.

Conclusion: Multicultural, International Celebrity Author Whilst critical voices on social media are a significant part of Oksanen’s reception in the contemporary mediascape, recently her position as a celebrity author who plays the role of a public intellectual has become stronger 30 31 32 33

Nussbaum 2010, 71‑72. See also Keats Citron 2010, 31‑32. Barnett 2004, 187. Dahlgren 2012, 100. Papacharissi 2004, 280.

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in traditional media and she has also earned institutional recognition as a public thinker. In 2012, Oksanen was invited to participate in 40under40 – European Young Leaders, an initiative supported by the EU in which 40 European experts from different fields are invited to discuss the current state of affairs in European politics.34 In March 2012, Oksanen was voted as the third most influential woman in Finland in a poll conducted among leading figures in business, politics, culture, and media.35 Later in the same year she was awarded the Pro Finlandia Medal of the Order of the Lion; one of the highest acknowledgements that an artist can receive for her work in Finland. Apart from feminist issues, Oksanen is now a common debater on Russian politics at various venues in Finland and abroad. For instance, her recent speech at the Frankfurt Book Fair, published in full on the website of Helsingin Sanomat, addressed the political relationship of Finland and Russia, freedom of expression, and the importance of female authors within Finnish literary history.36 Oksanen’s increased recognition as a public intellectual is in no way due to any toning down of her position as a celebrity author. Quite the contrary, in recent years she has only strengthened her position as an exceptional Finnish celebrity author. The launch campaign of Oksanen’s most recent novel, Kun kyyhkyset katosivat in 2012 was a media event of a scale without precedent in Finnish literary history. The launch of the novel was tied in with the premiere of the film adaption of Puhdistus and journalists and members of public were sold travel packages to Tallinn to attend the launch party. The first print run of the novel in Finnish was exceptionally large, 100,000 copies, and before the book was launched, readers were able to follow the production process in a blog on a website created for the novel.37 Pieces of news and interviews continue to combine the comments of the author-intellectual with stunning photos of her exquisite Gothic appearance. In December 2014, at the Independence Day Gala – which is one of the media events of the year in Finland – Oksanen was filmed dancing with a 101-year-old Second-World-War veteran, as well as commenting on the recent parliamentary decision to build another nuclear power plant in Finland. Even if Oksanen’s current position in the Finnish mediascape is strong, as a celebrity author and a public intellectual Oksanen must continually 34 35 36 37

EU 2012. Martikainen 2012. Oksanen 2014. Kyyhkyset 2012.

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(re)negotiate her credibility with her audiences. For an author who wants to perform the role of a public intellectual, media visibility is necessary and clearly Oksanen is making the most of her celebrity status to access spaces where she can also perform the role of a public intellectual. However, when an author is no longer only represented by their texts – or present as a talking head on television – but also appears as a visible, material subject on various media, the contents of their message are interpreted in relation to their embodied identities. In the case of Oksanen this represents both an opportunity and a challenge. It is an opportunity to perform the role of an involved, situated public intellectual whose authenticity is derived from her own identity and experience, one based on her sincere wish to change society for the better. It is a challenge, since for parts of the audience her visible, embodied identity may undermine any assumed neutrality and credibility as a public intellectual. Ironically, the more visibility an author gets, the more likely they are to be deemed inauthentic, merely a celebrity, visible only in the interests of self-marketing. Increased visibility may thus lead to a decrease in audibility, or lack of recognition of one’s voice and subjectivity as a participant in public debates. Yet, with controlled performances, those of a hardworking, outspoken, intellectual author with exquisite subcultural style and roots both in Finland and Estonia, Oksanen has been able to craft herself a unique position in the Finnish public sphere. Whilst being a literary star, she has also been able to invoke discussion on current societal topics, possibly more than any other contemporary Finnish author. Some may refuse to listen to her, but judging by her continued media coverage she is not about to disappear any time soon. On the contrary, Oksanen is one of the few Finnish celebrities who continuously influences public debates and raises awareness on current issues that others would rather be silent about.

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S. Lehtonen, ‘“Listen Girl. Hitler is Dead.” – Reception of a Female Public Intellectual on Finnish Discussion Forums’, Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies (2013), Paper 46, https://www. tilburguniversity.edu/upload/ea4cf05a-8b97‑4f91a676‑3fed06b93bb_TPCS_46_Lehtonen.pdf, last accessed 15 December 2014. T. Lewis, ‘Embodied Experts: Robert Hughes, Cultural Studies and the Celebrity Intellectual’, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 15 (2001), no. 2, 233‑247. T. Martikainen, ‘Tässä on Suomen 10 vaikutusvaltaisinta naista’, Taloussanomat online, 8 March 2012. J. Mitjonen, ‘Sofi Oksanen: yhteiskuntaa voi muuttaa taiteella’, Ellit online magazine, 6 October 2005. M.C. Nussbaum, ‘Objectification and Internet Misogyny’, in The Offensive Internet: Privacy, Speech, and Reputation, ed. by S. Levmore & M.C. Nussbaum (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 68‑87. S. Oksanen & I. Paju (eds.), Kaiken takana oli pelko: Kuinka Viro menetti historiansa ja kuinka se saadaan takaisin (Helsinki: WSOY, 2009). S. Oksanen, ‘Joulupukki puhuu suomea’, a speech at the Frankfurt Book Fair, Helsingin Sanomat online, 7  October 2014, http://www.hs.f i/kulttuuri/ a1412651943454?ref=hs-art-new-1, last accessed 8 December 2014. Z. Papacharissi, ‘Democracy Online: Civility, Politeness and the Democratic Potential of Online Political Discussion Groups’, New Media & Society 6 (2004), no. 2, 259‑283. S. Puhto, ‘Loppu lyönneille’, Anna, 7 April 2011, 18‑20. D. Root, Cannibal Culture: Art, Appropriation, and the Commodification of Difference (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996). E. Said, ‘Representations of the Intellectual’, Reith Lectures 1993: Representations of the Intellectual, BBC Radio 4, 23 June 1993, http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/ p00gmx4c, last accessed 2 September 2013. E. Showalter, ‘Laughing Medusa: Feminist Intellectuals at the Millennium’, Women: A Cultural Review 11 (2000), no. 1‑2, 131‑138. G. Turner, Understanding Celebrity (London: Sage, 2004). C. Walsh, Gender and Discourse: Language and Power in Politics, the Church, and Organisations (London: Addison, Wesley & Longman, 2001). YLE, Sofi Oksanen – syntynyt kirjailijaksi, documentary broadcast on Yle Teema (Helsinki: Yleisradio – The Finnish Broadcasting Company, 29 March 2013).



Notes on the Contributors

Sander Bax (1977) is Associate Professor in Literary Studies, Cultural History, and Didactics of Dutch Language and Literature at the Department of Culture Studies of Tilburg University. Recently, he published the Dutch monograph De Mulisch Mythe (Meulenhoff, 2015), and he co-edited the volume Interrupting the City. Artistic Constitutions of the Public Sphere (Valiz, 2015). He is currently working on a monograph on Dutch literary writers as public figures in contemporary media and celebrity culture. [email protected] Gaston Franssen (1977) is Assistant Professor of Literary Culture at the University of Amsterdam. His research interests include celebrity, literary authorship and fandom, and narrative identity. Together with Rick Honings, he published an edited volume on English and American literary celebrities, entitled Celebrity Authorship and Afterlives in English and American Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). [email protected] Silke Hoffmann (1973) works at the Goethe-Museum Düsseldorf / Antonund-Katharina-Kippenberg-Stiftung. Her research interests include German classicism and the reception of classical antiquity in German literature. In 2008, her PhD thesis Prometheus, Apollo, Zeus/Jupiter. Goethe-Bilder von 1773 bis 1885 (Peter Lang), written at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, was published. She co-edited the Schubert-Jahrbuch 2006‑2009 with Volkmar Hansen (2009). Her current focus lies on past and contemporary forms of iconicizing objects in museum contexts. [email protected] Rick Honings (1984) is Assistant Professor in Dutch Studies at Leiden University. With Peter van Zonneveld he wrote a rewarded biography of the Dutch poet Willem Bilderdijk: De gefnuikte arend (2013). Recently, he finished his NWO Veni-project The Poet as Pop Star. Literary Celebrity in the Netherlands 1780‑1900. In 2016 he published his monograph on Dutch literary celebrity in the nineteenth century: De dichter als idool. Literaire roem in de negentiende eeuw (Bert Bakker, 2016). With Gaston Franssen he is co-editor of the edited volume Celebrity Authorship and Afterlives in English and American Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). [email protected]

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Sjef Houppermans (1950) is Associate Professor in Modern and Contemporary French Literature at Leiden University. His research is based on narratological, stylistic, philosophical, and psychoanalytical methodology. He published on various authors, such as Proust, Beckett, Roussel, Robbe-Grillet, Ollier, and Camus. Collected articles are published as Lectures du désir (Rodopi, 1997). He is chief editor of the reviews Marcel Proust aujourd’hui and Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui (Brill) and of the open access journal Relief (www.revue-relief.org.) His current projects intend to open up new ways for interdisciplinary research combining art, psychoanalysis, and ecology. [email protected] Mary Kemperink (1951) is Full Professor Modern Dutch Literature at the University of Groningen. She is specialized in the literature and the culture of the fin de siècle of the nineteenth century. Her research focuses more in particular on the mutual relationship between literature and science, see a number of articles and her last book: Gedeelde kennis. Literatuur en wetenschap in Nederland van Darwin tot Einstein (1860‑1920) (Garant, 2011). Recently, she published on the authors self-fashioning. At the moment she is working on a monograph on homosexuality. [email protected] Sanna Lehtonen (1979) is Senior Lecturer in Applied Linguistics at the Department of Languages, University of Jyväskylä. Her main field of research is discourse and gender studies. She completed her joined doctoral degree in 2010 in Jyväskylä and at the Department of English, Macquarie University. Her doctoral dissertation focused on constructions of girlhood in contemporary British children’s fantasy. She is the author of Girls Trans‑ forming: Invisibility and Age-Shifting in Children’s Fantasy Since the 1970s (McFarland, 2013). Her current research focuses on narrativity, affectivity, and intersectional fan identities on online media. [email protected] Peter Liebregts (1959) graduated in Classics at the University of Utrecht, and is Full Professor of Modern Literatures in English at Leiden University since 2006. His research interests focus on the Nachleben of the classical tradition, and on Modernist and contemporary literature. Besides numerous publications on literatures in English, including articles on Jane Austen, J.M. Coetzee, Donna Tartt, and Jhumpa Lahiri, he published Centaurs in the Twilight: W.B. Yeats’s Use of the Classical Tradition (Rodopi 1993) and

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Ezra Pound and Neoplatonism (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004). He co-edited five books on Modernism in a European context, and was a contributor to and co-editor of The Oxford Guide to the Historical Reception of Augustine (Oxford University Press, 2013). He is currently involved in the project The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature. [email protected] Henk A. van der Liet (1956) is Chair of the Scandinavian Programme at the University of Amsterdam. His research primarily focuses on modern and contemporary Scandinavian literature, with a special emphasis on Danish literature as well as on mobility and vagrancy. He has contributed to the standard reference work Danske digtere i det 20. århundrede I-III (Gad, 2000‑2002), is one of the editors-in-chief of European Journal of Scan‑ dinavian Studies (EJSS), published by De Gruyter Publishers and works as a literary critic (Litteraturmagasinet Standart). At present he is writing a biographical study about the nineteenth-century Danish author-artist Holger Drachmann. [email protected] Suze van der Poll (1975) is Assistant Professor in Scandinavian Studies at the University of Amsterdam. She is specialized in late twentieth- and early 21st-century Scandinavian literature. Together with Rob van der Zalm she published De zomer beschrijf je het best op een winterdag (De Arbeiderspers, 2011), a Dutch annotated translation of the letters of Henrik Ibsen, and she edited – with Sabine van Wesemael – The Return of the Narrative. The Call for the Novel (Peter Lang, 2015). Van der Poll is editor of Armada, online magazine for world literature. [email protected] Ellen Rutten (1975) is Full Professor of Literature, with a special focus on Slavic Literatures, at the University of Amsterdam and leader of the research project Sublime Imperfections: Creative Interventions in Post-1989 Europe, which is funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research. Rutten is author of Unattainable Bride Russia (Northwestern University Press, 2010), Memory, Conflict and New Media (Routledge, 2013, with Julie Fedor and Vera Zvereva) and Sincerity After Communism (in print). She is co-founder and was editor (2008‑2015) of new-media journal Digital Icons. From January 2016 onwards, Rutten is editor-in-chief of the journal Russian Literature. [email protected]

Index Aanrud, Hans 94 Abrams, M.H. 19 Adams, John 184 Agostinelli, Alfred 165 Akerman, Chantal 167 Aldington, Richard 181 Aleksa, Tat’iana 243 Alphen, Ernst van 241, 249, 251 Andersen, Hans Christian 125 Andersen, Peder 115 Angers, David d’ 50 Archer, William 89 Arnim, Bettine von 47-49, 51-52 Asquith, Herbert Henry 140 Astbury, John Meir 141 Astrup, Nikolai 83 Auden, W.H. 185 Baert, Patrick 259 Bal, Mieke 241, 249, 251 Balzac, Honoré de 158-159 Barnett, Clive 269 Barrett, Brian Dudley 107 Barthes, Roland 164, 193-194, 199-205, 211, 213 Bastet, Frédéric 147 Baudelaire, Charles 202 Bawer, Bruce 222 Beardsley, M.C. 210 Beckett, Samuel 23, 165, 169 Beets, Nicolaas 18, 21-22, 59-79 Bénichou, Paul 157 Béraud, Jean 159 Bergounioux, Pierre 168 Bergson, Henri 159 Bernstein, Charles 187 Beyer, Andreas 44 Bjørnson, Bjørnstjerne 83, 86, 99, 109 Blok, Wouter 147 Blom, Onno 200 Blum, René 161 Bogner, Ralf 44 Bønnelycke, Emil 122 Boorstin, Daniel J. 12-13 Booth, Josh 259 Booven, Henri van 139, 146 Borchsenius, Otto 93 Bourdieu, Pierre 11-12, 39, 157 Bowie, David 13 Braak, Menno ter 146 Bradfield, William 187 Braekstad, Hans Lien 89 Brandes, Edvard 95, 110-111 Brandes, Georg 86-87, 89, 91-93, 109-110, 125 Braudy, Leo 14-15, 59 Bredius, Abram 139

Brinchmann, Christian 94 Bruggen, Carry van 137 Bull, Ole 83-84 Bunting, Basil 175 Bury, Friedrich 40-42, 44-45 Buschman, José 148 Butler, Judith 262 Byron, George Gordon (Lord) 16, 19-22, 59-77, 111, 116, 218 Casanova, Pascale 88 Cassegard, Carl 225 Catiline 84 Catullus 35, 180 Cavalcanti, Guido 180 Chandler, Raymond 223 Charles V, King of France 156 Chateaubriand, François René de 158 Clézio, J.M.G. Le 23, 169-170 Collignon, Jos 196-197 Compagnon, Antoine 157, 168 Companéez, Nina 167 Condé, Maryse 168 Cornips, Thérèse 167-168 Correggio, Antonio da 47 Couperus, Louis 18, 23, 133-151 Courtney, William Leonard 141 Coyote, Peter 187 Davydov, Daniila 246 Dawson of Penn, Bertrand 141 Dayan, Daniel 200 Deleuze, Gilles 166 DeLillo, Don 218 Derzhavin, Gavriila 239 Deyssel, Lodewijk van 145 Dickens, Charles 16 Dis, Adriaan van 148, 206-208, 211 Doolittle, Hilda (H.D.) 181 Dorgelès, Roland 165 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 158, 223, 243 Drachmann, A.G. 113 Drachmann, Holger 18, 20, 22-23, 105-131 Drachmann-Lasson, Sophie 120 Duchamp, Marcel 11 Duncan, Robert 176 Durkheimer, Émile 134 Dyer, Richard 196 Eckermann, Johann Peter 49-50 Eichmann, Adolf 193 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 186 Eliot, T.S. 166, 182, 184-186 Ellis, Bret Easton 16 Emerson, Caryl 239

280  Emma, Queen of the Netherlands 144 Epstein, Mikhail 241 Euripides 44 Feilberg, F.L. 125 Fenollosa, Ernest 182 Flaubert, Gustave 157, 202-203 Ford, Madox Ford 179, 182 Foucault, Michel 122, 197 France, Anatone 162 Franck, César 163 François I, King of France 156 Frazer, James George 39 Frost, Robert 181, 186 Frow, John 47 Fulsås, Narve 81 Funk, Wolfgang 241, 249 Gaga, Lady 12 Garbo, Greta 199 Garborg, Arne 83 Garland, Robert 14, 60 Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri 182 Geertz, Clifford 135 Genette, Gérard 166 Gengis Khan 67 Gide, André 160 Giles, David 221 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 18, 20-22, 24, 31-57 Goffman, Erving 20 Gogh, Vincent van 202 Goldring, Douglas 178 Gosse, Edmund 81-82, 89, 141 Gouders, Jean 192-193 Grasset, Bernard 160-161 Greenblatt, Stephen 20, 176, 240 Grieg, Edvard 83 Grillparzer, Franz 41 Grimm, Catherine 48 Gross, Florian 241 Groys, Boris 249 Grunberg, Arnon 249 Gude, Hans 83 Haan, Martin de 168 Hahn, Reynaldo 158 Halvorsen, Johan 83 Hammarskjöld, Dag 186 Hansen, Paul Botten 85 Hansen, Peter 92, 100 Harburg, E.Y. 228 Hardy, Thomas 158 Hederich, Benjamin 35 Hegel, Frederik 85-86, 90, 93, 95, 98, 101 Heijne, Bas 148 Heine, Heinrich 31-32, 35, 46 Heinich, Nathalie 156, 218, 220-223, 334 Helvig, Amelie von 49

Idolizing Authorship

Hemingway, Ernest 16 Henry, Prince of the Netherlands 138 Hensher, Philip 217 Herder, Johann Gottfried 42 Herz, Henriette 49 Heuet, Stéphane 167 Hilton, Paris 12 Hirst, Damien 249 Hitler, Adolf 183 Hofstede, Rokus 168 Holmes, Richard 60 Homer 32, 35, 41, 43-44 Hoop, Jr., Adriaan van der 75 Hoppé, Emil Otto 139-140 Horace 35, 39, 43 Houellebecq, Michel 249 Huber, Irmtraud 241 Hugo, Victor 23, 62, 81, 157, 172 Iannone, Gianluca 188 Ibsen, Bergliot 86 Ibsen, Henrik 18, 21-22, 81-102, 109 Immermann, Karl 50 Inglis, Fred 11, 20, 59, 134-135 Jackson, Michael 12 Jaeger, Henrik 93 Jaffe, Aaron 176 James, Henry 81 Jordan, Glenn 187 Jørgenson, Aksel 119-120 Joyce, James 81, 89, 101, 166-167, 182, 184 Kafka, Franz 223 Kaspe, Irina 244 Kate, Jan Jacob Lodewijk ten 69 Katz, Elihu 200 Kauffmann, Angelika 51 Kaulbach, Wilhelm von 51 Kaunismaa, Maija 261 Keller, Luzius 167 Kenner, Hugh 185-186 Kierkegaard, Søren 125 Klauer, Martin Gottlieb 36-39 Kneppelhout, Johannes 64 Knowlson, James 166 Kolb, Philip 160 Körner, Gudrun 39 Kräuter, Theodor 50 Krieken, Robert van 11-12, 14-15, 82, 91, 135-136 Krohn, Olaf 95-96 Kruse, Lars 115 Kuritsyn, Viacheslav 242 Kuz’min, Dmitrii 243 Lagerlöf, Selma 143 Lamb, Caroline 65 Lawrence, D.H. 179 Lemaire, Madeleine 158

281

Index

Lennon, John 13 Leriche, Françoise 161 Lermontov, Mikhail 239, 247 Lewis, Wyndham 181, 183-184 Lips, Johann Heinrich 39-41 Liszt, Franz 60 Lorrain, Jean 158 Louis XIV, King of France 158 Lovink, Geert 240 Lowell, Robert 185 Lugné, Aurélien Marie 88 MacCarthy, Fiona 59 Madonna 12 Mailer, Norman 218 Mallarmé, Stéphane 202-203 Mann, Thomas 44 Marees van Swinderen, Reneke de 139 Martin du Gard, Roger 159 Marshall, P. David 196 Mauriac, Nathalie 166 McKenna, Stephen 141 Meester, Johan de 144-145 Meijer, Hendrik Arnold 75 Meizoz, Jérôme 21, 39, 42 Millet, Richard 168 Modiano, Patrick 168-169 Mole, Tom 19, 59, 72 Molewater, Jan Bastiaan 68-69, 73 Montesquiou, Robert de 158 Moore, George 139 Moran, Joe 16 Morozov, Aleksei 248, 250-251 Mulisch, Harry 18, 24-25, 193-215 Müller, Timo 42 Munch, Edvard 81, 95 Murakami, Haruki 16, 18, 24, 217-237 Murakami, Ryū 223 Mussolini, Benito 175, 183, 188 Nansen, Peter 117 Nemirov, Miroslav 242-243 Nielsen, Eivind 98, 100 Nilsson, Amanda 112 Nora, Pierre 168 Oksanen, Sofi 18, 20, 25, 257-273 Olsen, Andreas Bohr 87-88 Olson, Charles 175 Opitz, Alfred 36 Otzen, Per Marquart 126-128 Ovid 34-35, 47 Palm, J.H. van der 66 Perec, Georges 168 Perloff, Marjorie 187 Perron, Edgar du 146 Petersen, Clemens 86 Peterssen, Eilif 95

Polak, Sara 176 Pomerantsev, Vladimir 250-251 Potgieter, E.J. 65, 69, 73-74, 76 Pound, Ezra 18, 23, 175-190, 218 Prendergast, Christopher 167 Presley, Elvis 13 Propertius, Sextus 35 Proust, Marcel 18, 20, 23, 153-173, 202-203 Pückler-Muskau, Hermann von 41 Rachewiltz, Mary de 187-188 Ravn, Carsten 98-99 Reznikoff, Charles 175 Riemer, Friedrich Wilhelm 39, 50 Rifbjerg, Klaus 126-128 Robinson, Henry Crabb 42 Rodden, John 222 Rojek, Chris 12 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano 176, 184 Roscher, Wilhelm Heinrich 41 Rose, Billy 228 Rosenbaum, Susan 242 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 14 Roussel, Raymond 157 Rowling, J.K. 16 Rubin, Jay 219, 222, 226, 231 Rudge, Olga 183 Ruiz, Raoul 167 Rutte, Mark 15 Said, Edward 259 Saint-Saens, Camille 163 Saint-Simon, Claude Henri de 163 Salinger, J.D. 217 Salomons, Annie 145 Schadow, Johann Gottfried 44-45 Schasler, Max 51 Schickel, Richard 14 Schiller, Friedrich 42-44, 46, 51 Schlegel, August Wilhelm 45-46 Schlegel, Friedrich 45-46 Schlöndorf, Volker 167 Schmidt, Michael 175 Schwartz, Alice 208 Scott Moncrieff, C.K. 166 Seats, Michael 225 Shakespeare, William 16, 107 Shavlovskii, Konstantin 246 Shaw, Bernard 89, 139 Simon, Claude 169, 23 Simons, L. 145 Sinding, Stephan 95-96 Sinding-Larsen, Alfred 94 Smith, Carel 241 Smith, Zadie 218 Smurova, Varvara 244 Snider, Grant 227-228 Spencer, Diana (‘Lady Di’) 13-14 Stefano, Simone di 188

282  Stein, Gertrude 16 Steinhäuser, Karl 52 Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle) 158 Sterne, Laurence 59 Stevenson, Robert Louis 81 Stölzl, Philipp 33 Strecher, Matthew 225, 228 Strindberg, August 109 Suter, Rebecca 225 Tadié, Jean-Yves 166 Tate, Allen 185 Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich 202 Teixeira de Mattos, Alexander 139 Testud, Sylvie 167 Thackeray, William Makepeace 141 Tibullus, Albius 35 Tidemand, Adolph 83 Tolstoi, Leo 81, 239 Touw, Pleuni 147 Trippel, Alexander 34, 36-37, 39, 42, 48, 51 Turgenev, Ivan 243 Turner, Graeme 13-14 Varnhagen, Rahel 49 Veen, L.J. 142 Vermeer, Johannes 162, 172 Verne, Jules 157-158 Viala, Alain 39 Visser, Arnoud 15 Vivaldi, Antonio 183 Vliet, Dick van 147-148

Idolizing Authorship

Vodennikov, Dmitrii 18, 24-25, 239-255 Voss, Johann Heinrich 35, 46 Voss, Julie von 45 Vullum, Erik 93 Wagenvoort, Maurits 145 Walsh, Clare 258 Wambaugh, Joseph 187 Warhol, Andy 11 Warren, Austin 210 Weber, Max 12 Weil-Proust, Jeanne 157 Welie, Antoon van 138-139 Wellek, René 210 Werenskiold, Erik 95-96 Westerman, M. 63 Wilhelmina, Queen of the Netherlands 138-139, 145 William II, German Emperor 138 Williams, William Carlos 174, 181 Wilson, Thomas Woodrow 138 Wimsatt, W.K. 210 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 35-36 Woolf, Virginia 107, 122, 166 Wray, John 222-224, 226 Yeats, William Butler 178-179, 182, 184 York, Lorraine 218 Yoshimoto, Banana 223 Zola, Emile 81, 109, 159 Zukofsky, Louis 175