© W. S. Maney & Son Ltd 2013 DOI 10.1179/0309656412Z.00000000025

dutch crossing, Vol. 37 No. 1, March 2013, 57–78

Dandyism as Monumental-Political ethos: Van Deyssel and the Walking UtopiaGeertjan de VugtPrinceton University, US / Tilburg University, NL

Dandyism is seldom studied for its political dimension. Often histories of dandies represent these idiosyncratic fi gures as being characterized by a typical l’art pour l’art attitude. In the literary history of the Low Countries, sharp tongued author Lodewijk van Deyssel has often been discussed as representing precisely this aspect of dandyism. However, it is this author’s refl ections on dandysme that offer the cultural historian a perfect source for an investigation of the political aspects of dandyism. An attempt is made to lay bare the ideas on the relationship between politics and aesthetics, between politics and life, and between aesthetics and life that inform Van Deyssel’s perspective by reinserting a curious conceptual pair, het Monumentaal-Politieke, employed by Van Deyssel in its proper discursive context; that is, by reading it as part of a typical fi n-de-siècle refl ection on a community in decline. The cure Van Deyssel proposes is the dandy as a walking utopia carrying a promise of a choreographic community dancing to its own rhythm and harmony.

keywords Lodewijk Van Deyssel (1864–1952), dandyism, politics, aesthetics, genealogy

A polder dandy?

According to a persistent myth, dandyism should be considered as an exclusively

British–French and generally apolitical phenomenon. Although the etymology of

the word dandy remains vague, it is often said that the history of the phenomenon

began when ‘the man with the deformed nose’1 walked onto the stage of the

early nineteenth- century British beau monde. Later, so the story goes, Beau Brummel

travelled from London to the French coast, after which Paris came within his sphere

of infl uence. Since then, dandyism, as typically described in the works of Barbey

d’Aurevilly and Charles Baudelaire, whose poetical oeuvre is sometimes interpreted

58 GEERTJAN DE VUGT

as the very beginning of modernity,2 has often been conceived of as being character-

ized by a typically French l’art pour l’lart attitude: ‘Un dandy ne fait rien’, Baudelaire

once wrote.3 After the French decadents had taken over his philosophy of living, the

dandy, so we are told, travelled back to where he came from. This, at least, is what

most of the historical investigations tell us about the history of this troubling fi gure.4

But on when and with whom the history of this enigmatic fi gure came to an end,

scholars seem to disagree. All too often, histories of dandyism work toward a

fi nal stage, culminating in fi n-de-siècle France or early twentieth-century England.

This suggests that the dandy could only have been observed in major European

metropolises.

In this article, which is one in a larger project on the genealogy of dandyism, I will

step out of the confi nes of the more or less traditional and well-accepted historical

narrative in which the dandy is solely read as an apolitical British–French phenom-

enon. As part of my attempt to show that this view is essentially fl awed, I scrutinize

all the remarks and notes left to us by one of the most pre-eminent voices in the Dutch

fi n-de-siècle literary scene, namely that of literary critic and writer Lodewijk van

Deyssel. I do so in order to lay bare a decidedly political dimension behind the

aesthetic norms advocated by this conspicuous Dutch literary fi gure. In doing so

I hope to disprove two common assumptions: fi rst, that dandyism was or is solely

a British–French phenomenon; and second, that dandyism is characterized by an

art-for-art’s sake, apolitical attitude.

To begin with, I briefl y summarize two paradigmatic interpretations of Van

Deyssel’s dandyism, both of which miss the crucial point by ignoring the political

dimension of his peculiar form of dandyism. After this brief overview, I explain in

what precise sense my method differs from the methods used by previous students of

Van Deyssel’s dandyism. My aim is to explain the relevance of a genealogy of dandy-

ism as a philological analysis of the ideas on aesthetics and politics that inform our

experience of dandyism. After this methodological intermezzo, one of Van Deyssel’s

most important, be it largely ignored texts on dandyism is read. Special attention

is paid to a curious term used by van Deyssel: het Monumentaal-Politieke (the

Monumental-Political). I trace this term, so crucial for a proper understanding of the

political dimension of this dandyism, back to the text from which Van Deyssel grasped

it. It turns out that for a proper grasp of this Monumental-Political philosophy of life

one needs to read Van Deyssel in conjunction with the texts from which this term

stems. If one does so, the contours of a fi n-de-siècle, antidecadence discourse gradu-

ally starts to emerge. In this discourse, there is another one resonating along, which

is that of the relationship between art and community. When we carefully unravel

these discourses, it becomes clear that Van Deyssel’s dandy can only be understood

as a walking utopia. The discussion concludes by explaining how this utopia is one

in which aesthetics and politics totally overlap, together creating a harmonious whole.

The dandy, rather than being someone who does not do anything, as Baudelaire

would like his readers to believe, turns out to be a walking utopia carrying the

promise of a choreographic community dancing to its own rhythm.

59DANDYISM AS MONUMENTAL-POLITICAL ETHOS

An apolitical game?

Throughout the 1880s, the Netherlands saw the emergence of a group of young

passionate writers fi ercely rejecting the more traditional rule-abiding, moralizing

poetry and literature of Dutch preacher-poets. This so-called Tachtig movement (De

Tachtigers) sought to overturn traditional structures and ordinary use of language by

introducing a radical renewal of grammatical structures, the formation of neologisms

and by making themselves the subjects of their poetry. However, they not only dis-

carded former poetic structures and ideas but also did away with the political ideals

of their predecessors. Although the name might suggest otherwise, this heterogeneous

group of young men having a single line as their motto — poetry should be the

ownmost individual expression of the ownmost individual emotions — included

proponents of socialism as well as aristocrats. Nevertheless, they are almost always

celebrated for their literary inventions only. Within this group of young poets, so

strongly opposed to the literature of a previous generation, there was one young man

of letters who became famous for his villainous epistles. Although initially he was one

of the fi rst and strongest advocates of naturalism in the Low Countries, he broke with

admirers of Zola and the like. In its stead, Van Deyssel proposed what he called a

literature of Sensitivism. Much like impressionism in painting, sensitivistic writing is

characterized by brief but dense descriptions of all kinds of sensory experiences. The

full splendour of sensory perception, a myriad of ways to describe one single colour

for example, was represented and employed to reach a higher truth of that which lies

hidden behind ordinary perception. The diffusion of light and the dispersal of other

sensory qualities so carefully crafted into a distinguished form of prose have brought

readers to read Van Deyssel’s work as constituting an astonishing example of pointil-

lism in literature. What he thus became known for was the introduction of this

extraordinary literary intervention, combined with a singular use of language and a

pen dipped in poison. His sharp tongue combined with his extrovert aristocratic

attitude has led many commentators to read him as a prototypical Dutch dandy. The

well-known Dutch critic Menno ter Braak once called him an ‘art-aristocrat’5 and

accused him of displaying a ‘haughty pretension to inequality’.6 And one of the most

famous Dutch authors of the twentieth century, W. F. Hermans, interpreted Van

Deyssel’s oeuvre as an ‘anti-oeuvre’ consisting of aphorisms, since aphorisms are

what dandies preach.7 But it is in the work of literary scholars that his theory of

dandyism received most attention.

Van Deyssel’s dandyism has perhaps received its most elaborate treatment in the

work of Reijnders. And although Reijnders himself admits that he did not intend to

present an exhaustive investigation of Van Deyssel’s ideas on dandyism in relation to

‘“the” theory of dandyism’,8 it is specifi cally in the relationship between van Deyssel

and fellow-author Louis Couperus, that other dandy and acquaintance of Oscar

Wilde, that, according to Reijnders, his dandy-theory most distinctly comes to the

fore. Precisely because the ‘dandy-Van Deyssel’ always found himself confronted with

his mirror-image the ‘dandy-Couperus’.9 Thus, as Reijnders repeatedly argues, it was

60 GEERTJAN DE VUGT

impossible for Van Deyssel to read Couperus without turning his gaze on himself.10

This is crucial for Reijnders since he argues that apart from attitude, dandyism has

no essential characteristics of its own. As a play in disguise, dandyism is all about the

attitude, or posture of a certain fi gure. As he puts it in another small collection of

essays: ‘What I would like to argue is that one should reserve the term dandyism for

the mask and the game, for the attitude, — differentiated from the drives and inten-

tions of this human being that in and through this play becomes dandy’.11 Such an

attitude can be found on two levels, that is to say, on two levels coinciding with two

kinds of dandyism, in so far as they are separable at all.

Reijnders distinguishes what he calls social dandyism from literary dandyism. That

is, he distinguishes dandyism as a social phenomenon, as manifesting itself within

society, from dandyism as a literary phenomenon, as a set of stylistic norms within

literature. However, this is certainly not a distinction Van Deyssel employs or would

have endorsed. Quite the contrary in fact, for with him the distinction between book

and author almost always disappears.12 Dandyism is always related to a certain

persona and will always express itself within the work as a manifestation of that same

persona. Hence, Reijnders’ approach — namely to investigate Van Deyssel’s dandy-

theory from the perspective of the relationship between Couperus and Van Deyssel

— allows him to employ an analysis on a stylistic level in interrelation with van

Deyssel’s personal appearance. And hence, it tends to be the persona that receives the

most attention. Although he hinted at an analysis of dandyism as a social phenome-

non, Reijnders failed to seize the opportunity that Van Deyssel had opened for him.

In other words, he failed to seize the opportunity to grasp the dandy as fully political

— in the words of Van Deyssel Monumentaal-Politisch — phenomenon, although it

is precisely this that gives Van Deyssel’s Dandysme such an interesting dimension,

because the dandy is seldom seen, let alone investigated, as a political phenomenon.

A fi rst attempt at a more political reading of van Deyssel’s dandyism was proposed

by Ruiter and Smulders. In their Literatuur en Moderniteit in Nederland Van

Deyssel’s dandy pops up in what is called ‘het socialismedebat’ (the debate on social-

ism). However, they do not investigate Van Deyssel’s dandy-theory in any detail to

look for its political dimension, something which could hardly be expected in the

context of a study like this. Instead of discussing him in conjunction with Couperus,

they discuss him in relation to one of the most important spokesmen of socialism

in the Netherlands of the 1890s, Frank van der Goes. ‘The aesthetic absolutism of

Van Deyssel’ they argue ‘makes him obviously susceptible to the aristocratic dandy-

mentality. In a political sense this leads him straight to an anti-egalitarian and anti-

democratic attitude. In his polemics with Van der Goes he occasionally takes the

opportunity to defend his aristocratic dandy ideal with lots of drama against the

uprising of the everything-equalizing democracy’.13

The fact that in this debate over politics and aesthetics Van Deyssel’s ‘aesthetic

absolutism’ comes to the fore with an extraordinary distinctness will not come as a

surprise to anyone familiar with Van Deyssel’s essays ‘Gedachte, kunst, socialisme’14

and ‘Socialisme’.15 But it is doubtful that this absolutism could be put on a par with

61DANDYISM AS MONUMENTAL-POLITICAL ETHOS

Van Deyssel’s dandyism without any reservations. What will strike one in a close

reading of these contributions to the debate on socialism is the absence of any refer-

ence to dandyism whatsoever. Nonetheless, as will become clear in the remainder of

this article, there is indeed a somewhat obscure link with another debate, one on

community art (gemeenschapskunst), in which Van Deyssel does refer to the dandy.16

The moment in which the dandy appears in the work of Van Deyssel is a moment in

which characteristically fi n-de-siècle thoughts fi rst entered his work, and ideas on

degeneration gained prevalence.17 As becomes apparent, this is not a trifl ing observa-

tion. It is precisely against this background that one should read Van Deyssel’s

remarks on dandyism, since it opens up a way of reading the dandy not as an indi-

vidual dancing on the ashes of a society burned down to the ground as in Baudelaire,

but rather as a walking utopia, as the cure for a society threatened by degeneration.

Dandyism as experience

Starting from the suggestion made in the work of Ruiter and Smulders but which was

not worked out in detail there, this study aims to lay bare the political dimension that

so far has remained hidden in Van Deyssel’s dandy-theory. Rather than trying to

answer questions such as who can be seen as a dandy or what the specifi c character-

istics of the dandy are, the objective of this article is to distil from the few paragraphs

on dandyism that Van Deyssel wrote, the ideas that allow the phenomenon of dandy-

ism to be experienced as such. Therefore, this article could be read as a passage, as

an analysis of one of those events that has brought us where we are, one of those

events that a genealogy investigates.18

The way of writing history that I employ throughout my genealogy of dandyism is

not as Foucault and many of the cultural historians working in his footsteps look

upon as a history of the body.19 Anyone who has carefully read Nietzsches Zur

Genealogie der Moral, the key text for genealogy as a mode of writing history,

knows that it is not so much the body as the experience — in the case of Nietzsche

of morality — that is the object under scrutiny. The aim is to investigate with ‘enough

seriousness’ life: ‘the so-called “experiences”’.20 Or, as Nietzsche continues in the

same preface: ‘The vast, distant and hidden land of morality — of morality as it

really existed and was really lived — has to be journeyed through with quite new

questions and as it were with new eyes: and surely that means virtually discovering

this land for the fi rst time?’21 What Nietzsche in this preface to Zur Genealogie seems

to be calling for is a historiography as cartography of experience. That genealogy

does not necessarily have to be a history of morality is something the work of Michel

Foucault has illustrated quite clearly.

Thus, when I speak of a genealogy of dandyism this does not mean I am referring

to an inquiry into the fi gure of the dandy as such: this is not an investigation of the

outward appearance or bodily characteristics of the dandy, nor is it a study of the

behaviour or practices of the dandy. Dandyism is not a settled fact and is not a set

of defi nite characteristics as is often proposed in works that belong to the body of

62 GEERTJAN DE VUGT

dandy-Forschung. First and foremost, dandyism is a name for the experience of a

certain phenomenon, experienced at certain time in a certain place, in a particular

sphere. This experience itself, as Nietzsche made clear long before all those who pass

for structuralists or post-structuralists, can only become graspable in the common

(Gemeine) medium of language.22 That is to say, each and every experience of dandy-

ism that is translated into an observation (i.e., in the medium of language), must

of necessity lose something of its singularity because it can only become graspable in

the medium of the community — das Gemeine. And, so Nietzsche argues, this means

that from this community there is always, be it implicit or explicit, a coercive

and constraining force at work.23 Conversely, one could say that every singular

experience gains something communal. Foucault, in the wake of his teacher Georges

Canguilhem,24 was right in analyzing this coercive force of the common in terms of

normativities, which in a decisive way infl uence and shape our experiences.

The experience of dandyism, as I claim in my genealogy, is always situated in a

normative sphere in which ideas on ethics, politics and aesthetics come together and

perhaps, one might add, even coincide. Around the fi gure of the dandy, ideas on the

ordering of the community, ideas on the specifi c visibility of this ordering of the com-

munity and ideas on how to live and how to live differently within this communal

sphere crystallize.

In this article, Van Deyssel’s observations on dandyism are not read as an attempt

at legitimizing or describing his own posture, but as a direct translation of a specifi c

experience — and how singular this in the case of Van Deyssel may be — into the

medium of the community. His observations on dandyism thus offer an opening for

the analysis of the relationship between ethics and politics, aesthetics and ethics, and

politics and aesthetics in the Netherlands at the end of the nineteenth century.

A sensitive young man

One of the texts in which Van Deyssel was most elaborate in his observations on

dandyism is the well-known review of Couperus’s Extaze. Needless to say, perhaps,

this text was of decisive importance for Reijnders’ reconstruction of Van Deyssel’s

dandyism. However, it is a text written two years later that forces the cultural

scholar to look at Van Deyssel’s experience of dandyism with new eyes, raising fresh

questions. When one aims to lay bare the contours of this experience of dandyism it

is Het leven van Frank Rozelaar (The life of Frank Rozelaar) that could serve as

perfect starting point. The book was written in a period in which Van Deyssel came

to the conclusion that naturalism had come to an end, and in which he was in search

of a new philosophy of living (levensleer) — as is testifi ed by the essays ‘Tot een

levensleer’25 and ‘De weg naar het goede leven’26 — with a monumental vision.27 As

Harry Prick, whose work has decisively altered the way in which Van Deyssel’s

oeuvre will be studied, claims, the writing of the Rozelaar — ‘this diary’ — coincides

with ‘the defi nitive entrance into the third phase of life: the synthetic and passive

way of living, in humility with life in general’.28 This fact makes The life of Frank

Rozelaar an even more curious text since it functions as a threshold in the life of

63DANDYISM AS MONUMENTAL-POLITICAL ETHOS

Van Deyssel. And as becomes clear, it is precisely here that Van Deyssel refl ects on

dandyism in relation to a specifi c form of this monumental ethos.

Although structured like an ordinary diary, Frank Rozelaar turns out to be a

strange collection of brief but vivid impressions of ordinary situations. Amazingly

colourful descriptions of the sunset or of the haunting fog enveloping the trees are

intermingled with those of descriptions of children playing in the garden as being

engaged in youthful frivolities. They are arranged in such a way that the unfolding

of the plot is shattered in favour of the representation of human sensibility in full

splendour. It is only the characteristic ordering of the diary that reminds the reader

of a temporal succession of events. Only a few entries are set apart from the main

body of the text by the seemingly trifl ing fact that they carry a title. The fi rst of these

concerns the entry for Monday November 1st of the year 1897. It is here that we fi nd

a relatively extensive meditation on the notion of Dandysme, as Van Deyssel calls it,

an entry that for reasons as yet unclear, was left out of the fi rst edition of 1911.

The fi rst thing that strikes the reader is the use of the French Dandysme rather than

the more familiar English term dandyism. Possibly, Van Deyssel preferred to see

dandyism as a French phenomenon, but what is more important here is the sphere

characteristic of Van Deyssel’s own experience of this dandysme. As it turns out,

this sphere was neither French nor British but concerns his own childhood in the

Netherlands.

Although the observation on dandyism did not appear in the fi rst edition of the

Rozelaar, Harry Prick, after a careful reconstruction of Van Deyssel’s notes and dia-

ries, managed to fi nd the proper place to reinsert this fragment. That this particular

location is not without signifi cance becomes clear when one realizes that it follows

on a short refl ection on Hubris (Hoogmoed), ‘a feeling of self-esteem that is dispro-

portionate in relation to reality’ [een gevoel van eigenwaarde dat in wan-verhouding

is met de werkelijkheid].29 The narrator, who along with Prick we can safely assume

is Van Deyssel himself, concludes that he cannot be accused of any form of pride

whatsoever, because he has looked down upon himself more than his worst enemy

has done, just as he has esteemed himself higher than any of the people who

respected him have done. The two extremes level out, making his self-esteem ‘prob-

ably accurately’ correspond to reality. And although the ideals of his youth, such as

described in the entry on dandyism, have been replaced with raptures of a different

kind, this entry on pride would fi rst and foremost seem to be a warning not to read

the subsequent fragment on dandyism as a testimony of a certain kind of youthful

hubris. As another entry, written down on the same day, tells us: ‘Maar ik heb niet

Berouw over vroegere levens-richting. Ik heb niet Berouw over de wonden, die ik

toebracht in den veldslag, waarin het Heroïke door mij werd bevochten’ [‘But I am

not Remorseful for the former direction of my life. I am not Remorseful for the

wounds that I infl icted in the battle I fought against the Heroic’].30 He does not

feel any remorse, because it happened in his imagination, a ‘Fantasy’, that is to say,

an ‘Ideal’ in which he lived. The entry titled ‘Dandysme’ must thus be read as an

apologia for the way Van Deyssel lived in his childhood, which in the same entry he

describes in terms of the Monumental-Political (Monumentaal-Politisch).

64 GEERTJAN DE VUGT

From the very beginning it is clear that Van Deyssel’s perspective on dandyism can

only be understood as springing from an antagonism. The entry opens as follows: ‘In

mijn jeugd is het wel gebeurd, dat ‘artiesten’ het niet sympathiek in mij vonden, dat

ik het voorkomen van een dandy wilde hebben’ [‘In my youth it has happened that

‘artists’ could not fi nd sympathy with my wanting to have the appearance of a

dandy’].31 The dandy fi nds himself in opposition with those who pass for ‘artists’,

but whose artisticness Van Deyssel deems doubtful considering his use of inverted

commas. While Van Deyssel doubts the alleged artisticness of this unspecifi ed group,

the members of this group in their turn observe the young dandy with distaste

and ‘repugnance’ (‘weêrzin’). What remained invisible between them, at least in Van

Deyssel’s observation of the situation — the opposition between the two philosophies

of life — becomes observable through the ‘visible sign’ (‘zichtbare teken’) of repug-

nance. And in the general sphere they share, this repulsion becomes visible through

the gaze: ‘zoo stonden, op dit zeer kleine plan, achter een enkelen blik van antipathie

zwijgend gewisseld, onder andere de twee groote machten van het Realistische en het

Monumentaal-Politische tegen-over-elkaâr op-gesteld’ [‘thus, on this extremely small

plane, behind a singular glance of antipathy exchanged in silence, among others

the two great powers the Realistic and the Monumental-Political’ stood facing each

other’].32

What is striking here and what thus needs to be investigated more thoroughly, is

the fact that Van Deyssel views dandyism as a philosophy of life with an emphasis

on aesthetics (Monumental) and politics (Political). Or put more precisely: it concerns

a philosophy of life in which aesthetics and the political are interlocked. The three

planes on which a genealogy of dandyism focuses — that of the relationship between

life and politics, that of the relationship between life and aesthetics and that of the

relationship between aesthetics and politics — can easily be explored in this entry.

But without going into too much detail at this point, it should be noted here that the

joining together of the Monumental and the Political into Monumentaal-Politisch

does not appear out of the blue, but is derived from a larger debate on the relation-

ship between community and art. Therefore, in this article this junction will serve as

the Ansatzpunkt for the analysis of Van Deyssel’s observations on dandyism. To

grasp this aesthetico-political philosophy of life in its full force, this entry should not

only be read as an apologia for his youthful fl irtation with dandyism, but also and

expressly as showing the reverberations of elements of this debate. The dandy, con-

trary to the a-political fi gure he is often made out to be, turns out to be taken up by

a debate over politics and aesthetics, in a debate on the ordering of the community

and the specifi c sensibility of this ordering.

Dandy vs. dilletant

However, what must fi rst be investigated is the other pole within this antagonism.

The short text is a refl ection on a non-specifi ed period in Rozelaar/Van Deyssel’s

childhood. And although his attitude towards Realism at the moment of writing had

65DANDYISM AS MONUMENTAL-POLITICAL ETHOS

changed, it now seems to have become equivalent to that ‘other Life-Conception’

[ander Levens-Begrip]. Dandysme is diametrically opposed to Realism, because the

latter ‘Life-Conception’, in preferring art to life, is life-negating: ‘Zij vonden het

Leven leelijk, aangezien zij hun eenzame ontroeringen in het bosch, op de hei, of op

een stadsgracht verkozen boven Deelneming aan het Leven’ [‘They [= Realist artists]

considered life ugly, giving preference to their solitary raptures in the forest, on the

heath, or on one of the city canals over Participation in Life’].33 The different points

of critique that Van Deyssel developed — Realism preferring art over life, Realism

fi nding life ugly, Realism being life-negating — are all of them, I would like to

emphasize, based on a tacit yet decisive separation, namely on the caesura that runs

between art and life.

Realism, according to the young Rozelaar, is based upon a radical separation of

aesthetics and life, as a result of which there is an ensuing separation between the

artist and the world. He argues that it is only by installing such a caesura that it

became possible for the Realists to deny life as such: ‘Hij gevoelt zich dus buiten de

Wereld, zijn theorie maakt de Kunst tot iets buiten het Leven, en waar hij zich wel

het minst om bekommeren zal, dat is welke plaats hij in de Wereld inneemt en hoe

hij uiterlijk die plaats moet beteekenen, daar hij er immers geheel buiten staat’ [‘He

thus feels outside of the World, his theory makes Art something existing outside of

Life, and the least of his concerns is what place he occupies in the world, how his

physical presence should afford meaning to this place, considering he is outside of it

entirely’].34 It is on this radical separation between art and life, between artist and

world, on this radical separation between aesthetics and life that that other separa-

tion, the caesura between Realism and the Monumental-Political, was founded.

However, Van Deyssel was not the fi rst to employ this antagonism. The passage

on dandysme as it can be found in Frank Rozelaar was written in 1897. But four years

earlier a well-known piece written by good friend and cousin Alphons Diepenbrock

— today perhaps only known for his work as a composer — appeared in the

important literary journal De Nieuwe Gids. Undoubtedly Van Deyssel had read

Diepenbrock’s ‘Schemeringen’ and it must be in this essay that he fi rst stumbled upon

the notion of the Monumental-Political. In a letter dated several years later, Van

Deyssel asks Diepenbrock if he would be ‘inclined to write a sequel to ‘Schemeringen’

[‘geneigdheid om een vervolg op ‘Schemeringen’ van eertijds te boek te stellen’].35

Diepenbrock answered him saying that he would rather write a piece of criticism

without the ‘swelling periods and oratorical rhythms’ so characteristic of ‘Schemer-

ingen’.36 This exchange, taken together with the fact that we know they read each

other’s pieces regularly, makes it safe to assume that Van Deyssel had carefully read

‘Schemeringen’. Although this may seem an insignifi cant fact, it is precisely in

this context that we should situate Van Deyssel’s referring to his observation on

dandyism as being a memory of his youth. In this context, we can hear the debate on

community art resonating in the debate on dandyism.

As has become clear above, the dandy was placed over against Realist artists.

Asceticism, the withdrawal from and negation of life, was the most distinguishing

66 GEERTJAN DE VUGT

characteristic of the individual-Realist artists at the time, at least according to Van

Deyssel. The Monumental-Political philosophy of life is completely opposed to any

form of asceticism. And although nothing in Van Deyssel’s observations points

explicitly to a Nietzschean infl uence, his criticism of Realism as such should indeed

be read as such. As Nietzsche in his Zur Genealogie der Moral expounded in an

inimitable way, the ascetic ideal stems from a will fi lled with hatred against every-

thing that is human. The only thing this will wants is the diminution of the human

being. It is a will against the proliferation of the human species, against life as such.

In response to the question what ascetic ideals mean in the case of artists, the

only possible answer according to Nietszsche is ‘nothing at all!’37 Furthermore, so

Nietzsche continues, artists are not in a suffi ciently autonomous position vis-à-vis the

world. In spite of the fact that this is exactly the position they claim to hold, they will

always remain ‘the valets of morality or philosophy or religion’.38 This is precisely

the problem both Van Deyssel and Diepenbrock encountered in the ascetic ideal of

the Realists. Realist artists are too dependent on a philosophy that offers them protec-

tion and makes them, in the words of Nietzsche, ‘often the all-too-glib courtiers of

their hangers-on and patrons and sycophants with a nose for old or indeed up-and-

coming forces’.39 In other words, even though these artists are the representatives of

a lyrical cult of the I, they do not have the capability of prescribing laws. They lack

the ability to give a community directions or guidelines in the sense of a living

principle. Rather, and this is what emerges from a reading of both Diepenbrock and

Van Deyssel, they are as symptoms of a communal sphere that can best be described

in terms of decadence.

Anyone who has read the above-mentioned article by Diepenbrock in any detail

will recognize that his line of argumentation is largely inspired by the thoughts of

Nietzsche. Diepenbrock once wrote to Van Deyssel that thanks to him ‘together with

Nietzsche and the Ancients’ his attempts ‘to put something of his inclinations and

experiences into words did not remain fruitless’ [‘pogingen om iets onder woorden

te brengen van {zijn} neigingen en gewaarwordingen, niet geheel nutteloos zijn

gebleven’].40 In particular Diepenbrock’s ideas on the problem of ‘self-exaltation of

the one against the ugly community’, the problem of lyrical-individualism, though

based upon a tradition that goes back to Christian mysticism, seems to be inspired

equally by the idea of the Nietzschean-Dionysian with all its emphasis on the com-

munal. Did not Nietzsche, already in his Die Geburt der Tragödie point out how the

individual dissolves into the larger Dionysian community? As Nietzsche writes about

the cult of the Dionysian: ‘we are happily alive, not as individuals, but as the one

living being, with whose procreative lust we have become one’.41 And Diepenbrock

argues that it is after all the task of all people in all times to fi nd ‘the agreement

between (the chord that unites) the I, the ‘inner-I’, and the Non-I’ [‘het accoord tuss-

chen het Ik, het ‘binnen-eige’, en het Niet-Ik te vinden’].42 He continues by saying that

this must be the way to escape from the ‘anarchy of thoughts and inclinations’. In a

rather pompous style, Diepenbrock emphasizes that the symbolist art of painting

should be reproached for being an ‘extreme in the art of lyrical self-exaltation’, which

67DANDYISM AS MONUMENTAL-POLITICAL ETHOS

is ‘analogous to the anarchistic principle in the community and to ‘dilettantism’ in

the empire of ideas’ [‘uiterste in de kunst der lyrische zelf-exaltatie {. . .} analoog aan

het anarchistische beginsel in het maatschappelijke rijk en aan het ‘dilettantisme’ in

het rijk der ideeën’].43

The fact that Diepenbrock uses the term dilettantism, always placed in inverted

commas, is not without signifi cance. As Van Halsema has shown one should read

this concept as a remnant of decadence thinking. As he maintains, and as we in

fact have already seen above, this concerns a specifi c form of the experience of

reality (werkelijkheidsbeleving) ‘in which the emphasis is moved from reality to the

experiencing subject’ [‘waarin het accent is verlegd van de werkelijkheid naar het

gewaarworden subject’].44 The same inference could be drawn from from the text on

Maurice Barrès that Diepenbrock wrote two years later. In this text, he argues that

the problem of ‘dilattentism’ stems from and coincides with the problem of ‘indi-

vidualism’. It is mainly a problem of how ‘the things external to the subject [. . .] are

related to us, and how the individual relates to the many’ [‘de dingen buiten het

subject {. . .} zich tot ons verhouden, en hoe de eenling tegenover velen’].45 The

relationship between subject and world is problematic for the ‘dilettant’ because

‘dilettantism’ is indeed based upon ‘the singular, individual feeling, which cannot be

imparted to or expressed to others, and hence would inevitably have to lead to isola-

tion’ [‘het enkele, individuele gevoel, dat onzegbaar en onmededeelbaar aan anderen

is, en dus consequent tot isolement zou moeten leiden’].46 From this solipsistic-

epistemological foundation of ‘dilettantism’, Diepenbrock immediately draws the

political conclusion on three levels: on the level of art, on the level of the community

and on the level of ideas. And these three come together in the position of the symbol-

ist artist in his relation to art, to society and to philosophy, which is after all the

empire of ideas.

Décadence

Diepenbrock’s rejection of the subjective-solitary lyricism of symbolism is motivated

by his concern for the ordering of the community. He maintains that, placing himself

outside of the community as he does, the symbolist artist, or the Realist in the words

of Van Deyssel, found an exogenous sphere from which he could develop into a

potentially destabilizing and thereby subversive force. The art of symbolism, we may

infer from Diepenbrock’s and Van Deyssel’s line of reasoning, is thus not a-political,

but rather in its complete withdrawal from the community and folding back upon

itself it has become a danger causing the disruption of the people ‘grown into a

unity though the sharing of spiritual desires’ [‘door gemeenschap van geestelijke

verlangens gegroeid tot éénheid’]47, as Diepenbrock phrases it after Wagner. It is a

form of dilettantism, in other words, ‘one of the true décadence-symptoms’.48

So Diepenbrock returns to the beginning of his essay, which he started off with an

alarming fi n-de-siècle Zeit-diagnosis.

There, at the beginning of his essay, we read: ‘Nog eenmaal moge, vóórdat de oude

occidentale, de oude Latijnsche wereld, het wrak van het oude heilige Roomsche rijk

68 GEERTJAN DE VUGT

wegsomberen zal in de matelooze kloof der oneindige tijden, nog eenmaal moge vóór

de ginsche schemering de oude wereld luisterrijk staan in roerenden glans van guldene

luchten op de hoogvlakte der verledene eeuwen’ [‘That one fi nal time, before the old

occidental, the old Latin world, the wreck of the old holy Roman empire fades away

morosely in the endless abyss of infi nity, that one fi nal time before the distant twilight

the old world may stand splendid in the stirring glow of golden skies on the elevated

plateau of centuries past’].49 What is being announced here is the Untergang des

Abenlandes, but not before a fi nal spark will light up the world one last time only to

fade away forever. The old world of Europe, we are led to believe, is threatened by

decay from within. Strangely enough, these young men of letters articulated a typical

fi n-de-siècle Stimmung of ‘tragic crisis’ while historians investigating this period

maintain there was nothing to warrant this atmosphere of doom. With the rapid

increase of the overall quality of life and a gradual process of democratization of

society including improvements in universal suffrage and the right to education, his-

torians interpret the last two decades of the nineteenth century as decades in which

the Netherlands caught up with large scale international developments, both on an

economic as well as a social level.50 And yet, it was precisely these developments that

provoked those young Himmelstürmer to air this feeling of general crisis.

More than on any others, Diepenbrock attacked, the French symbolists and deca-

dents — he appeared to be using the term ‘symbolism’ for all decadent literature since

Baudelaire.51 Baudelaire and his followers were reproached for their ‘pessimistic epi-

curism’,52 in other words, for their hedonistic atomistic anarchism. The spirit breathed

in their work, he asserts, is ‘a late fruit in the tree of culture’, a paradisiacal apple

leading to the end of the old world. Or in the words of Diepenbrock himself: it is

the fruit of ‘beautiful sickliness’ [schone ziekelijkheid].53 The anarchistic decline in

aesthetics has its political equivalent in the ‘sympathy, which, at the moment in

France connects those who are extremely refi ned with those for whom dynamite is

the only key to the future’ [‘sympathie die nu in Frankrijk de uiterst verfi jnden

verbindt met hen, wien het dynamiet de enige sleutel der toekomst is’].54 Diepenbrock

believed that the epicurism of the Marxist anarchists found its way into the works of

Baudelaire, Barrès and Huysmans, even in terms of ‘the whirling winds of words’,55

making those works nothing but symptoms of décadence. However, it is important

to emphasize that this Zeitdiagnose should not be read as applying exclusively to the

French situation at the end of the nineteenth century. As Diepenbrock writes to his

friend Andrew de Graaf, this criticism of the French ‘refi ned’ artists should be read

as a ‘small critique on De Nieuwe Gids’, and hence as a critique on most members

of the movement of the 1880s, as well as expressing an engagement with the poetics

of the painter Derkinderen.56

Derkinderen, whose wall painting in the town hall of the city of Den Bosch caused

some commotion, was at that moment one of the great representatives of the so-called

community art (gemeenschapskunst). What became clear above all was that the

reason for dwelling on the opposite of community art is that Van Deyssel’s dandysme

should be read within this antagonism between Realism/Décadence on the one hand

69DANDYISM AS MONUMENTAL-POLITICAL ETHOS

and Community Art on the other. Goedegebuure has already pointed out that

discourses of decadence are characterized by a strong bipolar organization, the

best known of which are sick-healthy, epigonism-renewal, and the a-moral versus the

implicit moralizing.57 Connecting to this, Van Halsema is quite right in noting that:

‘De diagnose van de décadence of van iets dat daarmee in verband staat, zien we

in de jaren negentig vooral daar verschijnen waar de ene poetica slag levert met de

andere’ [‘The diagnosis of décadence or of something connected to its, in the 1890s

is predominantly found where one kind of poetics is doing battle with another’].58

Undoubtedly, a reading of the negative pole within such an opposition will make the

proclaimed poetics stand out even more distinctly. Now, it is against the background

of disease, ‘the decomposing knowing’59 threatening the communal sphere of the

Occident, that Van Deyssel’s dandy observation will be most clearly visible.

Community art

From about the middle of the 1890s, the poetics of community art — or as it was also

often called: monumental art — began to gain importance in the work of Diepenbrock.

Diepenbrock’s vocabulary was enriched by the vocabulary of the debate that for

a large part took place in the journal for cultural critique De Kroniek. However,

De Kroniek was certainly not the only place where opponents and defenders of com-

munal art found their battleground. The wall paintings of Derkinderen provoked a

debate, the remnants of which some believe could still be found in the ideas of De

Stijl.60 In any case, one must acknowledge the fact that both the architects Cuypers

and Berlage took a strong stand in this debate. As Anbeek remarks, it was the second

time within the fairly short time period of the early 1890s that a journal formed ‘the

focal point of intellectual life’.61 Thus it should come not as a surprise that this debate

has attracted a lot of attention from cultural historians.62 A reconstruction of this

debate thus does not seem necessary and only a brief sketch of the outlines of the

poetics of communal art will suffi ce.

The denunciation of individualist art can easily also be found in the works of Jan

Veth, one of the greatest proponents of community art. Although history provides us

with numerous magnifi cent examples of this form of art, Veth observes that at the

end of the nineteenth century it led to the ‘decay of spiritual unity’63 and caused

a weakening of communal ideals. Developments of increasing democratization in

society and the accompanying individualism in the arts led the artists of the new

community art to articulate their Zeitgeist as one of spiritual decline. Proponents of

the new idea of community, fi nding its direct expression in works of art, often turned

to the works of the Arts and Crafts movement. The idea that ties John Ruskin,

Walter Crane and Augustus Pugin together is the conviction that the industrial

revolution led to enormous degeneration. Pugin in particular drew parallels with the

Middle Ages, where he found the idea of a community, which in his own time through

the machinery of modern capitalism had become obsolete.64

In the Netherlands at the end of the nineteenth century there was apparently a great

consensus among numerous painters, architects, writers and critics, over the lost

70 GEERTJAN DE VUGT

medieval ideal that they should try to recapture. They were not driven by any form

of nostalgia, but by true concern over what was happening with major imminent

changes in society round the corner: socialism and anarchy were fi nding their way

into society65 and it was no longer the cathedral that gave shelter to the people.66

Nonetheless, the cathedral was one of the ideal images for the artists of communal

art and therefore their poetics is best read as a ‘revival of the religious idea outside

of the church’.67 What they found in the image of the cathedral were at least three

forms of community: fi rst, the cathedral affording a visibly demarcated and shared

space for a spiritual community; second, the cathedral as the perfect example of the

community of the arts — architecture, sculpture, painting, music and poetry all had

their place within the harmony of the whole; third, such a community of the arts

implying at the same time a community of artists working together on the same

object. As such, the cathedral was the expression of the new idea of a harmonious

community. However, for both Diepenbrock and Van Deyssel the ideal community

was not so much thought of in terms of architectural examples. Rather, they empha-

sized the relationship between the particular individual and the communal sphere

with terms drawn from a musical register: they speak of harmony and rhythm, or, in

the case of Diepenbrock of an akkoord, which has a double meaning, referring both

to a musical chord as a pleasing combination of sounds and to an agreement between

the members of society. Under the sign of the monumental-political they outlined a

new idea of community that, although in diametrical opposition to lyrical individual-

ism, had, as we will come to see, lying at the basis of it a utopian individual.

The Dandy as monumental-political phenomenon

What Diepenbrock calls monumental-political is of the nature of the epic, that is

to say: ‘objective-communal’.68 The quintessential example is the Wagnerian

Gesamstkunstwerk, which is received by a community of ‘spiritual desires grown into

unity’.69 For Diepenbrock, it is the composer whose music will sound not as a call

for salvation but as the ‘last dying gloom of the end of civilization’. Monumental-

political music creates a sphere, or rather, a ‘singing atmosphere’70 in which all earthl y

things will bathe in celestial light. In other words, monumental-political art as

Diepenbrock conceptualizes it coincides directly with the social sphere for which it

was created. The work of art encompasses the whole of the social sphere, that is to

say, the whole community has become a work of art. As a result, the foundation of

a new caesura between aesthetics and the community becomes impossible. In this

monumental-political form of art, aesthetics and politics interlock and it is virtually

impossible to tell whether aesthetics has become politics or if politics has become

aesthetics. The ordering of the communal sphere and the specifi c visibility of this

ordering have become one and the same thing. Music, in the case of Diepenbrock,

is the community. Its citizens dance to the ‘wide, spacious, lofty rhythmus’.71 And

the community is harmony: a contract between Reason and Feeling, against ‘the

degenerating knowledge of today’, and against the hubris of the individual.72

71DANDYISM AS MONUMENTAL-POLITICAL ETHOS

Van Deyssel, who undoubtedly stumbled upon the notion of monumental-political

art for the fi rst time in the work of Diepenbrock, does not borrow this notion without

reservations. Nevertheless, one can clearly hear Diepenbrock’s thought resonating in

Van Deyssel’s observations on dandyism. The monumental-political attitude towards

life that Van Deyssel believed to have found in dandyism in everything is the opposite

of the degeneration-aesthetics of the symbolists, decadents and certainly also the

naturalists. The monumental-political attitude is distinguished from the Symbolists’

negation of the world. Instead, the dandy fi nds life beautiful and wants to be an

affi rming part of it: ‘Ik wilde er dus aan deel-nemen, ik wilde een deel, en een zich

manifesterend deel zijn der Samenleving’ [‘I wanted to take part in it, I wanted to be

a part and a self-manifesting part of Society’].73 At fi rst sight, it may seem as if the

dandy no longer draws a radical line of demarcation between the community and the

self. Rather he seems to favor the idea of community of harmony and rhythm as

found in Diepenbrock. And indeed the semantic fi eld of Van Deyssel’s observation is

fi lled with such notions: ‘Where harmony between me and the community would

exist’.74 One should take note here that the notion of harmony does not necessarily

imply an egalitarian sphere. On the contrary, one might say, since it is very well

possible that such a harmony serves to maintain a hierarchy of social inequality.

This is in fact something that can already be found in the great anti-democratic

philosophy of Plato. In his Politeia, Plato describes an ideal community as a sphere

in which bodies are distributed according to the positions in which they can act best

as functional parts of the whole. There are those who function best using their hands

and who are therefore assigned a place in the workshop. There are those whose

physical appearance makes them suitable for a position as a guard, and there are

those whose intelligence makes them the best candidates to become philosophers, that

is to say, kings.75 Thus, the distribution of tasks is at the very same time also a spatial

distribution of bodies. With the right distribution of bodies and tasks, this social

sphere functions as a community dancing to its own rhythm and harmony: it is a

choreographic community.76 As a shared communal body it enacts its own living

principle. This is the idea of community art in which the community not only sees

itself mirrored in the work of art, be it a cathedral or composition, but in which

it has become a work of art itself. All participants work together to prevent the

community from disruption through dissonance, i.e., obtrusive noise. The ideal

community is one in which noise is not allowed.77

In Dandysme, Van Deyssel employs a register that is very similar to the one

employed throughout the work of Plato: ‘dat de beste mensch, de meest wijze en de

meest kunnende, bestuurder moet zijn in eene harmonische en schoonst mogelijke

samenleving, leek mij onbetwistbaar’ [‘that the best human being should be the

wisest and most capable ruler in a harmonious and most beautiful society possible,

seemed to me indisputable’].78 One can fi nd the whole debate on community art

resonating in Van Deyssel’s perspective on dandyism in the sense that he compares

the relationship between ruler and community with that between architect and work

of art. Put differently, he once again introduces a separation of artist/I and commu-

nity, although in this instance it should perhaps be seen more as contiguity rather

72 GEERTJAN DE VUGT

than as a radical caesura. After all, the beauty and harmony of the community stem

directly from the character of the dandy and thus not from a negation of the social

sphere.

Van Deyssel places strong emphasis on the beauty of the harmonious community.

But this harmony is not only constituted by the harmony of all bodies performing

their task in the right place. Van Deyssel also points to the necessary harmony

between inside and outside appearance: ‘that a beautiful society must also look

beautiful on the outside, that the women must smell as odoriferous as the fl owers in

a beautiful garden, that the people must not only be known according to their posi-

tion, that is their nature, but that they must also be beautiful’.79 As if the distribution

of bodies in the social sphere in which the young dandy Van Deyssel lived was not

visibly apparent enough, every body had to make visible what otherwise would

remain hidden to the eye: one had to try to be and physically embody as much as

possible one’s inner nature.80 The distribution of roles within this Platonically

inspired choreographic community acquires an even more distinct visibility through

the bodies of its citizens. The political structuring of the community is at the same

time an aesthetic structuring in a double sense: fi rst of all, such a harmonious distri-

bution makes visible what someone’s role is and where he/she has to perform this

role. This, as has become clear, is not an uncontrolled distribution but a very

specifi c ordering of the community proper, to protect it against noise. And second,

this visibility itself must be beautiful, that is, aesthetically pleasing. The external

appearance is a direct expression of what would otherwise remain hidden, and it is

so in a most beautiful — i.e., harmonious — way.

A walking utopia

Perhaps one might say that the protection of the stability of the social hierarchy

served fi rst and foremost as a protection of the rhythm of the community, to keep the

rhythm going. The cobbler sticks to his last, just as the man of letters sticks to

his books. Together they function in the whole of the communal harmony. Internal

traffi c between different positions must be avoided, otherwise dissonances, or noise,

will arise. But how come Van Deyssel believes it must be the dandy who should

conduct the whole? In the fi rst instance, he keeps on repeating the Platonic mantra:

‘dat de Beste, Wijze en Koning te gelijk moet wezen, om dat de meest Wijze en de

meest Schoone het beste oordelen, besturen en samen-stellen kan’ [‘that the Best must

be Wisest and King at the same time, because the Wisest and most Beautiful can best

judge, govern and compose/put together’].81 This is a necessary but insuffi cient

precondition to guarantee the happiness of the community.

In order to reach the desired state of happiness the community needs something

else as well. The dandy as Van Deyssel depicts him functions as some sort of walking

utopia. By looking at the dandy, all of the community’s participants recognize in what

way they themselves should behave and how they should give shape to their existence.

They see the ‘over-een-stemmen’82 (the accordance, the harmony of voices), the

73DANDYISM AS MONUMENTAL-POLITICAL ETHOS

harmony between inner world and outward appearance that makes the position and

nature of each and every person visible. They see someone who, rather than negating

it affi rms life and who views the world as something beautiful. Rather than feeling

estranged from the community, the dandy lives as if he is the living heart of it. The

citizens of this community see someone who deems life as art to be much more

important than either art or life. And everything that comes together in this walking

utopia will lead to ‘people being happy by looking at me and living their life, accord-

ing to various degrees of development, following me’ [‘de menschen gelukkig zouden

zijn door naar mij te zien en hun leven, gradueel naar de veschillende graden van

ontwikkeling, volgends mij te leven’].83 And thus Van Deyssel concludes that he as

a dandy should be ‘governor of society, thus in this case, King of the Country’

[‘bestuurder der samenleving, in dit geval dus Koning van het Land’].84

This utopia would appear to be so beautiful that it seems to carry along with it

something magical: ‘Deze soort schoonheid zoû ontroeringen verwekken niet alleen

veel dieper dan de menschen plegen te ontvangen, maar van een essentieel anderen

aard, zóó, dat de natuur der menschen er door veranderde’ [‘This kind of beauty

would not only touch people much more profoundly than they are used to, but it

would be of a nature so essentially different that people’s natures would change as a

result’].85 The ones who govern will only have to look at this utopia once and they

will immediately feel inclined to crown him king. Thus the dandy wants to be a king

not only of his own world, but also of the community as a whole. However, it

remains unclear where exactly the emphasis should be placed: should we see dandy-

ism as an attempt at gaining power, or is it merely an attempt at an aesthetic trans-

formation of society? Van Deyssel does not hide his aspirations to be king, but not

as a simple and pure struggle for power. In fact, the question of power or aesthetic

transformation cannot be answered decisively. One thing that Van Deyssel’s perspec-

tive on dandyism does makes clear is the fact that dandyism is concerned with an

aesthetization of power as well as a politicization of aesthetics. They are inextricably

connected in dandyism, a way of living that is different from all other forms. And

although the dandy in his monumental-political philosophy of life claims to subordi-

nate both politics and art to life, a symbiosis of the three makes it impossible to tell

where exactly the centre of gravity lies. Van Deyssel experienced his own dandyism

as a utopian phenomenon in which politics as the ordering of the community, ethics

as the philosophy of living, and aesthetics as the specifi c visibility of the ordering of

the community, are inextricably tied together in a harmonious ideal.

A Dandyist gesture

When, after reading the passage on dandysme, reinserted in the discursive network it

originated from, one returns to what some consider to be the most important text

revealing Van Deyssel’s perspective on dandyism — the review of Couperus’ novel

Extaze — it becomes clear how Van Deyssel was able to read Extaze ‘as a dandyist

74 GEERTJAN DE VUGT

gesture, without a doubt’.86 The dandy, or at least the ‘greater dandy’ is superior to

any kind of artist because he does not have to give in to the ‘amiable intimacy and

excited diligence’, that is the ‘prostitution of the soul’ of which the artist suffers.87

Again the critique of anarchic-individualism is played out and again this happens

contrasting it with the harmonious-utopian character of dandyism. It should be

noted, however, that Van Deyssel is neither concerned with whether or not, or the

extent to which the author himself is represented in his own text, nor is he interested

in representations of dandyism in other works by the author. This is precisely why

Van Deyssel writes: ‘De fout is dus niet in het dandy-like maar híerin, dat ten

onrechte op déze plaats [. . .] de schrijver zijn dandyschap onderstreept’ [‘The mistake

thus does not lie in it being dandy-like, but in the author, quite unjustifi ed, emphasiz-

ing his own dandyism here’].88 It does not serve any purpose to look for the charac-

teristics of Couperus the dandy, nor, as Reijnders did, for the Van Deyssel the dandy.

If one does, Extaze could not be read as a gesture of dandyism, but only as purely

representational image of one author.

As a deed, as a gesture, the book points to something more active. The active ele-

ment is not the persona of the author — anyone who has read Van Deyssel’s review

will remember the words: ‘Mr Couperus may as well get lost, I don’t have anything

to do with Mr Couperus’89 — but dandyism as such, i.e. as monumental-political

phenomenon. Or as Van Deyssel writes in the same review: ‘Dit is het hoogste, dit is

de hoogste buiging van de schoonheidslijn, dit is de Essentie der Gratie, dit is het

opperste rhytme-bereiken: zich God-voor-zich-zelf te ontzeggen om God te geven aan

de menschen’ [‘This is the highest, this is the highest curvature of the line of beauty,

this is the Essence of Grace, this is achieving the supreme rhythm: to deny God-to

oneself in order to give God to the people’].90 God should not be read as referring

to God in any theological sense of the word, but as the ‘Goal, Goal of the highest

Spiritual-states, the Highest-End of emotional pursuits’ [‘Doel, Doel der hoogste

Ziele-staten, Top-Einde der emotionele strevingen’].91 Giving God to the community,

that is, presenting to the community its highest spiritual goal, cannot but be read as

a dandyist gesture, as another attempt to make the community function in the right

rhythm (to phrase it in Van Deyssel’s words). Here again, one fi nds remnants of the

idea of the choreographic community with the dandy as composer.

The dandy as the harmonizing element in a communal sphere in decline is a feature

one sees constantly reappearing in Van Deyssel’s observations. It also occurs in

another text, a short note on Stefan George, in which the dandyism of the literary

man is briefl y explored. Stefan George as a dandy and a man of letters is neither

a fi ne, nor a curious ‘monstrous excrescence of modern times’, but a ‘centre of life

instead of an outgrowth, a harmonious unity instead of a monstrosity’.92 The dandy-

man of letters, of which George is one particularly fi ne example, cannot be under-

stood but as a walking utopia. Looking at and listening to him the people will ‘receive

him with joy and improve their lives after his example’ [‘met verheuging ontvangen

en hun leven verbeteren naar zijn beeld’].93 We are not dealing here with the dandy

75DANDYISM AS MONUMENTAL-POLITICAL ETHOS

as we fi nd him in the theories of Wilde or d’Aurevilly, writes Van Deyssel, but a

‘sober dandy’. And the poet as a sober dandy is a ‘seer of the beauty of life and a

teller of beauty in great or fi ne grace’ [‘schoonziener des levens en haar schoon-zegger

in hooge of fi jne bevalligheid’]. In this, he stands in stark contrast to the ‘heavy organ

music visionary’ [‘zware orgelmuziek vizioenen-gever’].94 Although Van Deyssel

speaks of a dandy-man of letters, the semantic fi eld of his observations is drenched

with words coming from a musicological register. Time and again, we fi nd observa-

tions of the communal sphere in terms of the harmony and rhythm to which it

dances.

Conclusion

Van Deyssel’s dandysme, or dandyism tout court, is seldom considered as a political

phenomenon. The only exception may very well be a contemporary example: Dutch

dandy-populist Pim Fortuyn.95 But to get a fi rm grasp on how this fi gure has popped

up where one would perhaps least expect him — in the very heart of politics — one

needs to reconstruct a genealogy of dandyism. What such a genealogy could bring out

is that dandyism constitutes one of the specifi c problems of modernity,96 arising

every time the social sphere fi nds itself in a crisis. As this study has aimed to show,

Van Deyssel’s observations on dandyism may very well be read as the observation of

one of those moments of crisis.

In the observation of his own youthful dandyism, Van Deyssel employed a par-

ticular notion that was rooted in the debate over community art. This notion — het

monumentaal-politische — formed the Ansatzpunkt for us from which we could read

his perspective on dandyism as a moment in which several debates over community

art, decadence and the fi n-de-siècle intersect and resonate. A community split up

along several caesurae, best characterized in terms of atomic individualism — at least,

that is how both Diepenbrock and Van Deyssel described their own time — cannot

bring forth a proper harmony. Noise is bound to appear. When everyone works in a

haphazardly chosen place and rhythm, words and things start to get mixed up and

the rhythm of the community will falter. The community that once danced joyfully

to the rhythm it brought forth itself falls into decay: this is the décadence as

Diepenbrock painted it. Fear of anarchy on the level of the community, on the level

of the arts and within the arts (e.g. at the level of words) keeps men of letters chained.

Van Deyssel found the solution in his own youthful ideal, but also in the gesture of

Couperus’ novel Extaze and in the persona of Stefan George. The dandy as a walking

utopia did not constitute a threat to the harmony of the community, as one

would perhaps expect, and instead represents a life in which inner and outward

appearances are in perfect harmony.

Rather than being concerned with elements of dress or attitude, Van Deyssel is

interested in how the dandy’s appearance could inspire people, showing them how

they could live their lives and how they could live it differently, representing a utopia

76 GEERTJAN DE VUGT

in which each and every individual will fi nd their place and start living the way they

should live according to their nature, as a result of which harmony will ensue. Every

individual has a part in the whole of the social sphere and when everyone sticks to

this distribution of bodies over the social canvas the perfect harmony may come into

existence. And, as explored above, this is precisely where Van Deyssel’s ideas on

living life differently, on politics and on aesthetics form an inextricable Gordian knot.

The ordering of the community is at once also an aesthetic ordering that makes a

specifi c way of harmonious living possible. Therefore, the emphasis lies neither

on art, nor on politics, or on life. This is what the monumental-political means:

the coinciding of life, art and politics. Dandyism should be understood as the

phenomenon that carries the promise of all this within it.

Notes1 Leon Vincent, Dandies and Men of Letters (London:

Duckworth & Co., 1914), p. 20.2 Ulrich Baer, Remnants of Song: Trauma and the

Experience of Modernity in Charles Baudelaire and

Paul Celan (Stanford: Stanford University Press,

2000).3 Charles Baudelaire, Œuvres Complètes (Paris:

Gallimard, 1975), p. 704.4 See for example: Ellen Moers, The Dandy: Brum-

mell to Beerbohm (New York: The Viking Press,

1960); Martin Koomen, Dandy’s en Decadenten.

Engelse schrijvers van Byron tot Amis. (Amsterdam:

Bas Lubberhuizen, 2008); André Hielkema, De

Dandy of de overschrijding van het alledaagse.

Facetten van het dandyisme. (Amsterdam: Boom,

1989); Vincent, Dandies and Men of Letters.5 Menno ter Braak, ‘Lodewijk van Deyssel 70 jaar’, in

Verzameld Werk, deel 4 (Amsterdam: G.A. van

Oorschot, 1951), pp. 304–310 (p. 305).6 Menno ter Braak, ‘Van der Goes — Van Deyssel

— Burckhardt’, in Verzameld Werk, deel 4 (Amster-

dam: G.A. van Oorschot, 1951), pp. 457–462

(p. 458).7 Willem Frederik Hermans, ‘Van Deyssel’s

dandyisme’, in Ik draag geen helm met vederbos

(Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1979), pp. 67–80

(p. 72).8 Karel Reijnders, Couperus bij Van Deyssel: een

chronische konfrontatie in beschouwingen, brieven

en notities (Amsterdam: Athenaeum — Polak &

Van Gennep, 1968), p. 468.9 Reijnders, Couperus bij Van Deyssel, p. 489.10 Karel Reijnders, Onder dekmantel van etiket

(Amsterdam: Athenaeum — Polak & Van Gennep,

1972), p. 53.11 Reijnders, Onder dekmantel, p. 12.12 Reijnders, Couperus bij Van Deyssel, p. 477.13 Ruiter en Smulders, Literatuur en moderniteit in

Nederland 1840–1990. (Amsterdam: Arbeiderspers:

1996), p. 148.

14 Lodewijk van Deyssel, ‘Gedachte, Kunst,

Socialisme’, in Verzamelde Opstellen, Derde Bundel

(Amsterdam: Scheltema en Holkema’s Boekhandel,

1897), pp. 41–58.15 Lodewijk van Deyssel, ‘Socialisme’, in Verzamelde

Opstellen, Derde Bundel, (Amsterdam: Scheltema

en Holkema’s Boekhandel, 1897), pp. 275–312.16 Ton Anbeek, Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse

Literatuur tussen 1885 en 1985 (Amsterdam:

Arbeiderspers, 1990), p. 72.17 Cf. J.D.F. van Halsema, Te zoeken in deze angstige

eeuw (Groningen: De historische Uitgeverij, 1994).18 Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, la généalogie,

l’histoire’, In Dits et écrits I. 1954–1975, ed. Daniel

Defert and François Ewald (Paris: Gallimard, 2001),

pp. 1004–1025.19 Ibid.20 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality.

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007),

p. 3.21 Ibid., p. 8.22 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002),

pp. 163–164.23 Ibid.24 Cf. Michel Foucault, ‘Introduction’, in Georges

Canguilhem, The Normal land the Pathological

(New York: Zone, 1991), pp. 7–24.25 Lodewijk van Deyssel, ‘Tot een levensleer’, Verza-

melde Opstellen, Tweede Bundel, (Amsterdam:

Scheltema en Holkema’s Boekhandel, 1897),

pp. 321–334.26 Lodewijk van Deyssel, ‘De weg naar het goede

leven’, Verzamelde Opstellen, Elfde Bundel,

(Amsterdam: Scheltema en Holkema’s Boekhandel,

1912), pp. 175–196.27 M.G. Kemperinck, Van observatie tot extase,

Sensitivistisch proza rond 1900. (Utrecht: Veen,

77DANDYISM AS MONUMENTAL-POLITICAL ETHOS

1988) pp. 52–53; Please see also: Harry Prick, ‘Inlei-

ding’, in Lodewijk van Deyssel, Het leven van Frank

Rozelaar, pp. 4–23 (pp. 9–10).28 Prick, ‘Inleiding’, Het leven van Frank Rozelaar

(Zwolle: W.E.J. Tjeenk Willink, 1956), p. 24.29 Lodewijk van Deyssel, Het leven van Frank

Rozelaar, p. 72.30 Ibid., p. 71.31 Ibid., p. 72.32 Ibid.33 Ibid.34 Ibid., p. 73.35 Alphons Diepenbrock, Brieven en Documenten, V

(Amsterdam: Vereniging voor Nederlandse

Muziekgeschiedenis, 1981), p. 322.36 Ibid., p. 324.37 Nietzsche, On the Genealogy, p. 72.38 Ibid.39 Ibid.40 Alphons Diepenbrock, Brieven en Documenten, I

(Amsterdam: Vereniging voor Nederlandse

Muziekgeschiedenis, 1998), p. 404.41 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of the Tragedy

(Cambridge: Cambrigde University Press, 1999),

p. 81.42 Alphons Diepenbrock, ‘Schemeringen’, in Verza-

melde Geschriften (Utrech: Het Spectrum, 1950),

pp. 55–66 (p. 63).43 Ibid., p. 63.44 Van Halsema, Te zoeken, p. 37.45 Alphons Diepenbrock, ‘Dilettantisme’, in pp. 104–

108 (p. 104).46 Ibid., p. 105.47 Diepenbrock, ‘Schemeringen’, p. 63.48 Ibid.49 Ibid., p. 55.50 Cf. E.H. Kossmann, De Lage Landen 1780/1980,

Twee Eeuwen Nederland en België, Deel 1 1780–

1914 (Amsterdam: Agon, 1986), pp. 271–281.51 Van Halsema, Te zoeken, p. 36.52 Diepenbrock, ‘Schemeringen’, p. 61.53 Ibid.54 Ibid.55 Ibid.56 Diepenbrock, Brieven en Documenten, I, p. 498.57 Jaap Goedegebuure, Decadentie en Literatuur.

(Amsterdam: Synthese, 1987), p. 27.58 Van Halsema, Te zoeken, p. 41.59 Diepenbrock, ‘Schemeringen’, p. 66.60 Cf. Michael White, De Stijl and Dutch Modernism.

(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003),

pp. 1–12.61 Anbeek, Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse Litera-

tuur, p. 72.62 Cf. Bettina Polak. Het fi n-de-siècle in de Nederlands e

schilderkunst (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1955);

Jan Bank en Maarten van Buuren, 1900: Hoogtij

van burgerlijke cultuur (Den Haag: Sdu Uitgevers,

2000).63 Jan Veth, ‘Een gekleurd glasraam in het nieuwe

Utrechtse Universiteitsgebouw geschilderd door

A.J. Derkinderen’. De Gids, 58 (1894), 307–316

(p. 308).64 Bank en Van Buuren, 1900, p. 156.65 Cf. Kossmann, Lage Landen, pp. 257–298.66 Polak, Het fi n-de-siècle, p. 201.67 Polak, Het fi n-de-siècle, p. 203.68 Diepenbrock, ‘Schemeringen’, p. 63.69 Ibid.70 Ibid.71 Ibid.72 Ibid.73 Van Deyssel, Het leven van Frank Rozelaar, p. 73.74 Ibid.75 Please see Book 4 of Plato’s Politeia: Plato, The

Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

2000) pp. 111–143.76 Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator

(London: Verso, 2009), p. 5; Jacques Rancière, The

Politics of Aesthetics (London: Continuum, 2004),

p. 14.77 Lingis, The community of those who have nothing

in common (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,

1994), p. 12.78 Van Deyssel, Het leven van Frank Rozelaar, p. 74.79 Ibid.80 Ibid.81 Ibid.82 Ibid.83 Ibid.84 Ibid., p. 73.85 Ibid., p. 75.86 Van Deyssel, ‘Over Louis Couperus’, in Verzamelde

Opstellen, Tweede Bundel, (Amsterdam: Scheltema

en Holkema’s Boekhandel, 1897), pp. 287–312

(p. 297).87 Ibid., p. 298.88 Ibid., p. 301.89 Ibid., p. 293.90 Ibid., p. 301, emphasis mine.91 Ibid., p. 301.92 Van Deyssel, ‘De Letterkundige’, in Verzamelde

Opstellen, Tweede Bundel, (Amsterdam: Scheltema

en Holkema’s Boekhandel, 1897), pp. 379–384

(p. 381).93 Ibid., p. 382.94 Ibid.95 Cf. Dick Pels, De geest van Pim, Het gedachtegoed

van een politieke dandy (Amsterdam: Anthos,

2003).96 Cf. Otto Mann, Der Dandy, ein Kulturproblem

der Moderne (Heidelberg: Wolfgang Rothe Verlag,

1962).

78 GEERTJAN DE VUGT

Notes on contributor

Geertjan de Vugt is a literary historian and a doctoral candidate at the Tilburg

School of Humanities, where he is part of the TRAPS research group, and Visiting

Research Collaborator at Princeton University. In his dissertation he is constructing

a genealogy of dandyism that ranges from early 1820s rural dandyism in the USA to

contemporary forms of dandy-populism. Through a philological analysis of dandyism

he aims at rethinking the relationship between politics and aesthetics throughout

modernity. Previous research focused on the work of Jacques Rancière and Walt

Whitman.

Correspondence to: Geertjan de Vugt, Department of Culture Studies, Tilburg

University, PO Box 90153 NL-5000 LE Tilburg, the Netherlands. E-mail:

geertjandevugt@gmail.com.