{"id":67022,"date":"2014-02-20T17:26:36","date_gmt":"2014-02-20T22:26:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=67022"},"modified":"2014-02-20T18:27:50","modified_gmt":"2014-02-20T23:27:50","slug":"keep-smiling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/02\/20\/keep-smiling\/","title":{"rendered":"Keep Smiling"},"content":{"rendered":"

For the origins of the selfie, look to the dandy.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Honore\u0301_Daumier_-_Dandy\"<\/a>

Honore\u0301 Daumier, Dandy<\/i>, oil on canvas, 1871.<\/p><\/div>\n

When selfie <\/i>was crowned the Word of 2013 by the Oxford Dictionaries, the media reaction ranged from apocalyptic to cautiously optimistic. For the Calgary Herald<\/i>\u2019s <\/i>Andrew Cohen, \u201cselfie culture\u201d represents the \u201ccritical mass\u201d of selfish entitlement; for Navneet Alang in the Globe and Mail<\/i>, selfies are inextricable from the need for self-expression, a\u00a0\u201creminder of what it means to be human.\u201d For the Guardian<\/i>\u2019s <\/i>Jonathan Freedland, the selfie is both: at once \u201cthe ultimate emblem of the age of narcissism\u201d and a function of the \u201ctimeless human need to connect.\u201d<\/p>\n

With a few exceptions, commentators tended to converge on one point: the selfie, and the unencumbered act of self-creation it represents, is unmistakably of our time, shorthand for a whole host of cultural tropes wedded to the era of the smartphone. As Jennifer O\u2019Connell, writing for the Irish Times<\/i>, puts it: \u201cIt\u2019s hard to think of a more appropriate\u2014or more depressing\u2014symbol of the kind of society we have become. We are living in an age of narcissism, an age in which only our best, most attractive, most carefully constructed selves are presented to the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

But our obsession with the power of self-creation\u2014and its symbiotic relationship with the technology that makes it possible\u2014is hardly new. Even the \u201cselfie artist\u201d is hardly a creation of 2013. Its genesis isn\u2019t in the iPhone, but in the painted portrait: not among the Twitterati, but among the silk-waistcoated dandies of nineteenth-century Paris. <\/p>\n

It may seem like a stretch to mention selfie artists like Kim Kardashian or James Franco in the same breath as, for example, the French writer Jules-Am\u00e9d\u00e9e Barbey d\u2019Aurevilly, but today\u2019s self-creators owe more to d\u2019Aurevilly’s view of the power of public image than you might think. For d\u2019Aurevilly and his ilk\u2014recently celebrated in coffee-table book I Am Dandy<\/i>, which profiles \u201cmodern-day\u201d dandies from across the globe, dandyism was about more than mere sartorial elegance. It was a way of consciously existing in the world.<\/p>\n

And d\u2019Aurevilly existed more consciously than most. His clothing was as legendary as his writing. He famously kept a collection of bejeweled walking sticks in his front parlor and informed journalists that his favorite was to be referred to as \u201cma femme.\u201d His 1844 hagiography of Beau Brummel, a dandy of another age, doubles as a manifesto: in his eyes, the true dandy evokes surprise, emotion, and passion in others, but remains entirely insensible himself, producing an effect to which he alone remains immune. D\u2019Aurevilly’s celebration of the dandy at times borders on idolatry: for d\u2019Aurevilly, dandies are \u201cthose miniature Gods, who always try to create surprise by remaining impassive.\u201d<\/p>\n

Charles Baudelaire goes still further, treating dandyism in his 1863 essay \u201cThe Painter of Modern Life\u201d as \u201ca kind of religion.\u201d Like d\u2019Aurevilly, Baudelaire sees the ultimate dandy as transcending his humanity\u2014by choosing and creating his own identity, he remains splendidly aloof, unaffected by others or by the world at large. \u201cIt is the pleasure of causing surprise in others, and the proud satisfaction of never showing any oneself. A dandy may be blas\u00e9, he may even suffer pain, but in the latter case he will keep smiling, like the Spartan under the bite of the fox.\u201d<\/p>\n

Baudelaire takes pains to emphasize that the popular trappings of dandyism\u2014\u201cclothes and material elegance\u201d\u2014are secondary to the philosophy underpinning them. \u201cFor the perfect dandy,\u201d he writes, \u201cthese things are no more than the symbol of the aristocratic superiority of his mind.\u201d Clothing, makeup, intentionally confounding accessories\u2014all these are useful not for themselves but for the role they play in creating a public persona.<\/p>\n

Such a view of self-creation is at once attractive and unsettling. To be a dandy, in Baudelaire\u2019s view, is to be utterly free: to produce only the effect one chooses, to exist in the world as a kind of eternal subject, ever operating, never operated upon. Yet such power is granted only to a privileged few. It\u2019s predicated on the troubling notion that these masters of artifice are inherently superior to the \u201cmasses\u201d; that this is not only inevitable but desirable. The common man, after all, cannot create his own identity\u2014he\u2019s too busy being subjected to the great and brutalizing forces of biology and economics. The aristocrat alone is allowed the privilege of self-fashioning. To be a dandy is to exist in opposition to \u201cthe masses,\u201d to treat them, at best, as a kind of captive audience.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

One of the best portraits of the cult of dandyism, perched uncomfortably between satire and sincerity, can be found in the 1876 short story \u201cDeshouli\u00e8res,\u201d by Jean Richepin. The title character, the \u201cdandy of the unpredictable,\u201d is brilliant and bored; he lives in terror of being pigeonholed by others. \u201cHaving dabbled in nearly everything\u2014arts, letters, pleasures\u2014he had forged for himself an ideal, that consisted in being unpredictable <\/i>in everything.\u201d Deshouli\u00e8res lives by the maxim that \u201cone should never look like oneself\u201d; he applies false hair and makeup to alter his appearance and confound his peers. He has the potential to be a great artist or writer, but he cannot bear the \u201cvulgarity\u201d involved in committing to a single activity, and hence becoming \u201cpredictable\u201d to the common man. Instead, he decides on a whim to be a great criminal, hoping to alleviate his ennui <\/i>that way. He proceeds to dispassionately murder his mistress, have her embalmed, and live quite happily (if disturbingly) as her lover until he is finally caught, at which point, fearing that working on a defense would be far too ordinary, he spends his time in jail \u201cclassifying and codifying the mysteries of animal magnetism, and of transforming this dense philosophical treatise into a sequence of monosyllabic sonnets.\u201d Despite this, Deshouli\u00e8res is almost acquitted. Not content with that victory, however, he stands up in the courtroom and condemns the poor arguments of the prosecutor. Even his final execution, Richepin tells us, is original: he leans back so that the guillotine can slice his head rather than his neck.<\/p>\n

Here, the dandyist obsession with the freedom to fashion one\u2019s own identity is taken to the extreme. Every element of Deshouli\u00e8res’s identity is constructed for maximum effect. He is less a human being than an artistic rendering of one: a selfie in three dimensions.<\/p>\n

Such existence comes at a spiritual cost. Deshouli\u00e8res can commit to no meaningful course of action, because to be committed is to be predictable, and hence no longer free. He is incapable of love, or of any real emotion. In this, he echoes d\u2019Aurevilly, who included love in his list of things his ideal dandy should avoid: \u201cFor to love, even in the least lofty acceptation of the word\u2014to desire\u2014is always to depend, to be slave of one\u2019s desire. The arms that clasp you the most tenderly are still a chain.\u201d<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

For all their obsession with freedom, these dandies are wedded, at least, to their environment. Dandies exist in a particular urban context\u2014one in which a growing bourgeoisie accumulates the time to sit in caf\u00e9s and watch these dandies strut by, along with the ability to afford the kind of bespoke suits and tailored waistcoats d\u2019Aurevilly so adored. The possibility of being subsumed into an anonymous urban mass fills the dandy with terror, but that mass, with its disposable income and its penchant for reading the gossip column in newspapers, gives the dandy an audience to \u201ceffect.\u201d An 1886 newspaper article about d\u2019Aurevilly informs us that \u201chis costume is his hobby and, though he would prefer that only his talent should be talked about, the masses know him rather by this and his general reputation for eccentricity than by his writings, which are only appreciated by the literati.\u201d<\/p>\n

The dandy may live in horror of \u201cthe masses,\u201d seeking the original and the bespoke over the common or the factory-produced, but it\u2019s mass production that enables him to embrace artifice over reality. Technology at once threatens the dandy with anonymity and provides him with the tools to distinguish himself from \u201cthe rest.\u201d<\/p>\n

In J.\u2009K. Huysmans\u2019s 1884 novel, Against Nature<\/i>\u2014which owes a great debt to Baudelaire and d\u2019Aurevilly\u2014Jean des Esseintes, a dyspeptic aesthete, takes the project of self-creation to the extreme: he shuts himself up in a country estate in which everything is artificial and tailored to his liking, from the mechanical flowers to the jewel-encrusted tortoise. Artificiality, des Esseintes tells us, is the next stage of man\u2019s development.<\/p>\n

\n

Nature had had her day \u2026 By the disgusting sameness of her landscapes and skies, she had once for all wearied the considerate patience of aesthetes \u2026 What a monotonous storehouse of fields and trees! What a banal agency of mountains and seas! There is not one of her inventions, no matter how subtle or imposing it may be, which human genius cannot create; no Fontainebleau forest, no moonlight which a scenic setting flooded with electricity cannot produce \u2026 this eternal, driveling, old woman is no longer admired by true artists, and the moment has come to replace her by artifice.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Like the Romantics of the early nineteenth century, des Esseintes seeks to escape the uniformity and reproducibility of the modern age, desperately craving something original. But, unlike a Keats or a Shelley, he finds respite not in the power of nature, but rather in the potential of human intelligence: he escapes the overcrowded Paris technology has built by applying technology, appropriating the \u201chuman genius\u201d designed into a tool for the creation of his environment alone. In this, des Esseintes is not only of his time, but entirely of ours.<\/p>\n

The selfie, no less than d\u2019Aurevilly\u2019s collection of bejeweled walking sticks or des Esseintes\u2019s customized country estate, represents a thrilling possibility: that one can, with the help of technology, create his identity, triumph over nature, and \u201cproduce an effect\u201d while remaining at a safe remove behind his computer screen. Selfies are, in a way, a more egalitarian take on the dandy\u2019s notion of self-creation\u2014they\u2019ve made Baudelaire\u2019s snobbish \u201caristocratic superiority of the mind\u201d more widely accessible. And unlike Deshouli\u00e8res, who defined himself solely in opposition to a nebulous \u201cmass\u201d worthy of neither respect nor love, today\u2019s selfie artists are less aristocratic than democratic: the cultivated self, and the power to share that self publicly, is available to anyone with a camera and an Internet connection.<\/p>\n

Likewise, the relationship between performer and observer, dandy and people-watcher, is no longer as one-sided as that envisioned by d\u2019Aurevilly or Baudelaire. The possibility of a retweet, a \u201clike,\u201d or a reply allows for a degree of vulnerability that curtails the excessive impassivity of a Deshouli\u00e8res. Our self-presentation\u2014increasingly intersubjective\u2014becomes more of a self-offering.<\/p>\n

The idea of a democratized dandy might well have been d\u2019Aurevilly\u2019s worst nightmare. But every era gets the dandy it deserves. If Deshouli\u00e8res is the dandy of 1876, then Kim Kardashian\u2014surgically altered beyond Deshouli\u00e8res\u2019s most dizzying fantasies, taking a selfie, running it through various filters, posting it on Instagram, and receiving three thousand meticulously composed selfies in reply\u2014is the dandy of 2014. In the hands of the many, the act of self-creation becomes not a narcissistic act of superiority, but a human expression of all we have in common. We all have the capacity to tell our own life stories, and we all fear that these stories will end up lost in the crowd.<\/p>\n

Tara Isabella Burton\u2019s work has appeared or is forthcoming at <\/em>National Geographic Traveler, the <\/em>Atlantic, the <\/em>Los Angeles Review of Books,<\/em> Guernica, and more. Her first novel, <\/em>The Snake Eaters, was recently longlisted for the 2013 Mslexia Novel Competition. She is currently working on a doctorate in French decadence and theology as a Clarendon Scholar at Trinity College, Oxford.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For the origins of the selfie, look to the dandy. When selfie was crowned the Word of 2013 by the Oxford Dictionaries, the media reaction ranged from apocalyptic to cautiously optimistic. For the Calgary Herald\u2019s Andrew Cohen, \u201cselfie culture\u201d represents the \u201ccritical mass\u201d of selfish entitlement; for Navneet Alang in the Globe and Mail, selfies […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":650,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[2654,12934,12935,1103,12707],"class_list":["post-67022","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-charles-baudelaire","tag-dandies","tag-jules-amedee-barbey-daurevilly","tag-kim-kardashian","tag-selfies"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nKeep Smiling by Tara Isabella Burton<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"February 20, 2014 \u2013 For the origins of the selfie, look to the dandy. 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