Dandyism and Homosexuality in the Novels of Christian Kracht

Abstract

Christian Kracht's best-selling novel Faserland (1995) was one of the most successful and controversial literary debuts of the 1990s. This text, which describes the journey of rich young man through late twentieth-century Germany as series of parties and drug experiences, has been regarded by many as novel of Affirmation statt Kritik (Freund 12), exalting self-indulgent contemporary consumer lifestyle. Kracht, the son of senior executive in the Axel Springer Verlag and, at the time of the book's publication, writer for the lifestyle magazine Tempo, was accused of producing the literary equivalent of the contents of Hochglanz-Magazin (Piepgras). Such was the offence caused by the novel, one reviewer reports, that some salespeople even refused to market it to bookshops (Gross, Aus dem Leben). In the few intervening years, both reviewers and academic critics have ventured to correct this initial reception of das am meisten misverstandene Buch der neunziger Jahre (Ein taumelt), pointing out that the novel is, in fact, an example of Rollenprosa, in which the reader is invited to adopt critical distance to the perspective of the first-person narrator (Biendarra 115). These reappraisals of Kracht's novel do not, however, address the prominent theme of homosexuality in the text. This seems surprising, given that the narrator's fears of homosexual men and of being perceived as homosexual man are sometimes explicitly and, at other moments, implicitly the main forces driving his journey across Germany and thus the plot of the novel itself. Indeed, as the critic Moritz Basler has observed, the novel can be consistently read as Problemstudie uber ein verpastes Coming-out (113). On the other hand, reviewers and critics have recognized that one of the chief thematic concerns of the novel is the disorientation and loss of identity experienced by narrator whose primary means of identity construction is through style, that is to say through his particular mode of consumption in consumer society. In this respect, the narrator is referred to as Dandy with haltlose Subjektivitat (Gross, Gesellenstuck; see also Hutelin), who demonstrates a fetishist idolatry of status symbols and the continuous scanning of style codes, attitudes and taste in order to help [...] establish aesthetic distinction (Liesegang 264). However, the question of how the narrator's frequent encounters with gay men