Indian Dandy

Salient Feature #3: Aboriginal markers. In his Histoire Extraordinaire: Essay on a Dream of Baudelaire, Michel Butor points out that Poe's anti-Americanism, admired by Baudelaire, is deeply American. Notions of democracy, system, and reason are replaced by the sensibility of "Indian dandies" (131) whose knowledge is "encyclopaedic," attuned to "the primitive American substratum" (129). The Indian dandy is a flaneur of nature, capable of responding to it in toto rather than be "confined in the infinitely petty regions of specialization" (130). Such is the method of our primitive dandy, who leaves us with postmodern signs of the aboriginal without referent; s/he plays the primitive but is not content to remain "naturally" one (since s/he makes do with plasticated detritus as much as s/he does with bird feathers and string.) The signs left are not as subtle as the broken branch left by the trailblazer, but they come close, existing as they do at the margins of attention. Again note how a mere twist and knot of plastic holds us to an artistic address. We can only guess at the source of this specifically American creativity. For if we try to peg it too squarely, we fall into the trap that Poe warns against in "The Colloquy of Monos and Una":

Man, because he could not but acknowledge the majesty of nature, fell into childish exultation at his acquired and still-increasing dominion over her elements. Even while he stalked a God in his own fancy, an infantile imbecility came over him. As might be supposed from the origin of his disorder, he grew infected with system, and with abstraction. (610)

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