IN AN INTERVIEW WITH ULF PORSCHARDT IN 2009, Swiss Pop author Christian Kracht describes his debut novel Faserland as a “Mise-enabyme,” a “Spiegelkabinett” (hall of mirrors): a text that folds in on and echoes itself. Kracht’s self-assessment—itself a kind of mise en abyme—can refer to a variety of aspects of his work. Faserland reflects and refracts contemporary definitions of Pop, and its narrative also relies heavily on a network of intertextual pop-cultural references, from fashion to television and music. In this essay I will examine another set of references reflected throughout Faserland: a gendered symbolic system in which a masculine identity struggle is pitted against a feminine threat.

In Faserland Kracht uses gender “trouble” metaphorically to support a critique of contemporary culture. In service to this critical goal, Kracht’s male narrator comes to represent the victim who seeks a well-ordered and impenetrable defense against the superficiality, hypocrisy, and decadence of a society in decline; Kracht’s women, then, are allied with the very threat of self-dissolution this society poses, and all that is coded as feminine (or effeminate) comes to represent the seductive and threatening side of contemporary Western culture. In this way Faserland serves as a safe haven for time-worn “male fantasies” of gender difference and identity formation that continue to lurk within our cultural currency and ultimately prove destructive for men and women alike.

Faserland is the first-person account of an affluent young man as he wanders aimlessly from Sylt to Zurich, stumbling through a hedonistic social scene and failing to connect with anyone, before apparently committing suicide by drowning. Faserland caused a stir in the German feuilletons because of its apparent superficiality. Adopting the Pop movement’s focus on “low” and youth culture that had been established since the 1960s, Kracht depicted a stylish world in which fun was the only real goal and identity was dictated by brand names and glossy magazine copy. His narrator doesn’t know who Walter von der Vogelweide is, but he does know the name of the composer who wrote the theme song for Twin Peaks, and he judges character based on a person’s clothing choices (blue Barbour jacket or green? Brooks Brothers or Ralph Lauren?).