Allegories of Branding How to Successfully Fail Charles Bukowski

The American author Charles Bukowski (1904-1984) has become an authorial brand – that is, a complex symbol that projects a set of associations onto commercial products. This brand emerges from interactions between the fields of creation, production, and reception. Bukowski himself fuelled this interaction by constructing a recognizable, albeit contradictory public figure: that of the successful loser. Focusing on the Dutch reception of Bukowski as a case study, I demonstrate how cultural producers and suppliers capitalize on this figure, invoking it to suggest that their products allow consumers to partake in the Bukowskian lifestyle. However, the contradictions inherent in the persona of the successful loser subvert this process. As a consequence, instances of Bukowskian branding appear as normative failures, as their very success belies the values associated with the author.