Tim Hofman, Celebrity/author: exploring literary celebrity, postures and identity

Within the Dutch public sphere it is difficult to avoid Tim Hofman (1988), as he is a multi-layered individual taking on the parts of for instance presenter, filmmaker, social critic, and writer. Since kicking off his career in the spotlight he has created and presented various TV shows for broadcaster BBNVARA, started problem-solving YouTube channel #BOOS, and initiated the political youth project Coalitie-Y and the documentary Terug naar je eige land (2018) which galvanized the new kinderpardon law. Additionally, he makes frequent appearances in the media when asked to share his thoughts and opinions about various issues, for example at television talkshow De Wereld Draait Door,but is also often a topic of discussion himself, such as when media wrote about the way his personally initiated Tweet concerning sexual abuse on commercial television show De Villa provoked its cancellation. One of the most recent additions to his personal repertoire, his second bundle of poetry titled Grappig Jammer, appeared in November 2019.

As he produces within the realms of life-writing and self-fashioning, private and public, off- and online, Hofman becomes intertwined with the roles of artistic author and celebrity.

In a traditional context, the author is an individual urged to write literary works based on their personal being, tcelebrated by the public and consequently gain an, often inescapable commercial, status of ‘celebrity author’. Considering the practice of Hofman, however, this process is reversed e is a -‘celebrity’ who later resorts to producing poetry and thus challenges the value of literature as well as the divide between private and public. Drawing from theoretical concepts including posture and the celebrity author to analyse his textual expressions, self-presentation, and incentives as occurring in a selection of content from Grappig Jammer (2019), Hofman’s social media, and a recent interview by Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant (2019) this paper aims to explore which tensions are manifested between Hofman’s presentation of posture and identity as ‘private’ author in the cultural field and as ‘public’ person in the media, and how do these affect the literary value of his poetic writings?

Back to top

Defining posture

The concept of posture, as proposed by Meizoz (2010), aids in defining the author’s position within the literary field through the way they consider their own background and oppose others. Posture is one of the components making up a writer’s ethos, their ‘‘(general) way of being’’ (p. 83), and is intertwined with so-called ‘sociopoetics’ which encompasses the author’s strategy in the field and the formal processes engaged in understanding their personal poetics.

Authorial posture marks out ones position in a singular way, as the status of author involves the advancement of a public self-image based on an identity created by self-assigned elements, such as a pseudonym. This new identity enables the author to express themselves with a persona or posture, for example as ‘elite’ or ‘down-to-earth’, which contrasts others in the field. Then, ‘‘the logic of a literary strategy […] is brought out through establishing a connection between the trajectory of an author and the various postures manifested in it’’ (Meizoz, 2010, p. 83).

Additionally, posture is a dual observation involving both discourse, the author’s textual self-image,  non-verbal behaviour, their public presentation of self. Self-presentation  an interactive process which is co-constructed by the author or auto-representer and various other mediators or hetero-presenters through whom the author is ‘being represented’, potentially altering the way the author wishes to represent themselves (Meizoz, 2010).

Back to top

Channelling the artistic author

Through Hofman’s reflection ‘‘It feels like I gave in my diary to the publisher. […] through this poetry bundle everything of me is suddenly an open book.’’ (Huigloot, 2019, para. 10), the 74-poem bundle can be considered an act of autobiographical life writing. According to Smith & Watson this is ‘‘writing of diverse kinds that takes a life as its subject’’, in which autobiography is ‘‘the story of one’s life written by himself’’ which ‘‘celebrates the autonomous individual and the universalizing life story’’ (2001, p. 1).

They further identify autobiography as a form of life narrative, which involves the author’s refraction of self-referential practices that engage past lived experiences in order to reflect on identity in the present. The life writer simultaneously adopts an external and internal point of view in confronting the publicly visible self, the social, historical achiever, the personal appearance, the social relationships and real attributes, and the self-experienced and self-felt from within (2001).

Furthermore, life writers take personal memories, sources like journals, and knowledge of historical moments as the primary archival source address readers in first person and persuade them of their version of an experience. Life writing is bound to an autobiographical pact, meaning that when the person who claims authorship of the narrative is recognized as the protagonist, the text is considered truthful, reflexive, or autobiographical regardless of fictional elements (Smith & Watson, 2001).

Revealing the intimate

The poems, of which the length ranges between two sentences and 3 pages, cover a wide variety of topics and discourses, each different in intention and narrating tone. The intimate pieces in which Hofman grasps and bares small pieces of his personal life vary from him dealing with the lack of sex with his partner (Onseks, p. 61) to feeling  friend dying of cancer (Een dode vriend, p. 29), and from expressing his feelings towards his best friend (Talisia, p. 54) to his past experiences with depression (Doodswens, p. 68) and fears:

Ang, anger, angst.

ik ben nergens bang voor
behalve dat er niemand meer is
om dat tegen te vertellen (Hofman, 2019, p. 69)

Fear, fearer, fearst.

I am not afraid of anything
except that there is no one left
to tell that to (translation)

In the above poem Hofman reflects on feelings concerning fear of loneliness, using the rhetoric of irony to explain how he, the author, lives without any fears  of being entirely alone. Generally, mental fears are not openly discussed and regarded taboo, so Hofman’s claim of not fearing anything can be considered brave and ‘masculine’ and initially succumbto this taboo but he ultimately challenges it byvulnerability through the wording.

The posture and image that come forward from such topics and poems are ones in which Hofman embraces the role of the literary artist presents ‘the real individual’, using the narrating ‘I’ as the subject of textual expressions to (re)present thoughts, emotions, and feelings about events and moments that shaped his own life and supposedly his identity. The vulnerable and open expressions about dealing with personal issues and the tapping into private topics in his artistic and literary narratives makes Hofman appear human, down-to-earth, and approachable. The use of literary techniques such as irony additionally provide accounts of wit and intelligence.

Using his life as the poems’ subject-matter and allowing the reader to access the private provides legitimacy, especially as Hofman can be considered a figure of authority and through publishing this content does not seem to value the judgment of readers enough to let it affect his publication. He even encourages readers to discuss such personal topics more openly themselves as the style of writing and use of ‘I’, in which Hofman remains identifiable as the author and initial narrator, creates a certain relatability for those who have dealt with or are struggling with the same issues as they can interpret the ‘I’ and protagonist of the poems from a personal perspective.

Addressing the public

A type of poem that iverges from the intimate can be distinguished as these involve a personal reflection or comment on specific cultural, societal, and political constructs and issues, varying from generational differences (Slotpleidooi versie 4, p. 86) to intersectionality (Gezonde witte cis-man zkt. identiteit, p. 24), and from sexual abuse (VER/KRACHT, p. 40) to political comments (HomEO en Julia, p. 72).

Niqaab

‘Dat het je zo leuk staat,
dat patriarchaat.’ (Hofman, 2019, p. 43)

Niqab

‘suits you so nicely
that patriarchy.’ (translation)

This poem involves a reflection on religious racism in the male-dominated social sphere, adopting a socially critical discourse that supposedly represents Hofman’s. Stylistically the piece is presented as a quote, implying it is a saying he has heard from members within society. Further adopting sarcasm Hofman implies there is a personal stance and judgment involved against those expressing such discourse.

Even though these poems also originated in Hofman’s own mind, the initial ‘intimate’ posture shifts  to specific issues that are not directly about his personal life or effects on him as an individual, reducing the image of the personal ‘I’ of the author as  personal poems. In this, Hofman plays with the private versus public tension and presents the public discourse he supposedly stands for by referring to actual events that, despite their potential inclusion of fictional representations, such as in ‘Loyale gezinsman’ (p. 14) which mentions a son that he does not have, convey a specific message.

With these poems Hofman positions himself both as a creative artist and as a critic opposing specific social and hierarchies, who, again, appears not to fear others’ judgments of his personally based public opinions. This ‘free’ strategy combined with his authorial position in society and the creative affordances of poetry allow him to be more direct and critical about culturally sensitive topics than if he were subject to mediation. Furthermore, with such writing Hofman arouses debates on what it means to be a citizen of specific cultures, what socially accepted behaviour entails, how societies should co-exist, what freedom of expression conveys, and what cultural authority is. , such poems involve relationability with those readers who share or recognise situations .

Back to top

Challenging the celebrity

Self-fashioning involves the way an author creates a public identity that opposes the personal, which is expressed through their literary functions, behaviour, and work, and encompassing of social norms for public roles as well as more general behavioural norms and cultural structures (Greenblatt, 1980).

Further, Moran defines ‘literary celebrity’  as ‘‘the product of a complex negotiation between cultural producers and audiences’’ that spreads dominant and resistant cultural meanings and kindles discussions about ‘‘the relationship between cultural authority and exchange value in capitalist societies’’ (2000, p. 3). In the literary marketplace celebrities have to compete for popularity, commercial success, cultural authority, and the legitimacy that characterizes specific societal discourses (Moran, 2000).

Authorship and celebrity become intertwined as on the one hand, the author is celebrated for reformulating authorship, adopting it in discussing conflicting social values, and engaging with artistic commerciality in which they emphasize creativity or the greater good, and on the other hand capitalist society uses the individual as cultural signifier, denying the author function and de-subjectifying their writing (Moran, 2000).

The author's persona then becomes an inseparable combination of self-creation and external media invention, whereby they are promoted through their story, mediagenic profile, or discourse and provided legitimacy beyond the ‘I’. The author is both controlled by and complicit in the media’s presentation of their persona and can choose to revel in their superficially constructed image or  explore authorships’ inescapability by locating a ‘private’ self beyond celebrity. Ultimately, the blurry interchange of discourses of private self-referentialism and public intellectual stardom provide an interconnection of the ‘real’ author and their mythicized image, which authors are produced by but also help produce (Moran, 2000).

Disclosing the author

A direct act of non-verbal self-presentation and referentialism occurs on the cover of Hofman's book. It introduces Hofman ‘the author’ beyond the text, as he is pictured sitting cross-legged on a wooden table, wearing a plain black t-shirt that reveals his tattooed arms, white sneakers, a nonchalant expression, and a relaxed bodily attitude. A dark grey tone provides a solid background for the contrasting white and pink letters which respectively spell out his name and the book title in capital letters. The word ‘gedichten’, or ‘poems’, is placed below the title in a smaller font, as to give it less emphasis.

This image legitimizes Hofman as the real author of the book’s content, disregarding Barthes' notion that the author is hidden behind their work and the literary space is one ‘‘where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes’’ (1967, para. 1). According to Barthes, the author is "dead," as he is a mere scriptor who combines what has already been written, leaving the reader to collect and interpret the multiplicities of cultures and citations within a text and draw the text’s meaning and layers from their personal context, experience, and culture (1967). The cover thus takes on a commercial element, as Hofman consciously chose to be pictured prominently, perhaps tempting those who recognise him from his other work to purchase the book.

Additionally, the narrative presented on the book conveys the message that the person pictured is how Hofman sees himself, and his body language reveals how he feels about the content of his poems: not extravagant or dramatic but basic and down-to-earth, further implying the photo’s setup involved a personal choice. It gives the impression that the ‘I’ presented is human and sincere, coinciding with the openness of his poems,  discussions of contemporary political and societal topics, and relatability. Ultimately, Hofman presents himself as creative artist as well as one who does not shy away from visibility and accepts some commerciality.

Privatizing the public

Instances of Hofman’s self-presentation and identity-expressions also occur on Instagram, a publicly accessible social medium enabling  celebrity aspect and involvement of media to intertwine with self-creation. One such instance which received a significant amount of media-attention involved a specific image posted by Hofman, whose username @debroervanroos (‘Roos’ brother’) refers to the self-assigned pseudonym that was also used in his first poetry bundle, captioned ‘televiziergala omw’. The photograph depicts  and his partner Lize Korpershoek outdoors, dressed up for an annual television awards show, the televisiergala, supposedly wearing outfits fit for the opposite gender as Hofman is wearing a ‘feminine’ jumpsuit, heels, a purse, and a pink scarf, whilst Korpershoek is dressed in an oversized ‘masculine’ suit and flipflops.

The image, which received thousands of likes and comments from online followers, sparked debates from several entertainment-oriented media as they stated in their digital stardom texts how with the photograph Hofman challenge gender roles. Making statements such as ‘‘the couple is known for thinking outside the box and will surely try to make a statement with their outfits’’ (Boulevard, 2019) and ‘‘[they] did not care about [the dress code] and break with normative gender roles’’ (Glamour, 2019) these media mythicized Hofman and used him as a cultural signifier as to what alternative societal norms and expressions should be according to them.

Hofman himself reflected on and deflected these media’s claims by saying to De Volkskrant ‘‘everywhere it said we wanted to break with normative gender roles, that I wanted to make a statement about masculinity […] but I just wore what I think is nice.’’ (Huigsloot, 2019, para. 2). With this statement, Hofman refuses to revel in the media’s construction of his persona and fame and attempts to escape their discourse by countering what they interpret the Instagram-image to be and making the public private again.

Ultimately however, even by simply wearing an outfit that is ‘his own taste’ Hofman is normalizing his stance towards and criticizes gendered fashion and the way this is manifested in social constructs, especially as later in the interview he stresses he is part of a generation of change and rethinking  expectations, saying ‘‘I know I shouldn’t care about the expectations of others. I can’t wear heels to the televizierringgala? Stop it man!’’ (Huigsloot, 2019, para. 32). Then, the photograph on Instagram  both a visual presentation of self and statements of personal and societal identity similar to the one expressed in  poems, which, to some extent, includes the celebrity value as implied by the media.

Acknowledging the stardom

Ik schijnheilig te zijn

applaus, applaus
zie me lekker gaan
’t gaat niet om de veren

applaus, applaus
ik heb het goed gedaan
en je mag me tutoyeren

applaus, applaus
nee, ’t gaat niet om m’n baan
kijk me geven om de wereld

applaus, applaus
staat de camera wel aan
ik ben echt een fijne kerel (Hofman, 2019, p. 81)

I  holy/hypocritical

applause, applause
look at me go
it’s not about the praise

applause, applause
I did it well
and you can thee and thou me

applause, applause
no, it’s not about my job
look at me caring about the world

applause, applause
is the camera switched on
I really am a pleasant guy (translation)

Reflecting on such publicly mediated fame in his ‘private’ literary work, the poem Ik schijnheilig te zijn is Hofman’s creative way of commenting on the fact he is a celebrity who is frequently glorified in the media. He describes himself as ‘schijn heilig’, or ‘supposedly holy’, but changes these words to mean ‘hypocritical’ by melting ‘schijn’ and ‘heilig’ into one, opting for sarcasm to express a feeling of being two-faced and to reflect on the inaccuracy of the saintly status assigned to him by media. With this, Hofman acknowledges the media’s presentation of his persona and even adopts it in his creative processes but, as with the Instagram-post, does not necessarily agree with it.

Expressing further awareness and dislike of his celebrity-status and the ‘applause, clicks, views, and likes’ that are inevitably part of his work Hofman stated ‘‘I want to be a serving hatch for our generation, solve problems. […] for me TV is more than just getting a pat on my glitter-jacketed-shoulder, descending down a show-staircase and collecting a few tonnes from the commercial broadcaster. That is not sneer to my colleagues, for me that doesn’t work.’’ (Huigsloot, 2019, para. 5), presenting a posture with which he positions himself in opposition of his colleagues in the public sphere who, according to him, are primarily interested in the fame, showbusiness, and financial benefits of stardom.

Back to top

Celebrity/author status

Even though a more extensive body of content both by and about Hofman exists, the above analysis has revealed how the postures presented by him as ‘private’ author and ‘public’ media-person are considerably intertwined, bending traditional tensions into novel ones and establishing a peculiar ‘genre’ of writing.

The main tension lies in the fact that Hofman is, above all, a media-person who operates in the public sphere and adopts ‘offline’ poetry, besides posts on social media and productions on other media, as a platform to express intimate feelings and experiences that shape his life and worldviews. Considering the content of the poems, emphasizing the socially critical pieces, brings forward the influence of this public identity and the prioritization of the public posture in his supposedly private writings as these address issues of ‘the greater good’ and incidentally address his role as a socially relevant celebrity. Additionally, the simultaneously personal posture brought forward in these poems corresponds with the ‘I’ perspective adopted by Hofman in his other performances.

Furthermore, as relevant to any celebrity author, the media’s interpretation of Hofman’s public posture and his particular response to this highlight an alteration in the media’s traditional influence in the writer’s persona, beyond their control. In fact, a tension is established through Hofman’s initial rejection of identity-negotiation with alternative parties and of the manner in which they frame his public performances as a heroic ‘celebrity’ as he makes a conscious effort to deny their characterizations and emphasize his individual personal posture.

Rejecting fame-oriented celebrity-culture and the media’s attempts to affect his being and performances Hofman stays true to the ‘I’ as presented under his terms  writing. For instance, the ‘real’, non-extravagant and sincere persona Hofman sets out comes forward both in the visual-based Instagram  in which he individually chose to wear a ‘non-conventional’ outfit and in poems such as Fear, fearer, fearst, turning the post into a personal poem that discusses both personal and societal issues.

Overall, through all types of content, on- and offline, Hofman mostly maintains a consistent persona and identity that he constructs deliberately in which the media-person in the public sphere is consistent with the private writer, visible through the expression of specific mindsets in both contexts.

In this, it can be argued that the prioritization of the media-person and its intertwining with personal views, when considering the poems in the context of a literary genre, affects the literary value of Hofman’s writings. On the one hand, considering the relatability and content of the non-individual-life-experience pieces, the poems carry literary value as Hofman broadly discusses issues that are relevant for a broader public or ‘the greater good’, on the other however, the writings as presented on ‘just’ another trendy platform for thought-sharing lack potential to be literary artistic masterpieces as they contain views similar to for instance Hofman’s show #BOOS or his tweet concerning tv-show The Villa with which he criticized sexual abuse on television, and could therefore just as well be posts on social media.

Back to top

References

Barthes, R. (1967). The Death of the Author. UbuWeb.

#BOOS. (n.d.). Youtube.

BNNVARA (2020). Tim Hofman - De Wereld Draait Door - BNNVARA. BNNVARA.

Coalitie Y. (2019). Home | Coalitie Y. Coalitie Y.

Greenblatt, S. (1980). Introduction. In Renaissance self-fashioning. From More to Shakespeare. (pp.1-10). Chicago/London.

Hofman, T. (2019). Grappig jammer. Amsterdam: Meulenhoff.

Hofman, T. (2019). Tim Hofman on Instagram: “televiziergala omw.” Instagram.

Hofman, T. (2018). #BOOS docu: Terug naar je eige land. YouTube.

Huigsloot, N. (2019). Schrijver en presentator Tim Hofman: ‘Ik kan nu niks meer bedenken wat ik niet durf’. De Volkskrant.

Meizoz, J. (2010). Modern Posterities of Posture. In G. J. Dorleijn, R. Gruttemeier, & K. L. Altes (Eds.), Authorship Revisited: Conceptions of Authorship around 1900 and 2000 (Groningen Studies in Cultural Change) (pp. 81–93). Leuven: Peeters Publishers.

Moran, J. (2000). Star Authors: Literary Celebrity in America. Pluto Press.

Redactie Glamour. (2019). De geniale outfits van Tim Hofman en Lize Korpershoek tijdens Televizier-Ring Gala moet je zien. Glamour.

Redactie RTL Boulevard. (2019). Tim Hofman en vriendin draaien de rollen om. RTL Boulevard.

Smith, S., & Watson, J. (2001). Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Minessota: University of Minnesota Press.

Tim Hofman (@debroervanroos) • Instagram photos and videos. (n.d.). Instagram.

Segers, M. (2019). De Villa per direct van de buis na seksueel grensoverschrijdend gedrag. De Gelderlander.

Back to top