7: The Postwar Period, 1940–

I. From the Hunger Winter to the First Morning, 1940–1960

Ton Anbeek

Stone and Clouds

A young housepainter in a small provincial town in Flanders labors doggedly at his great novel. He has written more than four hundred pages and still there seems to be no end in sight. His wife, practical by nature, decides to intervene. She has read in the newspaper about a new prize for a book, a novel. So she sends her husband off to run some errands and takes advantage of his absence by writing at the bottom of the last full page, “And so on and so on.” She asks a girl in the neighborhood “who was learning to drum at a typewriter” to type out the text. Sure enough, the thick typescript wins the award. Louis Paul Boon (1912–79) receives the coveted literary prize for his debut, The Suburb Grows (De voorstad groeit). The book appears in print in 1943.

The factual truthfulness of the anecdote is less important than the story itself. At the very least it demonstrates Boon’s keenness to pass himself off as an “ordinary” writer, one who did not give a damn about literary pretensions of any kind. No muse, no divine inspiration, only a man who never stopped working. His book had been written at the kitchen table and completed by his wife, so it was she who should really be given the prize.

The Suburb Grows introduced a prose writer whose readers would be taken aback by the sheer epic force of his work. The reviewers voiced certain objections, of course, complaining that the structure was chaotic and the content excessively pessimistic. The accusation that he wallowed in misery would haunt Boon for the rest of his writing career, but the book signified a sharp break with prewar traditions. The composition was highly unusual. Unlike a traditional novel it features not one central protagonist but a series of characters, some of whom appear only briefly, while others are followed over a long period. If there is a central character in The Suburb Grows, it is the suburb itself. True, some earlier novels, notably those of Gerard Walschap, had featured a panoramic approach of this kind, but even in Walschap’s most famous novel, Houtekiet (1939), in which a village community figures large in the background, the main focus is on a single person or a small group of characters.

Boon himself pointed to John Dos Passos and Céline as sources of inspiration. It was probably Dos Passos who gave him the idea of using a kaleidoscopic perspective, such that the broad social canvas is more important than any in-depth psychological exploration of specific characters. The French author Céline reinforced Boon’s somber view of humanity. The Suburb Grows is a monument to pessimism, its message stark and clear: “Life is a wheel, and as it turns, the things you see are always new and always exactly the same.” Or, in another passage, “. . . have children, grow old, and die. Those who want a different life end up in prison or the madhouse.” There are quite a few people in The Suburb Grows who want a different life: artists with grandiose dreams, social reformers with high expectations; all are crushed by the same great wheel, which keeps on turning, regardless.

Louis Paul Boon, c. 1977. Antwerp: AMVC House of Literature.

Although Boon’s first novel holds out little hope of a better world, it does condemn the misery people inflict on each other. His entire oeuvre would address these two issues: although he remained deeply pessimistic, convinced things would never improve, he was also a moralist and a socialist, unable to resign himself to a situation in which a few had everything while most had nothing. In his third novel, Forgotten Street (Vergeten straat, 1944), he describes a curious experiment. Accidental circumstances cause a residential district to become completely cut off from the outside world. An anarchic community arises spontaneously, giving residents a brief illusion of freedom. But here, too, the ineradicable selfishness of humankind puts an end to the dream. As ever with Boon, greed and lechery operate as disruptive forces. Like The Suburb Grows, the book features a multitude of characters, presenting a panorama of human possibilities and, more especially, weaknesses.

Boon’s My Little War (Mijn kleine oorlog, 1947), a collection of anecdotes based on small newspaper items, is no less original. Taken as a whole, the stories reveal how ordinary people experienced the war, in particular life under occupation in small-town Flanders. Fear and hunger, collaboration serious or trivial versus quiet heroism, everything is seen through the eyes of a narrator who observes with astonishment how individuals behave in periods of extreme stress. The main character — Louis, or the author — does not make his presence felt to any great extent, although reading between the lines it is clear that his sympathies lie with the Communist resistance. This explains why the first edition of the book ended with the cry “Kick the people until they get a conscience.” The author added a new ending to later editions, closing the book with a sigh: “What’s the point of it all?” Boon the pessimist had defeated Boon the socialist.

In 1953 Boon published the book now regarded as his masterpiece, Chapel Road (De Kapellekensbaan). It took him ten years to write. A large and complex novel, it involves several interwoven storylines, including a historical strand in which he describes the rise of socialism. Boon chose to focus not on a socially committed leading figure (as he was later to do in Pieter Daens, 1971) but on a middle-class girl who looks down on socialist riffraff and prefers to associate with gentlemen of standing, who exploit and then abandon her. There is also a story with a contemporary setting, in which we encounter the author’s double, Boontje. He and his friends are forced to conclude that socialism has entered a sad decline; the old élan has been smothered by party discipline and cultural conservatism — the party opposes such modernist inventions as abstract art and “bourgeois” nihilist literature. The ex-Communist Boon has clearly been left with no illusions about a socialist utopia: What stance remains for a person refusing to conform to any party or doctrine? This dilemma is further explored in a third strand to the book, which tells the medieval story of Reynard the fox. Boon sees Reynard as a cunning non-conformist who curries favor with the upper classes in order to cheat them. Combative anarchism is the last resort of the vulnerable loner. Boon lays out this vision in a book that overwhelms the reader with its richness and multiplicity of voices.

Boon’s work breathed fresh life into Flemish — and, more broadly, Dutch — literature in different ways. First of all it introduced narrative techniques capable of evoking not just an individual life but the life of a community or an entire era. In this sense he expanded even further the broad vision of writers like Walschap. Second, he expressed, with devastating force, a deep social pessimism that had until then been merely a marginal presence in the Flemish novel. His fictional world negated the life-affirming attitudes in such prewar novels as Timmermans’s Pallieter and Walschap’s Houtekiet. Nor surprisingly, Boon’s nihilism met with a hostile response in the largely conservative Catholic Flanders and made him a hugely controversial figure. Finally, Boon’s work marked a decisive shift from the countryside to the city. His world is one of industrialization, exploitation, and social unrest. Just how much this setting differs from that of earlier Flemish prose becomes very clear when his work is compared with a novel published in 1952, a book that could be said to sum up all the major obsessions of the Flemish novel of the interwar years. Like Chapel Road, Wrestling with the Angel (Het gevecht met de engel) by Herman Teirlinck (1879–1967), by then the grand old man of Flemish letters, was a monumental work that presented a broad social and historical panorama.

Teirlinck’s novel pits two hostile groups against one another: the French-speaking aristocracy and the Dutch-speaking population. Theirs is an animosity all too familiar from prewar Flemish novels, but here Teirlinck seems to bring it to a head. He describes a Flemish family of more or less feral humans in a state of nature, a law unto themselves. In this sense they resemble Houtekiet. At the other extreme we meet the lord of the manor and his wife, specimens of degenerate nobility. Teirlinck neglects no opportunity to describe his ruling-class characters at their most decadent; the lady of the house, for example, indulges in sadomasochistic games with her maid. The narrator’s sympathies clearly lie with the uncivilized characters. A few years later Teirlinck would revisit the topic with a deft portrait of a decadent life in his novel The Man in the Mirror (Zelfportret of het galgemaal, 1955), in which an egocentric protagonist looks back on his cowardly life.

In Wrestling with the Angel the familiar contrast between blue-blood degeneracy and raw Flemish life-affirmation is taken to almost absurd extremes. In this sense the book provides a summary of fifty years of Heimat literature. By the time of its publication, however, the world around it had already moved on. Boon had published his urban novels and two years earlier, in 1950, a novel had appeared by a young man who was to play a unique role in Flemish literature: Hugo Claus (1929–2008).

The Duck Hunt (De Metsiers, 1950), Claus’s first book, has the traditional rural setting, but he certainly does not describe the Metsiers, the farming family at the center of the book, in traditional vitalist terms. They are an eccentric lot living quite literally at the margins of society. Their isolation is broken by the arrival, at the end of the war, of American soldiers, two of whom are billeted at the farm. In the ensuing tragedy, described with ingenuity and to great effect, nothing remains of the joyful religiosity professed by Timmermans before the war. The central characters want no truck with religion; the one son who does have faith is left alone with his doubts at the end of the book.

In a series of short chapters The Duck Hunt evokes the inner life of each character in turn, a technique borrowed from William Faulkner. The retarded Bennie is Claus’s version of Benjy in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929). Given that both Boon and Claus borrowed techniques from American literature, Dos Passos and Faulkner respectively, it could almost be said that the billeting of American soldiers at the Metsiers farm is symbolic of developments in the new Flemish prose in the wake of the Second World War. This does not mean that everything in Claus’s work is borrowed. The presumption of influence is always a matter of recognition and attribution. The figure of Bennie, for example, the retarded boy in The Duck Hunt who represents a purity lost by the adults who have adjusted to the realities of life, returns time and again in Claus’s work.

In his second novel, The Dog Days (De hondsdagen, 1952), purity is embodied in the young girl Bea, the subject of the protagonist’s quest. As soon as she begins to behave too much like an adult he leaves her, thereby saying goodbye to his own youth. It is no accident that she is called Bea; Claus repeatedly alludes to Dante and his Beatrice. In this novel he introduces something that will become a constant in his work: a perpetual intertextual game with older literary sources, including Greek myths and, in a more general sense, the vegetation myths described by J. G. Frazer in his study The Golden Bough (1890–1915). Another important influence emerged in The Dog Days, that of existentialism. It declares itself in sentences like, “Who will ever hear this game, this game of goose, that I regard as a game but that others, those lumps of meat on two legs who surround me and whom I mimic and apparently have to mimic in order to exist, will regard as a tragic dilemma?” On another page the “lumps of meat on two legs” are described as the “collections of arteries, nerves, small bellies, small heads, that become big bellies, big heads and each in their own time split open and eventually stick together.”

In the prose of the period such passages abound. The 1950s were not a cheerful time in Flemish literature — or indeed in Dutch literature more generally, as we shall see. Take for example the first novel by Ward Ruyslinck (1929–), The Depraved Sleepers (De ontaarde slapers, 1957), in which a married couple live out their lives in total apathy. The husband, a pathological liar, uses every possible means to avoid work. The wife, traumatized by the war, expects military conflict to erupt again at any moment. When she sees signs that it has begun, with her husband apparently the first victim, she commits suicide. This depressing story is told in sober, lucid prose.

The same is true of The White Wall (De witte muur) by Maurice D’haese (1919–81), which also appeared in 1957. It deals with the confessions of a murderer, written in his cell. Again we encounter a protagonist who simply lets life wash over him, and once more a shocking picture of human existence emerges. The style fits the character’s somber vision: “The gray, sick morning crept slowly and thickly over the roofs and slid like a cold, slimy reptile in through the window, until the sun stood big and hateful on the red, gleaming skyline of the woods.” At the end of the confession we learn that the main character has shot a man dead, “just like that.” The fact that the victim is of North African origin brings the book even closer to its model, The Outsider (L’étranger, 1942) by Albert Camus, in which the anti-hero commits a murder “because of the sun.”

D’haese’s novel reads like an existentialist catechism, at least for existentialism’s early, non-political, phase. While the plot derives from Camus, the viscous style is reminiscent of Jean-Paul Sartre. Contemporary French literature had a profound effect on the young Flemish writers of the immediate postwar era. Sartre and Camus showed them a world they recognized all too well, a world both pointless and disgusting. In an author with such a rich imagination as Claus this was a passing phase, and the same can be said of Ruyslinck, whose many subsequent books would focus on the lonely struggle of the individual against the collective. Nevertheless, the novels of the 1950s display a surprising similarity of theme. In an absurd world, people appear as “lumps of meat” (Claus) or “filthy, useless animals” (D’haese); life is “a book of which one would read the first chapter attentively before slamming it shut, knowing what would happen in subsequent chapters, knowing that all books were like this” (D’haese). For that matter, this last description could apply to all these novels of the absurd.

The most original work of this type is a novel by Jan Walravens (1920–65) with the characteristic title Negative (Negatief, 1958). Again it is a novel in which all kinds of awful things happen, and the protagonist is a marginal figure, in this case a kleptomaniac who has committed two murders as well as several other abhorrent acts, such as giving a child a razor blade to play with. His unhappy childhood — he was beaten by his parents, moved between children’s homes, and so on — is supposed to explain his extreme malevolence. The book’s originality lies in the way the unsavory anti-hero is confronted with an unexpected insight at the end, when his opposite number asks: Does not the negative always assume the positive? “And how could that shadow exist unless there was an object that, within light, casts a shadow? That object, the sun, the positive, is present everywhere, is presumed anywhere where there is a shadow, a darkness, or a negation.” The main character has no defense against this intelligent argument; in fact he feels defeated, although he clings to the idea that “A failure like mine is almost a success.” Negative employs all the clichés of the period but ultimately turns them on their heads. Walravens had the talent to grow into a major novelist, but he died young; he was one of the key figures of postwar Flemish literature, and later in this chapter we will look at his role in defending the new poetry.

Each of these writers illustrates the extent to which prose emerging after the Second World War differs from that of the interwar period. There are no longer any life-sized characters like Houtekiet. Instead, grubby marginal figures observe a human society in which they no longer wish to participate. Vitality has been replaced by revulsion.

Ivo Michiels (1923–) is a novelist who, like Claus, passed through an existentialist phase before going on to carve out a path of his own. His development is typical of many young Flemish writers of the time. Once a good Catholic and a conservative reviewer, he became a prophet of the new take on life. The experience of war had destroyed his old ideals, as he describes with great clarity in his early coming-of-age novel, The Crusade of the Young (Kruistocht der jongelingen, 1951). His first major work of fiction, The Parting (Het afscheid, 1957), echoes several other existentialist books of the 1950s. The main character finds himself in a situation fully deserving of the epithet absurd. Every morning he has to report to a ship about to leave on a secret mission, but his departure date keeps being postponed. Time and again he has to say goodbye to his family as if setting out on a long journey. His past, dominated by war and death, is sketched in flashbacks. The book’s atmosphere is heavy with fear and uncertainty. The only person who manages to maintain some dignity in these distressing circumstances is the protagonist’s wife. She represents a positive factor, if a very small one, in an otherwise relentlessly existentialist novel.

The Parting contains various stylistically interesting passages that foreshadow the author’s later work. Michiels was to emerge as an experimental prose writer without equal, as demonstrated by his next novel, Book Alpha (Het boek alfa, 1963). This work marks the start of a period in which experimentalism would flourish throughout Flemish prose. For this reason alone, Book Alpha deserves to be assigned a key position in the history of Flemish literature. This is not to say there was no experimentation before 1963. Boon’s Chapel Road, with its ingeniously interwoven storylines, was certainly no traditional novel, and the same goes for Claus’s The Dog Days, with its clever alternation between past and present. But at the very least Michiels reinforced and redirected a tendency to experiment with the novel as a form.

Despair, disgust, the shattering of the ego — in many West European literatures the Second World War seems to have left a desolate scene. Interestingly, there was also a countermovement in Flemish prose in the magic realism of Johan Daisne (1912–78) and Hubert Lampo (1920–2006). Daisne published his first novel, The Staircase of Stone and Clouds (De trap van steen en wolken), in 1942, long before the war ended. The title is programmatic: life consists not only of hard reality (stone) but equally of imagination and dreams (clouds). Two stories, one quasi-realistic, the other more like a fantasy, are interwoven to such an extent that ultimately the reader cannot tell what is “real” and what is not. Many years later the novel would be recognized as an early example of postmodernism; Daisne himself used the term “magical realism,” a symbiosis of dream and reality.

He gave convincing form to his artistic creed in The Train of Inertia (De trein der traagheid, 1950). A man sitting in a train on his way home finds himself, after an unscheduled stop, in the borderland between life and death along with several fellow passengers. At an inn, where an unfamiliar language is spoken, he encounters a beautiful, enigmatic woman. Each of his fellow travelers “recognizes” her in a different way. Eventually the main character wakes up in hospital: he seems to have survived a train crash. Daisne elaborates upon this strange fact with great lucidity and in the process his narrator clearly defines his beliefs: “In my own way, . . . I clung then, as I do now, to life, to the delightful significance of this reality.” The phrase “the delightful significance of this reality” is unique in a period dominated by the existentialist prose of despair and disgust. The magic realist embraces life, because for him it consists not merely of raw reality but just as much of magic and mystery.

In the most famous novel by Daisne’s fellow magical realist Hubert Lampo, The Coming of Joachim Stiller (De komst van Joachim Stiller, 1960), the protagonist receives a letter from the past. The atmosphere is filled with a sense of apocalypse. His contact with the sender of the letter, a certain Joachim Stiller, intensifies, and it seems they will finally meet, but at the crucial moment Stiller is run over: he lies in the road as if crucified. The Christian symbolism is reinforced three days later when the body has apparently vanished. The book explores the interference of the supernatural in earthly affairs, a phenomenon both frightening and comforting. Lampo further developed his theory of magical realism in later years, drawing on Carl Jung. His novels were appreciated by a wide range of readers, who clearly valued Lampo’s worldview more highly than the depressive prose of the existentialists. Lampo chose a traditional form for his novels, making them a good deal more accessible, in spite of their magical elements, than the work of experimental writers like Ivo Michiels. Literary criticism became increasingly hostile to magical realism and dismissed it as cheap hocus pocus, but readers remained loyal to Lampo for many years.

Lessons of the Hunger Winter

Our survey of modern Flemish prose began with Boon’s novel The Suburb Grows, published in 1943. People in Holland often find its year of publication surprising. How could a novel with such a pessimistic tenor, a book so diametrically opposed to Nazi propaganda in all its forms, have been published in the middle of the war, in a country living under occupation?

The riddle is easily solved. Occupied Belgium was run by a military regime, which left room for a degree of cultural freedom. In the Netherlands the Nazis established an ideologically motivated civilian government that tried from the outset to reform Dutch society in a spirit of National Socialism. As early as August 1940 it was announced that no printed texts could be distributed without the prior approval of the occupying regime. By the end of the year libraries were forbidden to lend out books with anti-German content. Most important of all was the establishment in November 1941 of the so-called Chamber of Culture (Kultuurkamer). Anyone who declined to join the Kultuurkamer was banned from exhibiting art or publishing literary work. In other words, after 1941 normal cultural activity became impossible. Anyone unwilling to comply with Nazi demands and who wanted to publish had to do so clandestinely. In the Netherlands a book like The Suburb Grows could never have been published during the war, let alone have won a prize.

There were other differences, too, between Dutch and Belgian wartime circumstances. The German invasion of May 1940 had come as a greater shock to the Dutch than to those Europeans, including the Belgians, who had been affected by the First World War. Many Dutch people believed, or hoped, that their country would be able to maintain its neutrality in the current conflict as it had in the last. This attitude, now considered naive, is quite understandable. The Netherlands had seen no enemy troops on its native soil since the days of Napoleon. Apart from some minor unrest over the border in Belgium around 1830 and various colonial conflicts, the country had been spared any kind of military confrontation. This period of tranquil detachment came to an abrupt end on 10 May 1940. The experience of occupation was completely new to the Dutch, in contrast to the Belgians who had seen their country turned into a European battlefield by foreign powers in 1914–18.

Another factor was that the Second World War lasted longer in the Netherlands, across most of its territory, than in Belgium. By the autumn of 1944, Belgium and the southern part of the Netherlands had been liberated, but after the Allies lost the Battle of Arnhem in September of that year, the region of the Netherlands north of the Rhine remained under German occupation for another nine months. The winter of 1944–45 was particularly harsh and brought terrible suffering to the urban population. A lack of food and fuel forced city dwellers out into the countryside to exchange any valuables they had for potatoes. Death by malnutrition was widespread; exhaustion and cold finished off those weakened by starvation. The state of utter desolation brought about by what became known as the “hunger winter” was to make a profound impression on the young writers who would shape Dutch literature after the war.

When the country was finally liberated in its entirety in May 1945, every effort was needed to enable normal life to resume. The few voices calling for radical political and economic reform elicited little response. Straitened circumstances did not encourage revolutionary change. In political terms the country that rose again after 1945 was almost identical to that of the prewar years; the separate ideological currents or “pillars” that dominated political and social life were exactly like those prior to 1940. It seems that distressing living conditions drove individuals to seek support within their own ideological pillar.

At first the literary life of the nation presented a rather similar picture. Despite calls for “renewal” there were no serious attempts to define what the new literature should look like. At most there was agreement on the importance of an author’s “personality,” on the rejection of purely aesthetic art and the glorification of form in favor of social commitment, and on the need for a broadly international outlook. All these requirements clearly reflected the program of the prewar Forum writers.

Shortly after the liberation, therefore, Dutch literature found itself in a paradoxical situation. In theory there was plenty of room for reform and renewal. After all, three of the leading literary figures of the interwar years had not survived May 1940: Hendrik Marsman had drowned, Edgar du Perron had died of a heart attack, and Menno ter Braak had committed suicide. Dutch literature had been decapitated, but as a result writers turned more than ever to the work of Ter Braak and Du Perron, authors who had vigorously opposed the Nazis. The Forum duo of Ter Braak and Du Perron overshadowed literary production in the early postwar years. Only very gradually did a handful of writers manage to wrestle free of their influence.

It would be wrong to conclude that these years were devoid of significant novels. In 1948 an author of the older generation, Simon Vestdijk, published Pastorale 1943, which paints a sobering picture of a resistance group in rural Holland. Three times they try to kill a pharmacist suspected of treachery. The failure of the first two attempts is described in comical detail, yet the most disturbing aspect is that the pharmacist is innocent of the crime for which he is eventually killed, as the reader is aware early on.

Vestdijk appears to have precious little respect for the resistance. Here is the protagonist thinking about a fellow resistance fighter: “He even asked himself whether, if the little man had been born in Germany, or in the Netherlands under different circumstances, he might not have become an extremely useful member of the Nazi party, aggressive, vain, and intolerable as he was.” Being on the right or wrong side, it appears, is largely a matter of accidental circumstances. This attitude was highly unusual in the early postwar years, when a myth was being created of a nation that had resisted the Nazi occupation practically to a man. The image was reassuring, particularly for those who had cooperated to a greater or lesser extent with the Nazis — in other words practically the entire population. Not until the late 1990s did the Dutch acknowledge that only a tiny number of people had been active in the resistance. An equally small number had actively collaborated, out of personal conviction or for profit, while the large majority had accommodated the Nazi regime in one way or another. Remarkably, this unblinkered view of life under occupation is reflected in literature at a very early stage, not only in Vestdijk but also, for instance, in Willem Frederik Hermans (about whom more later), and in a book like Louis Paul Boon’s My Little War.

Pastorale 1943, published in 1948, was not reissued until 1966. Its publishing history is symptomatic of waning interest in the Second World War. Bookshops were selling off war books at half price, so publishers felt little inclination to put more on the market. Several factors may account for this repression of the collective memory of the war. Attempts to bring collaborators to justice had ended in a fiasco: too many had been arrested and locked up in camps on the basis of spurious allegations; the camps were run in ways which, to everyone’s dismay, strongly resembled those of the Nazis; and those who had profited most from collaboration, the contractors and industrialists, seemed to escape retribution. So many other pressing problems needed to be solved. The threat of a third world war, this time with atomic weapons, held the western world in a state of fear. Amid all this the Dutch had to face an additional catastrophe: after a bitter struggle their rich colonial possession, the Dutch East Indies, gained independence in 1949 and would henceforth be known as Indonesia. Many in Holland believed that the loss of the colony would mean lasting poverty. All these worries distracted attention from the past misery of the Nazi occupation.

It is telling that the most important novel to appear in these early postwar years, The Evenings (De avonden, 1947), barely mentions the war at all, even though the story takes place in December 1946. Written by G. K. van het Reve (1923–2006), who later shortened his name to Gerard Reve, it is a prime example of the literature of suppression. The story concerns the monotonous existence of a young office clerk still living at home with his parents. He spends his evenings with friends, indulging in cynical conversations: “‘Mind you, things like that enrich life,’ said Jaap. ‘The sick and malformed. If I see a wooden leg or an old woman using a stick with a rubber tip, or a humpback, it makes my day.’” It would be hard to think of a greater contrast than that between this novel and a book like Edgar du Perron’s Country of Origin (1935), in which intellectuals engage in sophisticated discussions of art, politics, and morality. The characters in The Evenings talk about baldness, disease, bodies, and funerals. Reve reduces the human being to its imperfect body.

Gerard Reve. Photograph: Eddy Posthuma de Boer.

The Evenings is certainly not a cheerful book, although its accumulation and repetition of trivialities sometimes has a comic effect. The fact that the story takes place in the last ten days of the year makes the atmosphere all the more dispiriting. The protagonist has several days off work, which only adds to the grayness and boredom. What shocked reviewers most of all was not so much what Reve described as what he omitted; indeed, the book is devoid of any higher values or ideals. Nearly all the critics connected this attitude with the war. The jury that selected The Evenings for an award stated in its report, “This is not just any old history of a human soul but a book that demonstrates what the times, which have destroyed all illusions, have done to today’s youth.” The central character was widely regarded as representing young people uprooted by the war. The Evenings became a milestone in the history of postwar Dutch prose. It meant a radical break with the heritage of Forum and a general assault on prewar intellectualism. In his debut Reve had set a tone that would dominate prose until at least 1960; from this point on, novels would feature disillusioned characters mumbling acid comments on their depressing environment.

Although some years older, Anna Blaman (1905–60) was regarded as belonging to this new group of writers known as the disillusioned realists. With her novel Solitary Adventure (Eenzaam avontuur, 1948) she shocked readers by daring to write openly about homosexuality, a subject that was still more or less taboo in the Netherlands. Reproached for presenting characters driven purely by unrestrained lust, she was referred to as a writer “who dragged love down.” In Solitary Adventure love is called “disguised loneliness,” a definition immediately followed by another unambiguous thought in the same vein: “Love, happiness, they seemed indeed like the brief incubation period of a terrible sickness, a sickness of the soul that leaves sufferers somber and grim, and hostile, and deranged.” Readers of the period could be forgiven for failing to see that Blaman’s message was far more subtle than these statements suggests.

W. F. Hermans in Groningen. Amsterdam, Maria Austria Institute, Photograph: Wim van der Linden.

The author who provoked most hostility at this time was undoubtedly the young Willem Frederik Hermans (1921–95). The war had been Hermans’s main formative influence. In May 1940 he faced a personal tragedy: his elder sister committed suicide along with her married lover. The episode shattered the apparent orderliness of bourgeois life. Chaos revealed itself, a chaos hidden in peacetime by convention and hypocrisy. The “hunger winter” completed Hermans’s education.

When that war ended, I was twenty-three. Well, I’d certainly been given a very peculiar view of the human spirit by that time, one that has never left me. . . . I mean, in a war like that you can’t walk around with a piece of dry bread in your pocket without having to keep both hands on it. Otherwise they’ll rip it off you! It’s amazing to see the criminal acts supposedly respectable people are capable of in a desperate situation like that.67

Hermans had difficulty finding a publisher for The Tears of the Acacias (De tranen der acacia’s). Chapters that had appeared in literary magazines were regarded as so offensive that at first no publisher was prepared to take the book on. It was not brought out until 1949, and reactions were indeed fierce. Readers objected to several overtly sexual passages and were no less upset by the way the resistance was portrayed — in Hermans’s view it seemed to have consisted mainly of braggarts and fantasists. His picture of life in occupied Amsterdam was as grim as it was shocking. For the protagonist the liberation is barely a salvation from tyranny at all; as he walks through a jubilant Amsterdam he makes some telling comparisons:

Outside there were brief bursts of sunshine. His mouth tightened with bitterness. Never, never would the misery end. Everything was as it had been. When something you had long expected finally happened, it was so colorless and tasteless that it seemed as if you had never dreamed of it for a second. One mess or another mess, it all came down to the same thing. The flags swirled before his eyes. It was as if the houses were hanging out their intestines, as if the city had finally gone mad. These colored woolen fabrics did not belong in the outdoor air. Nevertheless he looked at each flag in turn; not one of them was hanging straight; they twisted around their poles as if ashamed to fly for such a victory.

At the time readers saw The Tears of the Acacias primarily as a disillusioned novel about wartime life, with a cynical protagonist as the author’s mouthpiece. They failed to notice that Hermans’s ambitions went beyond mere demystification, since they took it for granted that a young author would write an angry book. Later commentators observed that Hermans was already addressing what would remain the key concern of his oeuvre: the world cannot be known. The central figure in The Tears of the Acacias is obsessed by the fact that he keeps hearing contradictory verdicts on the people around him. Is his best friend a hero or a “lousy traitor”? Is his sister working for the resistance or is she simply a “kraut-whore”? It seems impossible for him to discover the truth, which leads to bewildering uncertainty about his own identity. This problem dominated Hermans’s early work. The wartime background provided fertile territory, because in a country under occupation the ability to ascertain what others are thinking may be a matter of life and death.

Contemporary readers overlooked such philosophical issues in the book, seeing it above all as an outpouring of what an older critic called “the life lessons of the hunger winter.” Another reviewer described the prose of Blaman, Hermans, and Van het Reve as “the cynical and sullen tarnishing of the beautiful things in life.” This type of prose constitutes the Dutch equivalent of existentialism, which was in vogue across western Europe after the war and found its most notable expression in France. The Dutch authors, however, were not writing under direct French influence. Hermans, for instance, had formed his view of the world before familiarizing himself to any significant extent with French existentialism; his early work is closer to surrealism. Blaman’s novel Woman and Friend (Vrouw en vriend) was published in 1941 and thus predated the influence of existentialism, although she was a teacher of French and went on to develop a detailed knowledge of French existentialist literature, which left obvious traces in her later prose. One aspect of French existentialism found no parallel in Dutch literature: the emphasis on human solidarity in the later work of Sartre and Camus.

In its own day this “prose of disillusionment” drew attention mainly from critics who were scandalized by it or worried about its effect on the public. Of course, there were novels and stories that did not fit the mold created by Blaman, Hermans, and Van het Reve. One example is the work of Maria Dermoût (1888–1962), who spent most of her life in the Dutch East Indies and then Indonesia. Her prose has a highly individual tone, as she seeks to ally herself with an oral tradition that involves magical and fairy-tale elements. Her work stands in clear contrast to the harsh realism of writers in Holland, which is not to say she is all sweetness and light. In her novel The Ten Thousand Things (De tienduizend dingen, 1956) the Indonesian archipelago is evoked as a place where the boundaries between reality and myth, between past and present, and between the living and the dead dissolve. It does not seem the slightest bit odd that a man and a boy are described as “being really a shark and a little shark.” Dermoût’s work found a large readership, and not only in the Netherlands: it was received with enthusiasm in America as well. A. Alberts (1911–95), who achieved recognition in 1953 with the collection of stories The Islands (De eilanden), was also inspired by his experiences in the colonies.

Maria Dermoût. The Hague, Literary Museum.

In the 1950s there were signs of a return to the Second World War as subject matter. The history of the diary of Anne Frank (1929–45) reflects this. Anne’s father, the only member of the family to survive the concentration camps, tried to interest various Dutch publishing houses in the text immediately after the liberation, but it was only when a highly respected historian gave his support that the diary found a publisher, appearing under the title The Annex (Het achterhuis) in 1947. Not until the latter half of the 1950s did the book begin to win the international fame that still brings thousands of tourists each year to the house on the Prinsengracht in Amsterdam where the Frank family lived in hiding. Until quite recently The Annex (later English editions were entitled The Diary of a Young Girl) was the only modern Dutch book known to readers abroad. There are several different versions of the text. In the first edition, passages about sexuality or that include criticism of Anne’s mother were omitted. In fact, Anne herself had already edited her diary. An authoritative scholarly edition appeared in 1986 partly as a rebuttal to Holocaust deniers who cast doubt on its authenticity; it has since been further expanded.

The main significance of The Annex was, and still is, that the book gives a face to the abstract figure of six million Jews killed by the Nazis. Anne’s lively style evokes the stifling atmosphere of the hiding place yet also shows how she managed to retain her humor and inventiveness in confined circumstances. At the same time we follow her development from a child into a young woman. In this context it is useful to look at another witness to the Holocaust. In her short novel Bitter Herbs (Het bittere kruid, 1957), Marga Minco (1920–) evokes the war through the eyes of a Jewish child and includes a number of disguised autobiographical elements. Her story is all the more gripping because she employs a sober, almost businesslike style in her descriptions of horrific events.

Marga Minco. The Hague, Literary Museum.

In the late 1950s two novels appeared that are among the greatest achievements of postwar Dutch literature and were immediately recognized as such by literary critics: The Darkroom of Damocles (De donkere kamer van Damocles, 1958) by W. F. Hermans and a year later The Stone Bridal Bed (Het stenen bruidsbed, 1959) by Harry Mulisch (1927–). The publication dates are significant: internationally, several novels now recognized as literary classics about the war appeared around the same time, including The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel, 1959) by Günther Grass, The Last of the Just (Le dernier des justes, 1959) by André Schwarz-Bart, and Catch 22 (1961) by Joseph Heller. It seems that quite some years have to pass before profoundly affecting experiences like those of war can be portrayed convincingly.

W. F. Hermans’s The Darkroom of Damocles can be read on several different levels. First of all it is an absorbing war story about a character called Henri Osewoudt, who becomes involved with the resistance and liquidates several collaborators on the orders of one Dorbeck. The plot resembles that of an ingenious thriller, the major difference being that the reader’s most urgent question remains unanswered: does Dorbeck, the man who has been issuing orders to Osewoudt, including orders to kill, really exist? Did he ever exist? Or is he is a product of Osewoudt’s imagination? The second level is psychological, concentrating primarily on Osewoudt’s personality. His biological inheritance is unfortunate: his mother suffered from delusions and he is cursed with an inability to grow a beard. Have these afflictions led him to dream up his own virile doppelgänger? The book also works at a philosophical level, illustrating the thesis that humanity and the world cannot really be known. This reading is supported by a quotation from Ludwig Wittgenstein that Hermans added to the text from the tenth edition onward.

If ultimately The Darkroom of Damocles centers on the impossibility of gaining certain knowledge about the world, there is another aspect that some contemporary critics rightly pointed out: the novel’s anti-moralistic, nihilistic tenor. Imprisoned as a collaborator after the liberation, Osewoudt meets a young man who calls himself a “great amoral theorist,” who joined the SS when Germany was already losing the war even though he was not particularly interested in Nazi ideology. He developed a worldview of his own:

But what I do believe is that moral values are nothing but a temporary frame of reference, and that once you’re dead morality is irrelevant. . . . But to anyone who accepts the reality of death there is no morality in the absolute sense, to anyone like that goodness and charity are nothing but fear in disguise.68

The statement is made by a fictional character, so it cannot simply be attributed to Hermans, but no one in the novel contradicts its tenor. True, it is counterbalanced by the opinions of Osewoudt’s uncle, a man with a philosophical bent, but he is presented as a half-baked and rather unworldly idealist. The events of The Darkroom of Damocles tend to bear out the amoralist’s views rather than those of Osewoudt’s Hegel-quoting uncle.

Hermans’s “amoral theoretician” has much in common with the main character of Mulisch’s novel The Stone Bridal Bed. Here too we find explicit distrust of morality and civilization; culture is merely a mask for the barbarity that underlies it, the ultimate chaos. Both Hermans and Mulish had developed a jaundiced view of humanity as a result of wartime conditions, and both would revisit the subject of the Second World War time and again to illustrate their ideas. While for Hermans the unknowable nature of the world becomes undeniably clear in the diffuse circumstances of occupation, Mulisch focuses more on elements like time and history, with the question of guilt as a recurring theme. Both authors, who along with Gerard Reve are regarded as the most important of postwar Dutch prose writers, were molded by the experience of war, as their work testifies. In these years the message is far from cheerful.

Simon Vestdijk. The Hague, Literary Museum.

The focus on young writers of disillusioned prose should not obscure the fact that older authors were producing some of their best work. In The Waiter and the Living (De kellner en de levenden, 1949), for example, Simon Vestdijk responded to existentialist questions about life. Twelve residents of an apartment building are rounded up to participate in proceedings of a remarkable kind. They represent the stakes in a bet between Christ and God the Father: when hard times arrive, will humanity curse God and its own existence? In this apocalyptic atmosphere, a kind of mock Last Judgement, the devil does his best to win over the twelve characters with inducements and threats, yet ultimately he fails. The novel contains no explicit references to the war, but events mirror those of Hermans’s novels, putting people in extreme situations to test the constancy of their values. Comparisons with The Plague (La peste, 1947) by Albert Camus are pertinent, since both Camus and Vestdijk address existential values. But in contrast with the disillusioned realism that was spreading inexorably at the time, Vestdijk’s novel concludes with an overt acceptance of life: Christ wins the bet with his Father, because humanity cannot bring itself to curse God.

In the late 1950s an interesting development took place in Vestdijk’s writing. In 1956 he published The Glittering Armor (Het glinsterend pantser), ostensibly a novel about friendship. Novelist S. tells the reader about his childhood friend Victor Slingeland. The book simply gives an account of events, which are intriguing enough in themselves; but another interpretation is possible, one that breaks through to a deeper level. The first-person narrator points to this alternative reading in a series of almost incidental remarks, such as “and if you want to write, you’ll find yourself grubbing around in his heart, which is your own heart, because that whole separation into two people is of course merely a pretense. Rather hard to comprehend, I fear.” Perhaps Slingeland is a facet of the author S.? One more step and both S. and Victor Slingeland (initials V. S.) become alter egos of the author Simon Vestdijk. A chapter title in the book’s sequel, “A Novel within a Novel within a Novel,” confirms that the reader is meant to explore these interlocking viewpoints. Vestdijk wrote three books about Victor Slingeland, and in all of them he plays an ingenious game with the relationship between fiction and reality. He is said to have been inspired by André Gide’s The Counterfeiters (Les faux-monnayeurs, 1926). This was certainly a theme new to Dutch prose in the late 1950s, and it anticipates later developments in deliberately non-mimetic writing.

The Fifties Movement

Historians have described the postwar years in the Netherlands as “a time of discipline and asceticism.” It was certainly not a time for experimentation. Paradoxically, it was precisely in these years that Dutch poetry went through a process of radical renewal.

It did not amount to much at first. Forum ideas still underpinned poetry, as they did prose. In practice this meant that intellectual and anecdotal elements predominated and passion was restrained. But divergent views slowly emerged. In 1950 a young Remco Campert (1929–) expressed his dissatisfaction with the current state of poetry in a poem in which he claimed it was high time “we make something heard, / a voice that cuts through the rubble-dust” and “blows the fuses of resignation.” Campert was clearly targeting the small-scale character of the poetry of the time. His verse forms were modern, in the sense that he was not concerned about rhyme or meter, although the imagery was far from revolutionary and even the title suggested hesitation: “Shouted Too Loud?”

Lucebert. Photograph: Chris van Houts.

The renewal might well have remained stuck there, were it not for the rise of a key figure, a poet who called himself Lucebert (1924–95). The pseudonym suggests both “bringer of light” and “Lucifer.” He gave a decisive boost to the initial stages of reform, much as Kloos had done at the start of the Movement of 1880. The comparison does not end there, since the experimental poets of 1950 were also named after a decade: the Fifties Movement.

In late 1948 the young Lucebert tried to sell his political drawings to a spread of different newspapers. In working through the various editorial boards he arrived at the Communist newspaper The Truth (De waarheid), where he met the poet Gerrit Kouwenaar (1923–). Kouwenaar wrote to a friend: “Here in my house a remarkable young man is lying asleep in rags. He draws and writes poems.” The raggedy youth scribbled away in a small notebook. One day Kouwenaar found a loose page that had fallen out and could not believe his eyes. Suddenly, here was what the young poets had been looking for, written on the torn out page of a tramp’s notebook. Lucebert was soon the charismatic central figure of a circle whose members became known as the experimentalists, or the Fifties Poets.

In fact it was Lucebert who gave the Fifties Movement its name. For him, as for Campert, the new poetry was about more than a purely literary revolution. The Fifties Poets wanted a change of climate and felt nothing but contempt for the sedate nature of Dutch society. Addressing the “ladies and gentlemen of letters” Lucebert wrote:

when you read blake rimbaud or baudelaire,

listen to our verse: their holy ghost runs there —

to kiss the naked arse of art beneath your sonnets and your ballads.69

“Kiss the naked arse of art”: it was this kind of earthy physicality that gave the language of the Fifties Movement its unique character. Their work provoked opposition from the start, as did their attitude. A public appearance by Lucebert in 1951, for instance, caused controversy. A fellow poet reported on the event as follows:

He began with a poem called “the illiterate” and then read out the a b c. He became angry with the audience and said, ‘You haven’t come here to talk, I’ve come here to talk.’ Then he tipped a glass of water over his head, having first put on a black mask. He took off the mask and read out a poem with a lot of cunt and cunts. . . . Finally he lit sparklers (ten for a quarter) and said, ‘Great, isn’t it? And it’s only cold fire.’ . . . Only the first two rows applauded; that was where the literati were sitting with their entourage.

A rightwing newspaper published a predictably indignant article about this “playful” event; others sneered that they’d seen such dadaist jokes before. Incidents like these were only part of the story, however. One poem by a Fifties poet consisting purely of sounds brought a protest from the Upper House of Parliament, where a conservative member expressed dismay that subsidies were being allocated to such “infantile drivel.” In 1953 an older poet asked himself whether perhaps the SS had marched in with the experimentalist poets. That same year the city of Amsterdam awarded its poetry prize to Lucebert. He dressed up as emperor of the experimentalists and went to the Stedelijk Museum, where he was refused access. The police intervened in a heavy-handed manner.

Scenes like this hardly encouraged readers to take the new poetry seriously, and few wondered what it was really all about. What did the new poets want? As always with questions like these, it is easier to show what the new poetry had pitted itself against. The most prominent characteristic of the Fifties Poets was their anti-intellectualism. Lucebert began a poem called “Little Textbook of Positivism” with the verse:

that philosophy let it go

three dead thoughts

in a grey-leather skin

afloat on a fug of words70

The movement wanted nothing to do with dead theory. They asserted the importance of the flesh, in other words of the body rather than the mind. With their resistance to intellectualism, the Fifties Poets were moving closer to the prose writers of their day. In Reve’s The Evenings, as we saw, man is reduced to a physical body and the novel lacks any intellectual dimension. But although poets as well as novelists saw man first of all as a physical being, there are differences. In a book like The Evenings the focus is on bodily deficiencies and imperfections: sickness, baldness, and so on. The bodily experiences described by the poets are much more festive, as in the opening stanzas of “Lying in the Sun” by Hans Andreus (1926–77):

I hear the light the sunlight pizzicato

the warmth converses with my face again

again I lie not so you’d better start so

again I lie obsessed while light stuns my dumb brain.

 

I lie full length lie singing in my skin

sing soft replies to sunlight’s repartee

lie dumb yet not so dumb not letting people in

sing things about the light around and over me.71

We are unlikely to find sun worship of this kind in the “fiction of disillusionment” of the time. And there is another difference: Reve, Hermans, Blaman, and others write sentences with a logical progression, whereas the Fifties Poets invented a new idiom. The physicality of the body also pervades the imagery, so that we repeatedly come upon lines like “I have arms to my brain,” “We listen with our hands,” and “Think with tongue and hands.” Words too are physical, and even the poem ought to have a body, or to be one. As Jan Elburg (1919–92) wrote:

I’m cussedly just of flesh

and the poem’s

not made of blood and muscle

more’s the pity72

Since for the Fifties Poets everyday language was contaminated, the shrieking vocabulary of newspapers and careless everyday speech, they went in search of a “language of Adam,” as described by the only essayist among them, Paul Rodenko (1920–76). He characterized the poetry of the experimentalists as

an attempt to take the language back from the specialists; they achieve this by using neologisms, unusual word combinations, and bizarre images, by the destruction of grammar, the interjection of meaningless sounds, etc., in short through techniques aimed at stripping language of its functionality, its utility value — with the intention, of course, of restoring language to its primal state, reduced to raw material, so as to create a new language, a new poetry, a new space; not just another kind of poetry, different upholstery for the same space, but a truly new language like that of Adam, the first man, in a truly new space, with a scent like that of the “first morning.” And if the very first morning, the very first language, that of Adam, remains irretrievable because of the fall — because we have become people of culture for ever — well, one can still try to create a language and a space as young and unsullied as the child who, with a new slate pencil and a clean slate, steps into Culture for the first time.

One of their most striking methods in the quest for a language of Adam is the use of so-called autonomous images. In the poetry of the experimentalists images no longer “stand for something else,” rather they create their own reality. Lines like “against the pulse of the stone / beats the thought of the hand” do not allow the image to be connected with any conceivable corresponding object. Of course, such puzzling images occur in older literature as well, but in Lucebert and his fellow poets they are much more common than in any of their predecessors. It is precisely at the point where logic becomes disjointed that the experimental nature of modern poetry reveals itself: the connections it establishes lie far beyond the world of everyday experience.

The emergence of the Fifties Poets can be explained in various ways. There was certainly a need to catch up. The Netherlands, a neutral backwater during the First World War, had seen little avant-garde activity in literature: some expressionism in Hendrik Marsman, who always hovered between tradition and innovation; a single dadaist in I. K. Bonset (Van Doesburg); no surrealism at all. Vague attempts at avant-garde work in the 1930s had been stifled by Forum and the sheer seriousness of the period. Now, at last, the country was witnessing a breakthrough similar to the one that had taken place in other European countries in the 1920s and of which Paul van Ostaijen had been the leading proponent in Flanders.

But to regard the Fifties Movement as making up lost ground would be to dismiss it as Dada après Dada, as indeed some contemporary critics did. The reality is more complex. Lucebert claimed that the new poetry distinguished itself by its novelty. This can be applied to the physicality that is such a striking feature of the new imagery. In contrast to the interest in bodily imperfections typical of fiction writers after 1945, the Fifties Poets invite us to feel the celebratory vitality evoked by Lucebert in a poem dedicated to the sculptor Henry Moore:

it is the earth that drifts and rolls through the people

it is the air that sighs and breathes through the people

the people lie inert as earth

the people stand exalted as air

 

out of the mother’s breast grows the son

out of the father’s brow blooms the daughter

wet and dry as rivers and banks their skin

as streets and canals they stare into space

their house is their breath

their gestures are gardens

they shelter

and they are free

 

it is the earth that drifts and rolls

it is the air that sighs and breathes

through the people73

While the experimentalist poets were certainly at the center of attention in the 1950s, there were several important poets who did not belong to the movement. Some used traditional verse forms such as the sonnet but with entirely new content. Most prominent among them was Gerrit Achterberg (1905–62), who had made his debut before the war (and was discussed in the previous chapter). Achterberg was the only Dutch poet the Fifties Movement wholeheartedly admired, and his postwar work showed a broadening of his immediate concern — reaching across death to his deceased beloved — into a quest for God, the beloved, and the perfect poem. This extremely ambitious approach was balanced by the apparently unpoetic material he took as a starting point, reflected in titles like “Asbestos,” “Gristle,” “Plastic,” and “Gravel.” His later work, marked by a preference for the formal restraints of the sonnet, managed to give a metaphysical sheen to everyday things, as in the following lines from a sonnet about a famous department store:

Dots move about in a primeval state.

A Vitus dance of men and women churns

and seethes to yield you up. High priests libate

a brand-new scent. On altars, incense burns . . .

 

The names reverberate, tannoyed out loud.

Meneer Van Dam is somewhere in the crowd:

you might be too at any time, I guess.

 

Then I shall go across to the cashier,

inquire after you, just to appear

polite, and tell the shop girl my address.74

The First Morning

In Flanders, too, the revolution represented by experimental poetry claimed center stage in the 1950s. In 1949 the magazine Time and Man (Tijd en mens) was established, a publication explicitly opposed to the neoclassicist restoration that had taken hold in Flanders in the 1930s. “In poetry we will seek out afresh the intuitive hallmarks, rejecting the current Flemish tinkering that people are pleased to call neoclassicism,” the editors declared in the inaugural issue — the word “afresh” in their statement suggesting a return to Paul van Ostaijen and the humanitarian expressionists. Intuition would be the chosen weapon to combat metrical verse and traditional content. Time and Man also rejected another aspect of neoclassicism, the appeal to eternal beauty. “We reject theories that detach people from the influence of time; instead we want to zero in on both time and the individual,” they declared. Even the magazine’s name, reminiscent of Sartre’s controversial mouthpiece Les Temps Modernes, suggested a program: Time and Man intended to take a stance vis-à-vis the problems of the postwar period and to give a voice to the young, those “who were twenty in 1940 and raised not by professors but by the war.” The experience of war had made a non-committed art focused on eternity impossible.

In this approach, with its emphasis on engagement, the hand of one of the magazine’s founders, Jan Walravens, is clearly recognizable. He was to become the driving force behind Time and Man. Even before 1949 he had written an essay in which he stated quite unambiguously that Flemish literature would only become great “if it can manage to provide an answer, in its own forms, out of its own circumstances, and with its own vision, to the great need and great fear of these times; only then will it interest the world.” Grand words indeed, but this was apparently the era for such words.

Although Time and Man also published prose, including that of Maurice D’haese, Louis Paul Boon, and enfant terrible Hugo Claus, its primary contribution was in the field of poetry. Among its young and talented poets was Ben Cami (1920–2004). In The Land of Nod (Het land Nod, 1954) Cami points to the biblical figure of Cain, the archetypal man without faith, who is evoked in an atmosphere of oppressive emptiness:

No one hears the flow of time as it spumes

Across the rocks which we call towns, in a spate

Which scours the words and pictures from the rooms

Of all that we adore and execrate.

In the sand a skull, an axe of stone,

Which nobody will see.

Wind on the water, light of sun,

A god who starts again, reluctantly.75

The form is such that this could certainly be called experimental poetry, despite the absence of a feature that dominates most other poetry in Dutch at this time: imagery of the human body. As a result Cami’s words have a defiant quality, as in the lines:

And if you’re lonely or afraid

In face of merciless eternity

Refuse all comfort:

Man, incarnate question.76

In Cami’s work this “incarnate question” — a bodily image, an exception to the rule — always takes the form of an individual who stands in opposition to tyranny, corruption, and other maladies of modern society.

In 1955 Walravens published an anthology of new Flemish poetry, Where Is the First Morning? (Waar is de eerste morgen?). Like Paul Rodenko, who had recently compiled the anthology New Pencils, Clean Slates (Nieuwe griffels, schone leien, 1954), Walravens placed experimental poetry in a historical context. He started by quoting Guido Gezelle, followed by several poems by Paul van Ostaijen, before finally arriving at the new generation. The brief introduction laid out the basic assumptions of the new poetry. Only irrational images could do justice to “the reality of modern humanity.” These images were not an added bonus, as in traditional poetry; they constituted the poem itself. Walravens further stressed the specifically Flemish character of the poems in his anthology: “The Flemish modernists talk about the reality of these times rather than their own individual pleasures and sorrows.” This, he argued, set them apart from the Dutch poets: whereas the Flemings were driven by ethical concerns, in Holland the movement was “more youthful, more turbulent, but also more aesthetic.” The observation proved highly influential, the contrast becoming an accepted part of literary history.

Nevertheless, by no means all the poets in Time and Man can be described as ethically committed, as is clear from the work of the greatest among them, Hugo Claus. Claus quickly recognized that the triumphant new Flemish poetry had clichés of its own. In a letter to Walravens in 1954 he wrote: “I hope you’ll forgive me, but when I read ‘the arteries of the will,’ ‘the bird of your eye,’ ‘the blond dune of the sun,’ I feel dreadfully tired. I turn puritan when I’m given these things to read, and I long for the strictly disciplined alexandrines of Count August von Platen.” These objections are typical of Claus in a dual sense: in the incisive way he captures the new-fangled imagery, but also in his longing for classical poetry, which speaks volumes. The young Claus is declaring himself an eclectic, unwilling to commit to any tradition, even the “modern.”

Claus’s widely acclaimed collection The Oostakker Poems (De Oostakkerse gedichten, 1955) demonstrates how, at an early stage, he forged a means of expression as compact as it was complex. There is a discernible “story” running through the collection: a young man extricates himself from his background and environment in order to devote himself to an intense loving relationship with a woman, even though ultimately he comes to experience this relationship as a new form of coercion. The love story reflects the changing seasons, from spring to summer to winter. The title refers to the village of Oostakker, not far from the city of Ghent, where Claus’s parents were living at the time. The significance of Oostakker is not merely autobiographical, however. The village is known as a place of religious pilgrimage, where sick believers come to seek a cure. The poet has no faith in its curative properties; instead he tends to locate all maladies in his parents, who take on mythical qualities. His mother becomes a Virgin Mother, and religious and erotic connotations become entwined. These lines from Claus’s most famous poem, “The Mother,” give an impression:

When your skin screamed my bones caught fire.

You laid me down, I can never rebear this image,

I was the invited but slaying guest.

 

Now, later, I’m a strange man to you.

You see me coming, you think: “He is

The summer, he makes my flesh and keeps

The dogs in me awake.”

 

While you stand dying every day, not together

With me, I am not, I am not but in your earth.

In me your life rots, turning, you do not

Return to me, and I will not recover from you.77

Around 1955 experimental poetry spread like an inkblot as modern verse proliferated in a variety of magazines. Nevertheless, tradition retained a significant presence. Among its advocates was one particularly complex figure, Christine D’haen (1923–). While some see her as a representative of traditional poetry because she uses well-established poetic forms, others emphasize her “exuberant mannerism,” suggesting she has more in common with some of the experimental poets. All agree that she looks to the Western tradition, dominated by its classical and Christian inheritance, as a source of values. Although D’haen’s poetry sometimes features everyday objects, they are always given mythical or symbolic weight. Her work is a prime example of the unfashionable tradition of craftsmanship that does not shy away from deliberate artificiality.

The magazine Gard Sivik (1955–64) situated itself between these two currents, the avant-garde and the consciously traditional. Here we find the work of Paul Snoek (1935–81), who made his name with the collection Hercules (1960) and built on the achievements of the experimentalists without ever lapsing into incomprehensibility. This helped to make “A Swimmer Is a Horseman” a much anthologized poem; its first two verses can serve as an introduction to the whole of Snoek’s work:

Swimming is dissolute sleeping in floundering water,

is making love with every available pore,

is being infinitely free and mastering within.

 

Swimming is probing loneliness with fingers,

is telling ancient secrets with arms and legs

to the always omniscient water.78

This is not the only poem dominated by the presence of water. For Snoek water is a fundamental principle, the primary creative element, in which opposites merge, gravity seems suspended, and a person is free. In the third verse of “A Swimmer Is a Horseman” the narrator states explicitly: “In water / I am a creator embracing his creation.” Poetic and erotic accents blend together in the extraordinarily physical, triumphant image of a swimmer riding the waves. The poem’s last sentence is set apart: “Swimming is almost being somewhat holy.” This sacral element recurs throughout the collection. To Snoek a poet is a prophet, a concept entirely in accord with Romantic tradition, and indeed the volume’s title gestures toward a (no less Romantic) cosmic self-aggrandizement: Hercules performed superhuman acts. But it closes with a rather less joyful poem, “Living on Earth,” which evokes a race of humans who

tread on the sea, but without wings

could not be naked and called up gods without will

in order to meekly, yet more lonesome, discover the wound

that death is the oldest sin of the earth.79

These lines are reminiscent of the empty landscapes of Ben Cami. In other words, in Snoek’s work, alongside the romantic embrace of life, a somber existentialist worldview looms large, as it does in many other poets and novelists of the time. We encounter the same dualism, a sensual acceptance of life contrasting with a deeply depressive tendency, in the Dutch experimental poet Hans Andreus.

Snoek had started out as one of the driving forces behind Gard Sivik, but gradually the character of the magazine changed. In 1961 Snoek left the editorial board, and Gard Sivik became an outlet for Dutch “new realism,” a very different phenomenon. In 1963 Jan Walravens concluded that “the hour of experimentation has passed.” Others came to the same conclusion. What annoyed the once experimental poets most of all was that, paradoxically, experimental poetry had become entirely acceptable: “Professors devote their lectures to it, anthologies come thick and fast, . . . official prizes are awarded to poets who write this way (when only yesterday the same jury members ridiculed them).” Paul Snoek observed sadly that “the Fifties poets are being taught in schools.” It is a pattern familiar to modern art: whatever enters the mainstream loses its power and necessitates a countermovement. And so, the challenging nature of much experimental poetry led to calls for an art that was easier to understand, for a “democratization of art” as it would be called in the populist 1960s. A fresh chapter had opened in the history of poetry.

II. The Revolution of the Sixties, 1960–1970

Anne Marie Musschoot

The 1960s ushered in an economic boom and set the stage for a new society, a consumer society characterized by broadly based anti-authoritarian movements, a liberalization of moral norms, and a playful atmosphere in which people believed that, as the saying of the time went, the imagination should seize power. The sixties were years of revolutionary slogans and critical questioning. Art became a form of critique, and artwork as such came under fire; it was dislodged from its isolated, elitist position as a message for the happy few to become a product of collective activity and deployed as a means of changing society.

Consistent with this atmosphere of general protest, a new phenomenon arrived, that of the “happening,” which was introduced to the Netherlands in 1959 and for a while put pressure on the notion of art as a form of individual expression. The poets C. B. Vaandrager, Hans Sleutelaar, and Armando produced a manifesto preaching “permanent revolution” and proposing, in a gesture inspired by Dada, the closure of all museums and the destruction of all the artworks held in them. The call represented merely the latest attempt to abolish existing art or radically reform it, except that it took resistance to established art further than ever. The intention was now to abolish art as such for being elitist and to merge it into a broader social event in which the artist would be wholly indistinguishable from the non-artist. This was the logic that led to everyday items (known as ready-mades) being elevated to the status of art or at least integrated into it. As a result, the previously marginal phenomenon of American pop art, itself an avatar of Dadaism, became public property in the Low Countries as it was elsewhere.

This critical, anti-authoritarian way of thinking gave rise to the Provo movement in Amsterdam in 1965. Its playful guerrilla tactics were underpinned by a political anarchism that aimed to destabilize the consumer society it despised. Provo was a youth movement, using disturbances of the peace, or provocation, as a conscious political strategy designed to bring about social change. Quick to join this “Provotariat” were students, artists, and writers (including Harry Mulisch) who had turned against the law-abiding middle classes and declared their solidarity with the workers in their social struggle. The Provo movement had been officially disbanded by the spring of 1967, but by then the fuse had been lit. Spearheading the attack on bourgeois values and institutions were leftwing students, who set up numerous “extra-parliamentary” opposition groups in line with international student syndicalism and inspired by the revolutionary beliefs of the philosopher Herbert Marcuse (author of Eros and Civilization, 1955 and One-Dimensional Man, 1964) and the Frankfurt School. This resulted in spectacular student occupations at universities in the Netherlands and Flanders in 1969.

The most noticeable concrete result of these widespread democratizing tendencies was the dissolution of boundaries and hierarchies, even in novels and poetry. The dividing line between art and reality became blurred, and traditional literary structures were dismantled, including definitions of specific genres. The most dramatic change became known as the trend to “defictionalize” literature. While, following the example set by Marcel Duchamp, ready-mades were introduced into the visual arts, including the graphic work of Louis Paul Boon, and street sounds were integrated into music in the manner of John Cage, poets started to make use of preexisting “texts” or everyday pieces of writing; J. Bernlef (1937–), for example, presented a shopping list as a poem. The novel was stripped of its fictional quality by the introduction of non-literary elements intended to puncture the illusion of reality, such as the authentic archival documents used by Sybren Polet. Authors turned away from traditional narrative techniques that created the illusion that a real world was being evoked.

New Realism in Poetry

New realism was introduced into poetry in the early 1960s in the Flemish magazine Gard Sivik. When its editorial board was expanded in 1957 to include the Dutch writers Hans Sleutelaar (1935–) and Cornelis Bastiaan Vaandrager (1935–92), the impact of new-realist principles became increasingly visible, and the group began to define itself by its opposition to the Fifties Movement. One issue in 1964 announced “a new date in poetry” and featured on its cover a road sign reading “50” with a red line running through it. The poets of the sixties resolutely turned to face the everyday world around them and appealed for an exclusive focus on the ordinary. Although experimentalists like Lucebert, Jan Elburg, and Gerrit Kouwenaar were recognized as innovators, they were accused of helping to promote the traditional Romantic image of the artist. “The Fifties Poets, they were bohemians after all, so a large part of reality escaped them, a large source of richness,” as Armando put it later in an interview, and Sleutelaar pointed out that the new generation, with its background in journalism and advertising, had repaired the breach with established society opened up by the Fifties Movement. In the issue of Gard Sivik announcing “the end of the fifties” Armando expressed the new approach as follows:

Do not moralize Reality or interpret (artify) it, but intensify it. Starting point: always accept Reality. Interest in a more autonomous role for Reality, as already seen in journalism, television reports, and film. Working method: isolate, annex. Result: authenticity. Not of the maker but of the information. The artist, who is no longer an artist; a cool, businesslike eye. “Poetry” as the result of a (personal) selection from Reality.

The same points were emphasized in the magazine Barbarber, which ran from 1958 to 1971. Although a number of its contributors, such as Jan Hanlo (1912–69), at first continued to work in the tradition of the Fifties Movement, they evolved away from “excessively esoteric” writing that took itself too seriously and instead returned to reality. Barbarber presented itself from the start as a “magazine for texts.” It initially appeared in stenciled and thus “democratic” form, implying that the boundaries between literature and non-literature had been abolished: everything that existed, everything that could be observed, belonged to the domain of poetry.

Of the Barbarber poets, K. Schippers (pseudonym of G. Stigter, 1936–) and J. Bernlef (pseudonym of H. J. Marsman, 1937–) emerged as the most influential. They rejected the poetic metaphors favored by the Fifties Poets, preferring “barbarberism,” which meant working within a contemporary, everyday context and inviting sober, objective observation of facts and things. The type of poetry introduced by Barbarber’s neorealism was based on the detached, observant gaze, and it persisted into the 1990s. Its principles were set out by Bernlef and Schippers, who also published a joint collection of essays. They hailed the example of Marcel Duchamp, who as early as 1913 had promoted a bicycle wheel to the status of a work of art, thereby introducing the phenomenon of the ready-made. Bernlef explained that Duchamp’s legacy had been taken up in France (nouveau réalisme), in the United States (pop art, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns), and elsewhere. The Netherlands, too, were now discovering new realism and, in particular, the ready-made. Both Duchamp and the Dadaists who were active in Zurich during the First World War had used materials that were plucked from the real world and had never previously been used in painting. But whereas Dada was “the dagger in the back of an ossified art and a ridiculous society,” Duchamp did not care for provocative social protest; he was a “cool man of science, a practical observer.”

For the Dutch new realists, too, the poem was simply “an object among other objects, a consumer item.” As the artist sought to expand, with a knowing wink, the boundaries of art to encompass everyday life, the new poetry would amount to a “cool” record of things that had caught the poet’s attention, “the value of the observation being determined by the originality of the point of view, the idea.” Like the American poets Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams, with whom they felt an affinity, Bernlef and Schippers took the view that in principle anything can qualify as art, without the need for a hierarchical distinction between art and non-art. No subject was poetic in and of itself: the artist simply isolates and records a specific moment from the interplay of ever-changing possibilities. One example is “Chasing Hearts” by K. Schippers, in which, as Bernlef noted, “one could say that the threshold of wonder has been lowered”:

For a pub might be full or empty,

it might rain for five days

or every other day for a week

sometimes three bowler hats may be seen in a street

or none

or one,

that’s the puzzling thing.80

Another representative of Dutch new realism was the poet and painter Armando (1929–). His work emerged most clearly in The New Style (De nieuwe stijl), a magazine in book form, of which only two issues were published (in 1965 and 1966), but which was nevertheless extremely influential. Armando had been involved with an international group called Nul or Zero (1958–61), who put their paint and brushes aside and simply selected “stuff” from among the items modern consumer society had to offer. They felt an affinity with the Nouveaux réalistes in Paris who, although each in his own way, tried to produce art that neutralized the artist’s subjective, individual contribution. There is a striking parallel between this development in (anti-)painting and the changes taking place in the literature of these years, both poetry and prose.

For Armando the New Style years were a passing phase, and in the 1970s he would revert to creating “simply Art.” But it was in this period that he poured his own idiosyncratic subject matter, a fascination with violence and war, into a new stylistic mold and wrote programmatic texts on the subject. His so-called “boxers cycle” of 1962, in which he took phrases heard in the boxing ring and presented them, without commentary, as poetry, provided the perfect illustration of the poetic principle that a vision of life is intensified “by isolating or annexing fragments from Reality.” The method was adopted by the entire group. Vaandrager “quoted” from police handbooks and Hans Verhagen (1939–) put together a cycle called “Kanker-cancer-Krebs” from his reading in medical literature.

Like Barbarber, The New Style issued appeals for a more journalistic approach and against the “inflated sense of self-importance” of literature and art reviews. In their “Directions for the Press” (1966), Armando and Sleutelaar claimed that “Not fiction but reality deserves to be declared art.” This might include instruction manuals, as in Armando’s “agrarian cycle” of 1965:

the machine is fitted with 4 rake blades

the machine has 3 pneumatic wheels

the machine can also use 3 sets of 2 blades

 

the machine requires little maintenance

the machine works very cleanly81

Depersonalized and de-poeticized verse like this marks the general democratization of poetry, a delayed explosion of avant-garde ideas about art, especially those of Dada. But the insistent return to “normal proportions” has deep social roots and was historically significant, because it testified to a fundamentally new attitude to life and a new mentality. Looking at familiar things in a fresh and unusual manner demonstrated a critical vision allied to a desire to break with traditional habits and norms. The playful scorn that the Fifties Poets had poured on bourgeois society had taken a serious turn. The way now lay open for the protest movement of May 1968.

The main Flemish proponent of the new “poetry of the gaze,” which developed out of new realism, was Roland Jooris (1936–); in his case too the cool, isolating art of observation adopted by new realism was only a passing phase. In Flanders as elsewhere in Europe new realism was closely allied with graphic art; Jooris acted as a spokesman for the New Vision movement, which included Flemish artists like Roger Raveel, Raoul de Keyser, and Etienne Elias, as well as the Dutchman Renier Lucassen. The “new poetry,” like the “new art,” meant an intensified way of looking, recording, and noting. As time went on certain subjects — landscapes, photographs, paintings — received special attention; one of Bernlef’s later poetry volumes is called Still Life (Stilleven, 1979). Gradually also the straightforward recording and reporting of elements isolated by the artist’s gaze began to leave room for interpretation, a personal point of view. The poem of the gaze became a poem with a vision, and the poet could also evoke what was not there, what had vanished. Roland Jooris’s development reflects this change. His art became an exercise in removing and purging, or, in the words of Bauhaus architect Mies van der Rohe, “More is less” (also the title of a collection by Jooris, published in 1972). Reduction grants the remainder added value. In the poem “Minimal,” from The Summer Museum (Het museum van de zomer, 1974), the result is as follows:

Bird bobs

Branch creaks

Sky clouds up

 

Almost nothing

to look at

and just that

I observe.82

The tranquil early poetry of Roland Jooris reveals a difference between Holland and Flanders as regards new realism. Perhaps because new realism did not make its breakthrough in Flanders until the late 1960s, its more extreme forms, as exemplified by the work of Schippers and Armando, are not found here, nor do we have joint programmatic declarations. Apart from Jooris only a few individual poets could be regarded as new realists, such as Herman de Coninck (1944–97), who exploited everyday topics like football, bars, and a bicycle tour, and Mark Insingel (1935–) who wrote concrete poetry. This last variant of modernism betrayed the pervasive influence of Paul van Ostaijen’s Dadaist experiments, but it was also part of international developments that included poesia visiva or visual poetry in Italy. The desire to make art more democratic led to a socially engaged poetry, such as that of Stefaan van den Bremt (1941–) in Flanders and Hans van den Waarsenburg (1943–) in the Netherlands, and to a range of imaginative events designed to bring poetry to a wider audience. There were poetry markets, a huge poetry festival organized in Amsterdam’s Carré theater in February 1966, and poems printed on beer mats, T-shirts, napkins, calendars, and so on. Such forms of “non-book poetry” turned writers into entertainers and performers, and they remain so to this day. Developments like these were part of the general anti-authoritarian euphoria of the late 1960s, as was the international success of the protest song, with Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Léo Ferré becoming cult figures among the young. As the protest singers tapped into an oral tradition, they helped to open the way for the new parlando poetry of the 1970s.

Alternative Fictions

Like the anti-authoritarian movement itself, the tendency of the new literature to cling to reality as closely as possible was an international phenomenon. It manifested itself as “faction” in the work of Norman Mailer and Truman Capote, and it reached a high point in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s imposing documentary novel The Gulag Archipelago (1973). In books like these the boundary between fiction and reality can be difficult to determine, and reporting often takes the form of an eyewitness account. In the Netherlands Harry Mulisch wrote about the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Criminal Case 40/61 (De zaak 40/61, 1962) and exhibited his sympathy for and involvement with the revolutionary Provos in Amsterdam in Report to the King Rat (Bericht aan de rattenkoning, 1966), placing the movement in a global context. In 1968 he confirmed his social commitment after a visit to Cuba with his Words As Well As Actions (Het woord bij de daad, 1968). Cuba and its leader Fidel Castro were a magnet for many young intellectuals and artists of the time, Hugo Claus among them. In an interview Mulisch explained his engagement as follows: “It’s war. And in wartime one should not be writing novels. There really are more important things to do.”

Harry Muslisch. Photograph: Edith Vermeer.

In these circumstances it was inevitable that someone would declare the novel dead. The declaration targeted the traditional realist or mimetic concept of the novel as portraying or reflecting reality. The criticism was sometimes quite radical; there was even an attempt to do away with narrative altogether and evict the narrator (at least the omniscient narrator of the nineteenth-century realist novel) as too authoritarian. “Texts” were to replace novels. The most extreme Dutch experiment of this kind was performed by Enno Develing (1933–99), who proposed a number of “projects” and whose observations on “the death of the novel” stressed the value of art as information. Develing’s experiment proved a dead end; his insistence on presenting texts without the mediation of a narrator drained them of life.

There were other, more literary, alternatives that sought to undermine the authoritarian narrator. Sybren Polet (about whom more below) explored the relationship between literature and reality in a book-length theoretical reflection, Literature as Reality: But Which? (Literatuur als werkelijkheid: Maar welke? 1972). Polet himself and many others in the Netherlands and Flanders experimented with techniques allowing different realities to merge on the page, blurring the distinctions between narrative levels. Several young authors exploited the theme of the problematical nature of fiction, as well as the modernist device of either dispensing with a central narrator or offering ironic comment on the story throughout. Only later would this kind of complex or multi-layered writing be termed “postmodern,” a concept that did not gain currency in Europe until the publication of Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (La condition postmoderne) in 1979.

Hella Haasse. The Hague, Literary Museum.

The Gardens of Bomarzo (De tuinen van Bomarzo, 1968) by Hella S. Haasse (1918–), with its labyrinthine structure, was part historical novel and part essay, an attempt to penetrate the riddle of these famous Italian Renaissance gardens. Haasse is the author of an impressive body of work of which subtle psychological analysis and a historical dimension are crucial features. In her novels she seeks to understand her own times as well as human relationships in general by interrogating the past. In this sense she builds on the tradition established by Simon Vestdijk’s historical novels. Haasse’s prose debut, the widely praised novella Oeroeg (Oeroeg, 1948) about a friendship between the Dutch narrator and an Indonesian boy called Oeroeg, was inspired by her childhood in the Dutch East Indies; it paints a gripping picture of the rise of Indonesian nationalism and the colonizer’s stunned incomprehension of it. Next came several relatively traditional historical novels that have become classics of modern Dutch literature; they include In a Dark Wood Wandering (Het woud der verwachting, 1949), about Charles d’Orléans and the death of chivalry and the old feudal order, The Scarlet City (De scharlaken stad, 1952), about the Borgia family during the Italian renaissance, and Threshold of Fire (Een nieuwer testament, 1966), about freedom of thought in newly christianized, early fifth-century Rome. In her later books, which still include a series of historical novels, among them Mrs. Bentinck or Irreconcilability of Character (Mevrouw Bentinck of onverenigbaarheid van karakter, 1978) and The Great of the Earth or Bentinck vs. Bentinck (De groten der aarde of Bentinck tegen Bentinck, 1981), the narrator was steadily pushed into the background.

A comparable development can be seen in the Flemish novelist, essayist, and critic Paul de Wispelaere (1928–). From Paul versus Paul (Paul tegen Paul, 1970) onward he showed an increasing tendency to meld different kinds of text. He continued to use a narrator, eventually in the shape of a fragmented first-person figure who produces a number of narrative, critical, or lyrical and contemplative diary fragments. A more recent highlight is De Wispelaere’s The Charred Alphabet (Het verkoolde alfabet, 1992), which reflects the trend toward autobiographical prose in the final decades of the twentieth century.

Of the many forms of experimental and innovative prose, the so-called anti-novel merits special attention. Once again this is an international phenomenon. American critics described it as “postmodern” in the 1960s, but it has also been called “new fiction” or “neo-modernism.” In Europe the anti-novel was also characterized, after Umberto Eco, as an “open work” (opera aperta), an artwork with an open structure, a many-layered novel that accommodates unusual kinds of material, both literary and non-literary. In this way Sybren Polet incorporated archival extracts in his fiction, Daniël Robberechts (1937–92) quoted a presidential speech, and Gerrit Krol (1934–) worked with scientific texts. Reflections on writing itself were often built in, puncturing the illusion of reality and calling into question the fictional character of fiction.

Still, a term like “open work,” for all its integration of diverse materials and piling up of narrative levels, does not tell the whole story. Dutch literature of the time abounded with other formal experiments, which were more closely related to the French nouveau roman and attributed to literature other, completely different, functions. In particular, there developed a genre of novels devised as purely language-based or “lingual” constructions, novels that created wholly autonomous “worlds in words” by exploring different linguistic registers and styles regardless of any referential or mimetic function. This was in a sense a countermovement: instead of presenting a story that reflected reality, or a vision of it, the text itself constituted its own alternative reality.

These were experiments, in other words, that developed around two poles, one outward-looking, the other turned inward. Both extended the prevailing dual tradition whose roots go back to the late nineteenth century: on the one hand, the novel that explores the outside world, the realist and the social novel, and, on the other, the novel that focuses on the inner world, that is, the psychological novel. Both types now employed techniques of montage, the supremely filmic method introduced to the novel back in the period of modernism by John Dos Passos and Alfred Döblin among others, aimed at imprinting a fragmented or kaleidoscopic worldview.

The anthology Other Prose (Ander proza), which Sybren Polet compiled in 1978, testified to his revolt against mimetic realism and drew attention to the long alternative tradition of “counter-prose,” a tradition stretching back to Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1760). Polet pointed to modernists like Theo van Doesburg and Paul van Ostaijen as precursors in Dutch literature, especially Van Ostaijen’s prose grotesques. He could also have named Multatuli’s Max Havelaar (1860), perhaps the first “anti-novel” in the Low Countries, or Du Perron’s autobiographical Country of Origin (Het land van herkomst, 1935), which Vestdijk already described as an “anti-novel.”

The tradition of counter-prose or “absolute prose” shows up an interesting difference between the Netherlands and Flanders. In the Netherlands the postwar novel was initially dominated by the grim prose of disillusionment, as seen in the work of Anna Blaman, Gerard Reve, and Willem Frederik Hermans, a type of fiction that stuck firmly to the realist tradition so typical of Holland. In Flanders these postwar years already witnessed the first explosion of formally innovative work with Louis Paul Boon, whose subject matter and nihilistic worldview were similar to those of Hermans, but who employed filmic collage techniques and a kaleidoscopic structure. By the time the first wave of formal innovation reached the Netherlands in the 1960s, experimental fiction was well established in Flanders, as Hugo Claus and Ivo Michiels demonstrated. The new “absolute” or “lingual” prose merely extended this line — and in so doing paid homage to Maurice Gilliams, who had consistently structured his prose on musical principles in the 1930s.

These divergences between North and South in the 1960s may reflect not only the dominant presence of Reve and Hermans in Holland but also a greater openness in Flanders to developments in France. Authors like Ivo Michiels, Paul de Wispelaere, and Daniël Robberechts conducted experiments that were obviously grafted on the French nouveau roman. This also applies to the Dutch writer Jacq Firmin Vogelaar (1944–), but his position in the Netherlands remained marginal. The early work of Jeroen Brouwers (1940–), whose autobiographical writings adopted an intricate, fugue-like form, was exceptional in going against the current. The continuing strength of the Dutch realist tradition may also be the reason why Cees Nooteboom (1933–) did not make his prose breakthrough until Rituals (Rituelen, 1980), which was published in a new, more experiment-friendly, climate; his debut, the poetic Philip and the Others (Philip en de anderen) had appeared as far back as 1955. Nooteboom’s novel in nouveau roman style, The Knight Has Died (De ridder is gestorven, 1963), a technically ingenious contemplation on authorship, provoked little response when it was first published. J. Bernlef is another writer whose prose only began to reach a broad readership in the 1980s. We will return to them later. Let us first look at what the experiments in prose amounted to in practice.

Early experiments that Bert Schierbeek (1918–96) conducted in the immediate postwar years used an associative style and typographical arrangements that challenged the distinction between prose and poetry, but they remained an isolated phenomenon in Holland. The 1960s, however, produced a number of novels that have since become classics. The greatest formal innovator to emerge in Holland was Sybren Polet, soon followed by J. F. Vogelaar and Gerrit Krol, as well as the older debutant Willem Brakman (1922–2008). But even established writers like Hermans and especially Mulisch adopted the innovative forms practiced by younger writers. In fact both had already begun to puncture the illusion of reality in earlier work, Hermans in the collection Paranoia (1953), Mulisch with The Stone Bridal Bed (1959).

Sybren Polet (1924–) set up an ambitious experiment in several books linked by the presence of a figure called Lokien, who appears with great regularity, and by various recurring motifs, such as changes of identity, metamorphosis, and rebirth. Lokien, who is introduced in Polet’s very first novel, Breakwater (Breekwater, 1961), is a linguistic phenomenon, perpetually transforming himself and quite unlike the standard idea of a psychologically detailed or rounded character. In Xpertise (1978) Lokien takes the form of various deities and other figures. In these books literature is no longer primarily a representation of reality; rather it is a game with identity and transformation, whose central concern is ultimately an investigation into the truth-value of literature. If literature is reality, then what kind of reality is it? There is no way, the author suggests (in the wake of contemporary philosophers), that literature can depict reality directly. Language is a system of conventionally determined symbols, and conventions are static and fixed. Polet’s intention was to disrupt convention with each new book he wrote.

In Breakwater Polet renames the novel’s central character, initially called Mr. Godgiven, after just seven short paragraphs:

Now that the first week of creation is coming to an end, we are replacing the name of Mr. Godgiven with a different name, since Godgiven is really a very emotionally charged name, unnecessarily reviving memories of a previous life. . . . He practices the same profession, possesses the same body. And he thinks: I don’t yet need hormone injections from a writer who is a perfect stranger, I, Godgiven.

The new name Breakwater is a symbolic reference to birth, to the breaking of the waters as labor begins — an ironic reference to the creation of a fictional character. Breakwater is obsessed with growing older and dying but seems otherwise to lead a normal life. Married with children, he also has an affair with his secretary. He fails to get a grip on reality, however. He dies twice in the book (or experiences death in his imagination), and his independence as a character is called into question by the Lokien figure who wanders through the novel and converses with him. Here Lokien is a writer, perhaps even the creator of the fictional Breakwater; this is only one of the many means by which the traditional illusion of reality is willfully disrupted. Polet uses various ways of creating unexpected layers of meaning, in order to demonstrate that literary reality is conventional, artificially, “made” as well as made up.

Polet himself described the Lokien figure as a variable, transformational figure, comparable to the “X-man” and “Mr. X” who appear in his poetry cycle Person/Unperson (Persoon/Onpersoon, 1971). The fact that X’s philosophy is repeated here also indicates that Polet recycles his own work, as Ivo Michiels was to do some years later. From the 1970s onward Polet began to add historical texts as well, projecting the Lokien figure onto the past, in the case of The Birth of a Mind (De geboorte van een geest, 1974) onto the history of Amsterdam. In Xpertise (1978) the main character is a travel writer who is collecting material for a novel in which he will “rewrite” the past from his own imagination, and which will be called “History’s Top Hat.” Polet’s novel with that very title did indeed appear more than twenty years later (De hoge hoed der historie, 1999); its main character (who appears in one of the stories as Loquin) travels through various eras as a wandering Jew. It is a masterful historical novel in which the central figure is “forever the same and always another,” now a detective in nineteenth-century London, then a partygoer at the time of Nero, a teller of sagas in medieval Greenland, or an explorer traveling into the distant future.

The Lokien books have an open structure as a series as well. Each book looks back to one of the others and encompasses it in a new whole. Ivo Michiels would use the same method in his voluminous Journal-brut cycle of the 1980s and 1990s, regenerating texts from his earlier Alpha cycle of the 1960s and 1970s. The composition of such vast cycles seems typical of writers who focus on literature as formal construction. After Sybren Polet, Ivo Michiels, and Willy Roggeman (1935–) in the 1960s and 1970s, A. F. Th. van der Heijden (1951–) would follow suit in the 1980s with his cycle of novels The Toothless Era (De tandeloze tijd).

Hugo Claus made his prose debut when he was barely twenty-one years old; The Duck Hunt (1950), as described in the previous section, was an astonishing experiment with multiple perspectives. His novel Wonderment (De verwondering, 1962) turned out to be the most significant innovatory novel of the 1960s. It tells a complicated story, in which a mentally ill teacher writes his autobiography, but his direct account alternates with a report of his life that he is writing at the request of his psychiatrist. There are two further layers to the narrative, one containing strictly secret personal notes and another situated in “the community” and narrated by a “we” character — a technique pioneered by Gerard Walschap. For readers of Wonderment it is often hard to tell exactly where the transitions take place and in which of the layers they find themselves at any given moment. But the greatest source of confusion — or of alienation from traditional ways of reading — is the absence of a fixed perspective. Whereas in Louis Paul Boon’s Chapel Road the reader can interpret the fictional world as a whole from the perspective of the storyline set in the present, with the narrator Boontje’s own story acting as a framework, in Wonderment even that degree of guidance is missing. There is only a unsettling multiplicity of viewpoints, all commingling to produce an impression of total relativity. The absence of an orienting vision is clearly meant to imply that there is no truth or certainty; the form itself destabilizes or undermines all certainty.

What makes Wonderment a typical postmodern novel is the insistent use of intertextuality. The book is packed with references to contemporary and especially past cultures. Claus himself once explained that Wonderment was an allegory and should not be interpreted purely literally. References to the work of countless writers, artists, and filmmakers, from John Keats to Rainer Maria Rilke, from Jacob van Ruysdael to James Ensor and Alain Resnais, make up a vast tangle of allusions and ambiguities. The main guiding thread that can help toward a possible, or sensible, interpretation is Dante’s Divine Comedy. Claus focused on one section of the Divine Comedy, namely “Hell,” and his version follows Dante one minute before turning him upside down the next. He rewrites and plays with the original text, as he does with a large array of texts from world literature, which are virtually impossible for the average reader to trace back to their sources. Not surprisingly, perhaps, Wonderment has been called “a mannerist reflection on the cultural tradition.” Claus joined together different frames of reference, principally the pagan world of antiquity and the Christian middle ages, freely and brazenly changing, distorting, parodying, and perverting his sources. That process of adopting, adapting, and appropriating quotations became a stylistic hallmark of Claus’s work, not only in his prose and poetry but also in his plays, graphic art, and films. Paradox, parody, travesty, and irony continued to inform his entire production as a novelist.

The same all-pervasive doubt and uncertainty, though without Claus’s breezy, parodic approach, lie at the root of the four-part Alpha cycle by Ivo Michiels (1923–). This cycle, which consists of the above-mentioned Book Alpha (1963) plus the subsequent novels Orchis militaris (1968), Exit (1971), and Dixi(t) (1979), is a prime example of a quest for autonomous or abstract prose that no longer makes any pretense of representing reality but stands instead as an independent linguistic construct. Michiels resolutely renounced narrative and autobiographical elements. In Exit, for example, he concentrates on recording linguistic registers or “semantic fields,” such as the language of card playing or a game of battleships. “What I write is unreadable,” the narrator notes in passing, “but it doesn’t matter, it’s not meant to be read, it’s meant to serve writing.” Some recorded conversations are reminiscent of Samuel Beckett’s absurdist drama, but for Michiels alienation as such is no longer a concern. Instead he concentrates on making states of language autonomous:

It ripples, it makes rings, and rings around the rings, without end, without sound, rings that produce rings, from the little ringing center pushing repeatedly outward a stone drips from the eye. Thus this looking: producing rings across the surface. Thus this listening, this searching, attempting, penetrating, fathoming, squeezing. Thus this essay, this assignment, this writing on assignment.

Consistent with the idea that all the usual forms of communication have been swept aside, the piece ends with a 0 (nil, naught, or the black hole). For Michiels the prime example of this kind of non-referential, “absolute” writing was the French nouveau roman — we could call it the French version of postmodernism — and in particular the work of Alain Robbe-Grillet, whose novels, including The Erasers (Les gommes, 1953) and In the Labyrinth (Dans le labyrinthe, 1959), were read avidly in Flanders. Robbe-Grillet’s theoretical appeal For a New Novel (Pour un nouveau roman, 1963, 1970) became a key manifesto for young Flemish writers. As a result, literature in Dutch developed modes of writing that have virtually no parallel in English.

A technique typical of the nouveau roman is to settle upon an image or situation to which all kinds of hypotheses can be attached, or of which different renditions are given. The near repetition of the same scene, each time slightly altered, is a limitless source of ambiguity. The freezing or recording of movement, or the abolition of the distinction between motion and motionlessness, became the basic motif of Michiels’s fiction. We also find it in Willy Roggeman (1934–). Whereas Michiels started to pick up narrative elements again in later work, for Roggeman, who took a close interest in jazz music and in the German modernist poet Gottfried Benn, there was no way back from this “cerebral” prose. To the rampant formlessness of reality he opposed the power of the artistic act to freeze and crystallize form. Rejecting the continuity of storytelling, he preferred the fragmentary texts that read like diary entries. However, his textual experiments, such as Blues for Glass Blowers (Blues voor glazen blazers, 1964) and The Summery Nil (Het zomers nihil, 1967), proved inaccessible to a broad readership; many of them were never even published.

Michiels’s fortunes were quite different. In the 1980s his work acquired fresh élan and found new readers. His Book Alpha was initially read as the chaotic stream of consciousness of the sentry introduced in the prologue, which made it seem less abstract and impenetrable. In view of Michiels’s later development, however, the book may also be read as an associatively constructed totality in which all antitheses and layers of time, both the present and reminders of earlier scenes, become caught in opposing currents and therefore neutralized. In subsequent books of the Alpha cycle, Michiels experimented further with apparently unconnected sequences of text. In these fragments, which include a great many poetic passages, he probed different forms of linguistic usage, each of which illustrates the power of the word in its own way. For Michiels words and the act of writing stand for the life force and victory over death.

In 1983 Michiels published The Archangel’s Wives (De vrouwen van de aartsengel), the first in a new ten-part cycle called Journal brut, completed in 2001, each book of which is built around a complicated structure founded on geometrical and alchemical figures. The new basic form, the diary, leaves room for “traditional” narrative elements, yet here too what matters is not so much the coherence of the narration as its composition, the writing itself. The long journey of Michiels’s experiment, it appears, eventually led to a self-reflexive linguistic structure in which earlier texts are given a new place and help to generate new texts. In this way the Journal brut cycle, the publication of which covered the last few decades of the twentieth century, echoes the international “biographical turn,” which we will examine shortly. As in Paul de Wispelaere’s The Charred Alphabet, the new diary genre combines the autobiographical with reflections on the profession and function of authorship:

Writing about your own pain and grace may be the unambiguous mission of a journal cycle, but the limits imposed by your own hesitancy need to be stretched wider and wider (at least, that is the lesson experience has taught us) if you want to show that you are really up to the task, no matter how much you may otherwise have wanted to give the assignment intellectual standing and creative élan by burrowing at your resistant self and overcoming it by writing about it, . . . using autobiography to rise above biography.

A different kind of experiment was performed in the Netherlands by Jacq F. Vogelaar, who, as we have seen, also drew upon the French nouveau roman, but whose view of society derived from the critical philosophers of the Frankfurt School. Vogelaar published “open” texts in which he explored the forms of a possible reality. At the heart of this worldview lay a Marxist vision according to which the world is multidimensional and mobile, and therefore changeable. Vogelaar is another writer opposed to the familiar image of the real world in literature, which he dismisses as impoverishing and unable to answer to reality. His social analysis, first presented in Anatomy of a Glasslike Body (Anatomie van een glasachtig lichaam, 1966), led him to write “situation novels” that offer a fragmentary and capricious kaleidoscopic world image, produced by means of a montage, in collage form, of heterogeneous material. In subsequent work, Vogelaar’s standpoint became further radicalized until he no longer created an image of reality at all but a critical investigation of what he saw as the “reprehensible” linguistic usage and mentality of his contemporaries. Readers lost interest, judging Vogelaar’s texts, like those of Roggeman, inaccessible.

Jacques Hamelink (1939–) adopted a halfway position. A writer of both poetry and prose, he made his debut with the collection of partly symbolic and partly realistic stories The Vegetable Regime (Het plantaardig bewind, 1964) and established his reputation with Ranunculus or the History of an Individuation (Ranonkel of de geschiedenis van een verzelving, 1969), a book with its own mythical dimensions. The “individuation” or “self-realization” of humanity, a reference to the psychology of Carl Gustav Jung, is evoked in an apocalyptic style. Humankind finds itself in a civilization showing symptoms of decline in the face of nature, which is all-powerful and eternal. The same subject is central to Hamelink’s poetry and seems to be part of his personal mythology, making him an exception among his contemporaries.

Breaking Taboos

One spectacular aspect of the change in mentality that took place during the 1960s was a general liberalization of norms. People “freely” experimented with sex and with consciousness-expanding substances, and there was greater tolerance for literary descriptions of eroticism. This liberation from the straitjacket of bourgeois propriety came fairly suddenly, and the speed of change increased its impact. The boundary between what was and was not permitted shifted with the arrival of several authors who conveyed to a quickly growing readership the excitement of breaking sexual taboos.

The novel that caused the most fuss in the roaring sixties was I, Jan Cremer (Ik, Jan Cremer, 1964), the first book by Jan Cremer (1940–), who promoted it from the start as an “inexorable bestseller.” His model was Henry Miller, who had done something similar long before, but around whom the taboo was only lifted in the 1960s. The significance of I, Jan Cremer was a time-bound phenomenon; its literary value is minimal. It is a picaresque novel in which sexual adventures take pride of place in an environment replete with drugs, violence, and alcohol. Cremer can in many respects be seen as a Dutch counterpart to Jack Kerouac; one of those who translated I, Jan Cremer into English in 1965 was the alternative poet and heroin addict Alexander Trocchi.

Jef Geeraerts. The Hague, Literary Museum.

Time has been kinder to Jan Wolkers and Jef Geeraerts. In their books the vitalist, direct experience of eroticism is again described without restraint, but each developed a unique style and vision of reality and wrote testimonial literature of lasting value. The more popular of the two was Jan Wolkers (1925–2007) who, significantly, was also the one who stuck closer to the realist narrative tradition. He received a great deal more attention from literary critics than was given to the experimental writers. Wolkers made his name with the novels Crew Cut (Kort Amerikaans, 1962) and A Rose of Flesh (Een roos van vlees, 1963), as well as several short-story collections. Not only his debut novel but all his books were a way of settling scores with his background and milieu, which had been defined by a domineering father and a strict, dogmatic Calvinist faith. The liberating effect of his work was therefore much deeper and broader than an audacious approach to love and sex could have produced on its own. The author was clearly struggling with an existential problem, which he kept having to write out of his system. The immense success of his best-known novel, Turkish Delight (Turks fruit, 1969), was largely attributable to the film adaptation, but the book, a love story that can be read in several quite different, even contradictory, ways, has the hallmarks of a bestseller. Readers were impressed above all by the tempestuous erotic scenes, but the novel is also permeated by themes of death, doom, and decay that would become Wolkers’ trademark. The love story ends with the protagonist’s tragic death, her body destroyed by cancer. From this point in Wolkers’s work onward, death and decay would by their very nature form an opposite pole to all that was pure. In his later books too, eroticism was associated with destruction, which tallies with what, in his very different style, Gerard Reve was doing.

Jan Wolkers. The Hague, Literary Museum.

A comparable settling of scores with, and liberation from, the author’s hidebound background and milieu can be found in the stylistically gripping account presented by the Gangrene (Gangreen) novels of the Flemish writer Jef Geeraerts (1930–). The cycle comprises four books, of which the first two are called Gangrene (Gangreen I, 1968; Gangreen II, 1972). In these early novels Geeraerts writes mainly about his experiences as a government official in the former Belgian Congo, which gained its independence in 1960. Uninhibited eroticism and a barely controlled impetuosity follow his escape from the stifling Catholicism of his youth in Flanders. Geeraerts’s strongly autobiographical accounts appealed to a broad public, and not only because of their content: for many readers their fascination may have lain in their stylistic qualities, including their insistently pulsing rhythm, with which the writer records his passion and obsession, apparently without constraint. Gangrene I begins with a sentence that continues nonstop for five pages in a single, breathless eruption:

“God in heaven, it’s already 1967 and what I’m about to tell you happened right at the beginning of that heathen, holy period, in the year 1955, the year of the basalt virgin, ha, she was just thirteen and her nipples still stood pointing outward and upward and a thing like that doesn’t last long in warm countries, but we spent the whole of those four goddamned months in a flush of refined pleasure . . .”

After his four Gangrene novels Geeraerts embarked on a second career as a writer of socially engaged crime novels and political thrillers.

Gerard Reve also broke taboos, in a manner all his own. His writing career was marked by a succession of commotions of one kind or another. In the early 1950s a travel grant allocated to him was withdrawn because a novella he published that year was said to be incompatible with the norms of “public order and decency.” As a result of this particular dispute he decided to write exclusively in English and went to live in London for several years where, among other things, he worked as a nurse at the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases and took a course at the British Drama League. A collection written in English, The Acrobat and Other Stories (1956), received little attention, however, and he returned to the Netherlands. In his epistolary works On the Way to the End (Op weg naar het einde, 1963) and Nearer to Thee (Nader tot U, 1966) he found an utterly individual form combining autobiography with testimony and narrative. These collections of letters are based on his actual private correspondence, including reports of his travels and letters to friends. In the opening missive, Reve wrote candidly about his homosexual proclivities for the first time. In other letters too he yields to all kinds of frank, mostly somber memories, broaching various subjects in which homosexuality, writing, death, and religion are central. Reve joined the Catholic Church and created a uniquely ironic and ambiguous confession of faith. A notorious passage in Nearer to Thee, where he describes copulating with a god incarnated as a donkey, landed him in court on a charge of blasphemy.

Nearer to Thee also contains a description of “revian love” in which the adoration of “the Pitiless Boy” achieves a sacral character, and death, love, and religion converge. The beloved boy is a godlike figure, and professions of love draw on the Catholic liturgy. One of the “Spiritual Songs” in Nearer to Thee, called “Song of Thanks for the Lamb,” goes:

With his photo in my free hand

I shoot my Seed towards eternity,

where Stu Sutcliffe, chosen so young

for eternal bliss, is relay-fucked

by God, beside himself with lust.

The closing lines are:

Thou seest me, but dost not laugh at me.

Since Thou art Love, Thou hast made up for it again,

for once admitting honestly that it was not my fault.

My Son, my Lamb, I love Thee such an awful lot.83

Such subjects, especially the open discussion of homosexuality and the linking of religion and eroticism, were still unfamiliar and often shocking to readers of the time. They also provoked opposition from many critics. As with the publication of The Evenings, the response was a fierce repudiation of “all the nihilistic misery of these young authors.” But for Reve himself, On The Way to the End was a first step “on the way to redemption,” and for many readers the “shamelessly honest and disconcerting confessions of faith” in his epistolary collections had a liberating effect. They also proved to be an inspiring example to writers like Andreas Burnier (1931–2002). Her work, like Reve’s, was valued as a major contribution to the emancipation of homosexual men and women in the Netherlands. The powerful influence of Reve’s work cannot, however, be attributed to its subject matter alone (the same could be said of Burnier, incidentally); it is also, indeed principally, a result of stylistic peculiarities. In resonant, extravagant sentences Reve combines solemn, exalted language with banal and colloquial usages that have the effect of trivializing that same solemnity and exaltation.

III. The Imagination Seizes Power, 1970–1980

Anne Marie Musschoot

The Return to Realism

The new decade began with the publication of a Manifesto for the Seventies (Manifest voor de jaren zeventig), which called for literary texts to become more readable. This was clearly a reaction against experimentalism and to the so-called “new gibberish” of Jacq F. Vogelaar and the group around the magazine Grid (Raster). The magazine had been established in 1967 by H. C. ten Berge (1938–), a poet, prose writer, and essayist averse to “confessional lyricism” and “emotional poetry.” His aim was — with a term derived from Ezra Pound — “logopoeia,” in other words “a form of poetry in which the intellect is an abiding element, part of the engine driving it, and is given a clear task, as in Pound’s Cantos, for example.”

It is characteristic of literary developments in these years that Grid ceased publication in 1973 but returned in 1977, at which point a debate ensued about the relationship between literature and society, and between literature and creative processes in the other arts. Grid was interested in literature that focused on form, in the making and creating of art, and in techniques of writing as such. It championed “literature as adventure” and welcomed experimentation; in fact its enthusiasm for radically innovative writing only increased after the attacks from proponents of “recognizable realism.” Literature is a construct, Vogelaar claimed, not something that emanates from a great personality; the swipe at the cult of personality as the Forum critics had defined it in the 1930s was unmistakable. Nevertheless the legacy of Forum remained — and remains to this day — a powerful force in Dutch literary criticism, with its strong preference for realism. The magazine Grid met with little public sympathy and was regularly ridiculed in the press. However, it did help to crystallize the debate around two clearly divergent conceptions of literature that came to the fore around 1970, and H. C. ten Berge himself achieved broad recognition as a poet and prose writer.

Immediately after 1970 and the publication of the Manifesto for the Seventies it seemed as if supporters of a “tell it like it is” approach would be proved right and the underlying current of traditional mimetic prose, which had never gone away, would return to prominence. The start of the decade saw a strong revival of the realist novel and the short-story genre, with its so-called “minor anecdotalism” and “domestic realism.” Within a few years, however, there was a resurgence of the desire to demonstrate, through a concentration on form, the impossibility of a truthful representation of reality. Symptomatic of this revived trend was the emergence of anti-mimetic ideas in the work of a new generation grouped around the magazine The Reviser (De revisor) in 1974. These young writers consciously aimed at an “aberrant” form of presentation, telling their stories in such a way that they not only portrayed reality but also called it into question.

Alongside these two prominent tendencies a possible third emerged. Several authors, including Gerard Reve and the poet Gerrit Komrij (1944–), appropriated nineteenth-century and fin-de-siècle romantic and decadent elements, in more or less ironic fashion. This same decadent tone appeared to be taken up by several younger writers, including Joyce & Co. (the collective pseudonym of Geerten Meijsing and others). Whether it is possible to speak of a separate trend here remains a moot point.

Realism flourished in prose a decade or so later than in poetry, and it was marked by deliberate miniaturism. The new realist prose of the 1970s concentrated on the small, the ordinary, the everyday, and its style is decidedly unpretentious. A plea for fiction that would paint a “recognizable” world held open the possibility of an ironic approach, and it was primarily this ironic version of realism that became successful in the 1970s. Irony is fundamental to the attitude to life exhibited by Maarten Biesheuvel (1939–), the author of several collections of short stories that were realistic yet absurd and grotesque. It seems almost inevitable that the success of this type of realism-in-a-minor-key would be accompanied by a flourishing of the short-story genre; the sudden success of brief opinion pieces in newspapers fits this context as well.

Neo-realist authors have many features in common. The brevity of the form imposes certain limitations. Stories tended to seize upon a single everyday occurrence and describe it simply and lucidly. Harking back to the tradition of Nescio and Willem Elsschot earlier in the century, the new realism showed a preference for a plain style of narrative, an abhorrence of pathos and self-importance, and a focus on the common and even the trivial, treated with appropriate self-irony. It was a type of writing that remained close to the experience of daily life of a broad readership.

The limited field of vision of this “domestic realism” also provoked animosity. The most vehement attack came from Jeroen Brouwers, whose own volcanic talent was the diametric opposite of the cozy “simplicity” of neo-realists and their “thin little books.” In his polemical pamphlet The New Reviser (De nieuwe revisor, 1979) Brouwers talked of “the web of infantilization in Dutch literature,” ridiculing the work of, among others, Mensje van Keulen (1946–). Van Keulen had made her debut with the short novel Bleeker’s Summer (Bleekers zomer, 1972), followed that same year by the story collection All Tears (Allemaal tranen). The title indicates the tone of the stories: meticulous, unaffected descriptions of different signs of decay. Bleeker’s Summer was one of several books that led critics to speak of the “smell of boiled sprouts” in Dutch literature.

Maarten ’t Hart. The Hague, Literary Museum.

The work of Maarten ’t Hart (1944–) could be seen as a representative highlight of traditional realist or mimetic prose, even though he places less emphasis on reflecting reality than on self-expression and he covers far broader themes than his neo-realist contemporaries. A strongly motivated writer with a clear message, he has none of the detachment and irony of the “small-scale” realists and is perhaps closer to the kind of psychological realism found in Simon Vestdijk. Like Vestdijk, ’t Hart is a prolific writer, and again like Vestdijk he is both a literary critic and a music critic. The novel A Flight of Curlews (Een vlucht regenwulpen, 1978), which holds up a mirror to the author’s life, became a bestseller. The story alternates between past and present, with scenes in which the central figure, Maarten, a biologist, goes looking for his own identity and comes to realize that he has never let any woman into his life other than his mother. Maarten ’t Hart was soon enjoying a popularity to match that of Jan Wolkers, with whom he shares an obsession with the subject of self-liberation from a strict Calvinist milieu and background.

From Depiction to Imagination

The new generation of writers who came to prominence in 1974 in the magazine The Reviser brought about a shift that revitalized Dutch fiction. The group included Dirk Ayelt Kooiman (1946–), Frans Kellendonk (1951–90), and Nicolaas Matsier (1945–). Other regular contributors were Doeschka Meijsing (1947–) and A. F. Th. van der Heijden (1951–), who made his debut in The Reviser under the pseudonym Patrizio Canaponi. They were joined by two writers whose work was published in the magazine but who were not really part of the Reviser group, Willem Brakman and Gerrit Krol, both of whom had made their debut in the 1960s.

The Reviser signaled a move from realism to idealism, or from modernism to postmodernism. In contrast to the realist, who merely describes reality, the idealist contributes something of his or her own mind or spirit. An idea is projected upon reality, reducing the real world to the impression the author has formed of it. The tension between realism and idealism is nothing new; in fact it lies at the heart of the medieval debate between realists and nominalists. In the new fiction of the 1970s the imagination took center stage in a reflexive type of prose that sought to convey states of mind, or inner experience.

It seems remarkable that this vision turned out to be such a unifying feature of the new prose, since The Reviser had no common program and issued no explicit declaration of principles of any kind. Indeed, the magazine initially published a varied range of contributions, with space for anyone its editors regarded as a “competent practitioner of literature.” Nevertheless, the phrase “Reviser prose” soon spread. It meant a return to the novel of ideas, in which the plot element was significantly downplayed, and which was characterized by careful composition, expertly crafted narrative structures, and a focus on the writing process itself. The Reviser authors had obviously learnt from the experiments of the 1960s. They too addressed the problematic relationship between fiction and reality, but this was now no longer a matter of marginal experimentation but of a comprehensive technique that once again afforded a place to clearly delineated, intelligible stories. The new writers also consciously placed themselves within an international artistic tradition, taking their lead from Gustave Flaubert, Henry James, James Joyce, Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov, and Witold Gombrowicz.

Critics were quick to label Reviser prose academic, which referred to the academic background of most of the authors concerned, and suggested, somewhat condescendingly, that they were applying models of literary theory and analysis to their creative work. That work itself proved far more accessible than the innovative prose of the 1960s, or perhaps the reading public had become used to non-realist writing. However that may be, the new prose was widely appreciated by readers, and it set a new standard. In 1979 the authoritative critic Carel Peeters (1944–) brought the new writers into the canon of Dutch literature by collecting them in an anthology called The Heart in the Head (Het hart in het hoofd). He also wrote a number of essays in which he welcomed the “return of intelligence and erudition in literature.” Peeters’s essays were collected in Imperishable Illusions (Houdbare illusies, 1984); one remarkable essay in this book, “The Trick of Literature,” concerns the role of imagination in literature and speaks of the imagination as “the regal diversion that leads to a surprising insight into reality”; it could serve as a retrospective program for Reviser prose.

Louis Ferron (1942–2005) played an important role in this shift from “depiction” to “imagination.” Ferron takes up a rather unusual position in Dutch literature, employing themes and techniques all his own. His oeuvre is marked by an enduring fascination for the phenomenon of Fascism in Germany, which he described in several books from the inside out but also, more unusually, from the bottom up, as experienced by marginals and underdogs. Ferron is not alone in his interest in historical reality — postwar literature witnessed a significant revival of the historical novel, as the work of Hella Haasse testifies — but the manner in which he recasts real events of the past for his own purposes by the use of anachronism and by mixing different realities and even different centuries is very unusual indeed. In an interview Ferron asserted that he wanted to abolish the distinction between imagination and reality completely, “because everything is imagination.” He added that he was “very much aware of the fact that history does not exist, at least not in the sense that there is a single interpretation of history.” After all, “each generation interprets history in its own way.”

Most famous is his so-called Teutonic trilogy, consisting of Twilight of the Fools (Gekkenschemer, 1974; the title is a twist on Wagner’s Twilight of the Gods), The Sacrificial Bull (Het stierenoffer, 1975), and The Stonemason of Fichtenwald (De keisnijder van Fichtenwald, 1976). The trilogy paints a picture of Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and analyzes in particular the violent tendencies of its blood and soil ideology. The final volume deals with medical experiments under the Nazi regime (keisnijder also means “mad doctor”). Particularly remarkable is the highly elaborate baroque style, something not at all common in Dutch literature. Ferron was blessed with a surreal and visionary imagination. The use of a downbeat central figure who repeatedly proves to be an unreliable narrator throwing the reader offtrack adds to the emphatically anti-mimetic, non-realist character of the writing. The result is that the boundaries between truth and fiction recede or become porous. The most impressive of his historical novels, Turkish Vespers (Turkenvespers, 1977), is based on the life of Kaspar Hauser. A number of historical and fictional realities flow together in this book, creating a world that could not possibly exist in reality. Rather than defictionalizing the story, Ferron could be said to have fictionalized historical reality, as history expands into one long “anachronistic collage.”

Oek de Jong (1952–) also carved out a unique position in Dutch prose, but in both content and form he remained close to the group around The Reviser. De Jong’s second book, the novel Billowing Summer Frocks (Opwaaiende zomerjurken, 1979), made him famous overnight. Its success is illustrative of the changed spirit of the times and of the individualistic and subjectivist tendency of the 1970s — a reaction against the engagement and euphoric faith in social change of the 1960s. The new era’s fascination with the self also brought a new intensity. Billowing Summer Frocks is a psychological coming-of-age story and at the same time a novel of ideas. Its central figure is Edo, whose development is described in three stages: as an eight-year-old boy, as a precocious adolescent, and as a young adult. The story is a quest for identity, in which many readers, especially the writer’s own contemporaries, recognized themselves. The small boy has discovered a sense of motionlessness bound up with the supreme happiness he felt while riding on the back of his mother’s bicycle. His fascination continues into adolescence, and he keeps searching for the same sensation, trying to fit all the unfathomable things around him into some kind of intellectual system. He becomes caught up in his own reflections, however. Unable to find a balance between thinking and intuition, he looks for a uniting principle (a deity) that eludes him, so that he remains trapped in self-reflection, spiritual narcissism, and even solipsism.

Frans Kellendonk (1951–90), the most talented and most representative author of the Reviser group, analyzed virtually all the dilemmas and clichés of his time, but he did so in a form that enlarges and distorts them until they appear grotesque. His work is a mirror of reality in which life is magnified and made laughable. Kellendonk had a lucid sense of what literature ought to be, and he set this out most clearly in a debate with Maarten ’t Hart. Against ’t Hart’s “writing as self-expression” he held up writing “as investigation, an investigation by means of the imagination.” Kellendonk was in fact formulating the philosophical belief that “the world is our representation” and that no existence, no consciousness, is thinkable outside language. The idea that we live only in language, in books, is worked up into a grand metaphor in the novel Letter and Spirit (Letter en geest, 1982), which takes its cue from the famous story The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges. Kellendonk’s novel can be read as a postmodern parody of the ghost story. The central character, Felix Mandate, gets a job in a library, where he is confronted by a ghost. The protagonist’s “mandate” is a quest for love, which leads nowhere, since he is incapable of contact with others and therefore of love. The message seems to be that there is no message: he who seeks shall not find.

In his most important work, Mystical Body (Mystiek lichaam, 1986), Kellendonk again acts first and foremost as a critic of his own time and culture. The book caused a commotion when the press attributed to the author the anti-Semitic pronouncements of one of its characters. Kellendonk was branded a neo-conservative, an image reinforced by his fascination for religion and more specifically the Catholic faith. Nevertheless, Mystical Body is above all a satire of its time and of the postmodern condition. The novel certainly purports to be a realistic story, constructed around an ordinary family situation, but there is no real central figure and all the characters represent the ideas of their times writ large. It features all kinds of mirror-effects and inversions of situations and texts, including the Easter story, the Song of Songs, and other biblical passages. At the end of the book old father Gijselhart, an arch-conservative, dyed-in-the-wool miser, is confronted by the return home on Easter Monday of his daughter (who is called Trash but whom he appears to love), who informs him that she is pregnant, having been “inseminated” by a Jewish doctor. Not long afterward he has to come to terms with his homosexual son’s having been infected with AIDS (the disease is not named in the book but it is clearly described). This situation gives rise to some provocative pronouncements on sexuality and religion, and on human, social, and cultural relationships in general. They are so ambiguously and ironically formulated, however, that it is difficult to settle on their interpretation, which may explain why some contemporaries considered the book blasphemous. Kellendonk himself described his novel as “a modern morality tale, in which the Pauline image of society as an organism, a mystical body, is contrasted with the desire to distinguish oneself, the addiction to sex, and the fake value of money that destroys real values.” Clearly Kellendonk did include a “message” in his investigation of reality, in contrast to the pervasive postmodernist urge to render everything relative.

The new prose of the 1970s was not a terrain given over exclusively to the Reviser group. Several older authors, Harry Mulisch among them, moved in the same direction. Mulisch emphatically distanced himself from the political and social engagement of the 1960s, including his own, and from the documentary novel. In 1975 he published Two Women (Twee vrouwen), at first sight a realistic and topical novel about two lesbian women. The story of their relationship is told in a series of flashbacks as the older women travels to the south of France. Behind or beneath this realistic layer, however, is a deeper, mythological stratum, as there was even in Mulisch’s earliest work. The book sets out from reality but ends up somewhere else, as Mulisch put it in an interview. The same could certainly be said of The Assault (De aanslag, 1982), a novel about the lasting effects of the Second World War that was probably the most read Dutch novel of the 1980s. Its popularity is no doubt due to the fact that it is both a psychological novel and the enthralling step-by-step revelation of a complex mystery. It also raises profound ethical questions about guilt and retribution. Central to the book is the question of guilt surrounding a traumatic event in the life of the main character, Anton Steenwijk. When Anton is still a boy, his parents and brother are shot by the Germans in occupied Holland in revenge for the killing of a collaborator by the resistance movement. The link between exactly what happened that night in early 1945 and the problematic question of guilt emerges gradually at various phases in Anton’s life. The smooth, apparently effortless narration of the realistic storyline is deceptively simple; in fact, the book is a complex composition full of internal references firmly embedded in a broader cultural and historical context.

Mulisch’s Last Call (Hoogste tijd, 1985), an accessible and realistic novel of the theater, has an intricate structure based on a performance of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. It features an ageing actor who is called on to act the part of an actor playing Prospero and is so overtaken by the role that he actually becomes this other actor. The game with reality and artifice is dizzying. Mulisch’s magnum opus, The Discovery of Heaven (De ontdekking van de hemel, 1992) shows a similarly masterful combination of apparently realistic, mimetic writing and a consummate structure, with multiple layers of meaning. In this monumental and ambitious book the experiences of Quinten Quist and his friend Max Delius not only are bound up with political and intellectual life from the 1960s to 1985 in the Netherlands, and indeed the rest of the world, but even extend as far as heaven, from where the entire sequence of events is orchestrated. Heaven is the “framework” of the story, as indicated in a prologue, an epilogue, and three intermezzos, and there the conclusion is reached that humankind has broken the old covenant, symbolized by the Ten Commandments, because man’s belief in technology has supplanted his belief in God. God’s angels have issued orders for the punishment of human arrogance and the return of the Ten Commandments to heaven, a kind of salvation in reverse that is ultimately successful. The Discovery of Heaven is an extraordinarily gripping and wide-ranging novel. The personal lives of the two central characters form the basis of erudite passages glorifying friendship, but their individual lives are also bound up with the moral, political, and philosophical problems of their time and history, including the Second World War, Auschwitz, revolutionary Cuba, and Fidel Castro.

Like Mulisch, Cees Nooteboom (1933–) is a much translated author who has garnered enormous respect internationally. In fact Nooteboom’s work was initially valued more highly abroad than in Holland, where he only became widely known as a novelist in the 1980s. This has everything to do with the fact that Nooteboom had always led a nomadic existence, first making his name as a literary journalist with travel reportage. Nooteboom is the only author who wrote internationally successful travel prose in Dutch. Attention was not focused on his fiction until the widely appreciated Rituals (Rituelen, 1980), which was awarded the American Pegasus Prize for the best non-American novel. It has an unusual episodic structure in which the main character, Inni Wintrop, is presented in three non-chronological phases of his life. He is preoccupied with the elusiveness of time and with death, which in the context of the eternal and unstoppable course of time represents no more than a trivial incident. In part 1 we learn that Wintrop has survived a suicide attempt. In part 2, set ten years earlier in 1953, young Inni is confronted with the eccentric Arnold Taads, who tries to control his obsession with the passage of time by keeping to a tightly regulated schedule. Part 3 jumps ahead to 1973 and confronts Wintrop with Taads’s son, who in turn tries to extricate himself from time by absorbing himself in Zen and focusing on a Japanese tea ceremony that is described in great detail in the book. Meanwhile, Inni Wintrop attempts to flee into the “little death” of brief sexual encounters with women. All the motifs in the book contribute to two overarching themes: time and the experience of being at one with the world. But this rather weighty philosophical quest for harmony is observed with detachment and skepticism by the protagonist, an outsider, which lends the book a light-hearted, ironic tone.

Death and the obsession with cyclical time, along with memory, are recurrent motifs in Nooteboom’s poetry and prose. In some form or other his prose always features a masterful game with reality and imagination and with the transitions between life and death. With a lightness of touch reminiscent of Italo Calvino or Jorge Luis Borges, Nooteboom exploits the complementary character of these transitions again in the novella A Song of Truth and Semblance (Een lied van schijn en wezen, 1981), in which the writer’s imagination ultimately gains the upper hand. The same is true of In the Dutch Mountains (In Nederland, 1984), a near-mythical tale located in a fictional mountainous region of the southern Netherlands. The story features a foregrounded ironic first-person narrator, who meditates on the past: “Once upon a time there was a time that some people say is still going on. The Netherlands then were much larger than they are now.”

Jeroen Brouwers. Photograph: Stephan Vanfleteren.

In Jeroen Brouwers (1940–) this game with the imagination takes a form that is both obsessive and close to the author’s personal life. Brouwers was born in Batavia (present-day Jakarta), and he devoted three volumes of memoirs to the former Dutch East Indies. In Sunken Red (Bezonken rood, 1981), the second book of the trilogy, he recalls the years he spent with his mother in a Japanese prison camp during the Second World War. His description of the episode is strongly colored by his own personal consciousness. When the book was published in the Netherlands there was widespread debate about its factual accuracy. Rudy Kousbroek (1929–), a journalist who had spent his own childhood in the Dutch East Indies and had also been interned there by the Japanese during the war, carried on a polemic lasting several years contesting Brouwers’s version of the story. The autobiographical and personal flavor of Brouwers’s prose is further accentuated by the baroque richness of his language and by a complex network of motifs. His polemical oeuvre is as extensive as it is vitriolic.

Reviser prose in Holland can be seen as a reaction against the tradition of Dutch realism, but at the same time it forms a link between Dutch literature and international postmodernism. These considerations hardly apply to Flanders, where formal innovation in prose had announced itself much earlier, in the 1950s, with the early work of Louis Paul Boon. In the 1970s Leo Pleysier and Pol Hoste took this tradition further, discarding the linear narration of realist fiction in favor of fragmented structures and varying viewpoints.

Leo Pleysier (1945–), who weaves poetic nuances into his prose and has an uncanny ear for the rhythms of spoken language, has reached a broad readership. The highpoint of his oeuvre are the later novels White Always Looks Good (Wit is altijd schoon, 1989) and The Yellow River is Frozen (De Gele Rivier is bevrozen, 1993). Language and writing style are central to both novels. White Always Looks Good, which takes place at the deathbed of the author’s mother, consists of one long torrent of speech that the dead mother pours out over her son. Its airy tone helps to make it both moving and memorable. The book was successfully adapted as a theater monologue.

In 1979 Pol Hoste (1947–) made a much-talked-of debut with the novella The Changes (De veranderingen), which traced a young intellectual’s alienation from the milieu into which he was born. His second book, Feminine Singular (Vrouwelijk enkelvoud, 1987), in which the author immerses himself in the speech and thought of five female characters, also garnered widespread interest. Hoste’s work, like Pleysier’s, is openly autobiographical, reflecting the inward, “narcissistic” turn that would become increasingly noticeable in the 1980s and 1990s. In Hoste the emphasis lies on the after-effects of an authoritarian upbringing and on the power structures of social intercourse and politics, as a result of which the individual has to navigate a threatening world, alienated, oppressed, and lonely. His prose has become increasingly fractured, with narration in the form of journal entries. In recent work Hoste has taken this fragmentation to even greater extremes.

The neo-decadent trend in fiction is not unlike Reviser prose in some respects, but it also harks back to the nineteenth-century fin-de-siècle. As the end of the twentieth century approached, art and culture began to exhibit remarkable parallels with those of the late nineteenth century, in which interest grew considerably. Movements such as symbolism and naturalism, as well as art forms like Jugendstil and Art Nouveau, were rediscovered, studied, and imitated. For all that, the writers of this neo-decadent tendency are certainly thoroughly contemporary. Theirs is an anti-mimetic conception of literature, based on the philosophical conviction that no objective reality exists independently of the observer and that there is no absolute truth to be had. That preempts any possibility of a truthful portrayal of reality. These writers consequently insist on flaunting the artificial character of art. Art is necessarily artificial because it is constructed; it interprets reality in an effort to understand it. These ideas are not especially “decadent” in themselves. They are very much part of the “investigative function” that Frans Kellendonk attributed to literature, and they form the basis of the large-scale reconstructions that Hugo Claus and Harry Mulisch presented in their most ambitious novels in the 1980s and 1990s, The Sorrow of Belgium (Het verdriet van België, 1983) and The Discovery of Heaven (De ontdekking van de hemel, 1992) respectively. What does distinguish the neo-romantic tendency that came to the fore in both prose and poetry in the late 1970s is its conscious retrieval of fin-de-siècle decadence and aestheticism.

Hugo Claus, 1966. Photograph Walter de Mulder.Antwerp, AMVC House of Literature.

Jan Siebelink (1938–) translated Joris-Karl Huysmans’s novel Against the Grain (A rebours, 1884), often referred to as the bible of decadence, into Dutch in 1977. It appeared as a mass-market paperback, in a large print-run. Siebelink was said to be “Huysmans’s shadow,” an image reinforced by the preference he displayed in his early novels for characters who suffered from their own inability to realize their ideals and build lasting relationships. The atmosphere of his early books is mannerist and decadent, sometimes macabre, akin to the tradition of dark Romanticism in its fascination with death and decay. Later books by Siebelink are in a more realistic vein, so that they began to resemble those by authors such as Maarten ’t Hart, who shares Siebelink’s predilection for Reformed Church settings. Siebelink found popular success with Kneeling on a Bed of Violets (Knielen op een bed violen, 2004) where, he recalls, lovingly and compassionately, the religious circles to which his father belonged.

The most important representative of neo-decadence in the Netherlands is undoubtedly Gerard Reve. Like any great writer he is unique, yet this particular tradition fits him better than any other. In Reve’s work we find an unusual and bold combination of eroticism and religion, combined with the “art for art’s sake” principles of European decadence. In 1972 he reminded readers of Oscar Wilde’s statements that “all art is useless” and “all art is immoral,” reformulating them as: “Art is useless, anti-social, and, like its twin sister religion, amoral.” He ridiculed the social commitment of leftwing writers, insisting that art has “in its deepest essence nothing to do with society.” His willingness to adopt extreme standpoints also gave him a Wilde-like fondness for paradoxical inversions: not just “life imitates art,” but also: nature can be improved by means of artifice, as he put it in a 1972 essay entitled “A Fine Speech . . . For the Mob Who Call Themselves Writers.”

An increasing aversion to political and social commitment as well as to realist or mimetic art can be seen in several writers who made their debut in the second half of the 1970s. Illustrative of this trend is the work of Geerten Meijsing (1950–), who initially published as the “writers’ collective Joyce & Co.” The pseudonym speaks volumes about the author’s powerful mythomania. His one-man collective aimed high right from the start. His first novel, Erwin (1975), was launched as the first in a trilogy and described by the author as “a romantic-decadent proposition about spleen, melancholy, and the tradition of authorship.” Subsequent volumes would treat painting and music as “propositions.” With his dandyesque appearance and public persona, Meijsing is the epitome of decadence, both as a writer and as an individual. He models himself after French symbolists and decadent authors like Baudelaire and Huysmans, whom he regularly quotes. He chooses, as do his fictional heroes, to live in an artificial, synthetic world of pastiche, garbled borrowings, and archaic styles and modes. His deprecation of vitality and originality is accompanied by a predilection for the themes of “sodomy, blasphemy, treachery, lying, deceit, sacrilege, and incest.” Another recurring theme is Venice, the ultimate symbolic cliché of decay and decline, whose effectiveness was confirmed by the success of Luchino Visconti’s 1971 film after Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice.

Poetry between Autonomy and Romanticism

In poetry, too, the 1970s present a varied landscape. In the same period that neo-romantic poetry came to prominence, another kind of poetry developed that revealed a more autonomous conception of language. The most famous poets of this “hermetic” tendency were Gerrit Kouwenaar and Hans Faverey, whose work proved extremely influential. Their search for new means of expression is closely related to that of the language-oriented prose writers such as Sybren Polet and Ivo Michiels. As we have seen, Polet wrote poetry as well as prose.

The distinction between neo-romantic and autonomous or language-oriented poetry is not always clear-cut. It is based on a further development of two modernist traditions that arose out of two distinct conceptions of poetry. Romantic poetry was in essence expressive and communicative. Romantic poets express emotions and create art on the basis of imagination; they claim prophetic status and often a clear social function as well. Post-romantic or symbolist poetry by contrast — the tradition of Mallarmé and Valéry, Eliot and Rilke — places the emphasis on the artwork itself as a linguistic object, an autonomous creation set free of its creator. It is true that even in the Romantic or “impure” tradition (the term serves to distinguish it from the “pure” or autonomous tradition) language is central, so designations like “lingual” or “language-oriented” are misleading. But unlike Romantic poets, the poets who work in the tradition of pure poetry are preoccupied with the creative process itself. They are “constructivists,” for whom the poem is not a direct expression but, in Eliot’s famous term, an “objective correlative” of personal feelings.

In modern Dutch poetry, a writer like Sybren Polet draws upon the impure Romantic tradition that comprises Walt Whitman, Emile Verhaeren, and Pablo Neruda. Gerrit Kouwenaar, by contrast, appeals emphatically to the autonomic, pure or hermetic tradition. Some poets start out at one end of the spectrum and work their way to the other. Paul van Ostaijen evolved from humanitarianism or Romanticism to organic and impersonal expressionism. Rutger Kopland shifted from an expressive, anecdotal vision to an increasingly abstract, language-oriented idiom. J. Bernlef, too, relinquished naked realism and, both as a poet and as a prose writer, developed into a pronounced constructivist, a “maker,” whereas Kouwenaar moved in exactly the opposite direction.

The magazine Grid (Raster), edited by the poet and prose writer H. C. ten Berge for most of the 1970s, was the main outlet for the debate around and self-positioning of autonomous poetry. It published a number of “neo-experimentalists,” who showed a keen interest in international developments, literary theory, and other art forms. Averse to poetry as self-expression, they concentrated on investigating the poetic medium itself. Especially in poets like Ten Berge, Rein Bloem, and Hans Faverey, poetry became essentially an epistemological process, which could also enter into dialogue with the cultural and mythological heritage (the latter being a particular feature of Jacques Hamelink’s work). The strongly meta-textual and intertextual character of this poetry gave it a distinctly postmodern feel.

The most important “autonomous” or “language-oriented” poets are Gerrit Kouwenaar and Hans Faverey. In the 1970s Kouwenaar had a huge influence on several younger poets, including Peter Nijmeijer (1947–), Wiel Kusters (1947–), Huub Beurskens (1950–), Hans Tentije (1944–), Ad Zuiderent (1944–), and Rein Bloem (1932–). Bloem was also one of the critics who helped to confirm Kouwenaar’s key position.

For Kouwenaar (1923–), poetry is not primarily a means to “convey” thoughts and feelings. Rather, a poem is a “world in words,” and language is the raw material to be used in shaping a new, independent reality. The central concern in his work is therefore the problematic relationship between language and reality, or between words — Kouwenaar speaks of “names”—and things. The aim is not to write about things but to “reduce a word to its materiality,” a conception of poetry that he summarizes in the phrase “the poem as thing.” The desire to “make the word flesh” is an extension of what the Fifties Poets were attempting, but it goes much further, because it simultaneously negates itself as impossible. The poet does succeed, using words, in creating something out of nothing, but that which he evokes never really acquires physical materiality. He can “name names,” but whatever is made present in this way remains a “thing of words” and therefore, in reality, absent. This typically postmodern, Derridean subject matter had already made its first impressive appearance in Kouwenaar’s collection without names (zonder namen, 1962), which included the cycle “gone/vanished,” inspired by the demolition of a building on the Frederiksplein in Amsterdam. The reader is faced with an object that remains remarkably indeterminate, an “it” that is “gone,” is no longer there, an absence or emptiness made present again in and by the poem. The central paradox — the demolition of the building gives rise to the construction of the poem — is made to apply also to Kouwenaar’s own endeavor. He appears in the final poem as the “killer,” the demolition man taking leave of his work.

Demolition that is actually construction, and vice versa, has continued to haunt Kouwenaar’s work as an unattainable ideal. The poem can never be made “material,” and language remains unable to render absence concrete. From the late 1970s onward, beginning with Totally Perfect Inedible Peach (Volledig volmaakt oneetbare perzik, 1978), Kouwenaar allowed more narrative elements into his poetry, picking up the thread of his earliest verse at the time of the Fifties movement. Since then his poems have “opened up” significantly, making room for “the sentiment of mortality,” but without abandoning the fascination with deliberate construction. In Landscapes and Other Events (Landschappen en andere gebeurtenissen, 1974) he put it as follows:

the shaping of almost, unshaping

of certain, steeling

of water, attempt

at a peep-hole to what remains closed84

For Hans Faverey (1933–90), as for Kouwenaar, poetry meant “working with language” in the tradition of pure poetry. The critic Rein Bloem identified above all connections with Mallarmé and Paul Celan, but also drew attention to intertextual references to Sappho and the Bible and to philosophers like Heraclitus and Zeno, as well as to Japanese Zen Buddhism. Right from his first collection, Poems (Gedichten, 1968), Faverey consistently constructed language worlds that seemed forbiddingly difficult to access. His subject was what he regarded as the hallmark of poetry: out of nothingness and silence the poet creates something made of language — and then breaks it down again or causes it to disappear. Readers who step into the language laboratory of the poem enter a “period of precarious / dislocation,” a kind of temporary isolation where they abandon themselves to the poet’s “snippets of meaning,” a language game that offers no firm foothold. Gradually Faverey’s fascination with death, with disappearance and mortality, took on a more recognizable character. From Chrysanthemums, Rowers (Chrysanten, roeiers, 1977) onward he began to write somewhat more accessible poetry, inspired by Paul van Ostaijen’s late work. In The Lacked (Het ontbrokene, 1990) the battle with death acquires an autobiographical aspect in several profoundly personal poems. Initially regarded as “unreadable,” Faverey has since been recognized as one of the outstanding figures of Dutch literature, to be mentioned in the same breath as Gorter, Van Ostaijen, Claus, and Lucebert. Here is the final poem in the cycle “Chrysanthemums, Rowers”:

Unhurriedly; that is how

they approach: 8 rowers,

ever further inland

 

growing into their mythology:

with each stroke still further

from home, rowing with all their might;

growing till all the water is gone

and they fill the whole landscape

 

to the brim. Eight —

rowing ever further

inland; landscape in which there is by now no

more water: overgrown

landscape by now. Landscape,

rowing ever further in-

 

land; land

without rowers; land by now over-

rown.85

The speaking voice captures the alienation that is human existence as a movement that slowly freezes and comes to a standstill; it is an image of life as a “brief little movie,” as Faverey put it in an interview.

In the decades around the middle of the twentieth century the internal dynamic of literary history showed a rapid pendulum motion, whose swings were manifestly linked to external causes. In prose, the postwar explosion of thematic and formal innovation led to a return to the traditional realism, followed by a broadening of objective reality into a subjectively experienced universe, which left space for the imagination and for neo-decadent and neo-romantic elements. In poetry, shifts of a similar nature had occurred a few years earlier; after the experiments of the Fifties Movement, the 1960s saw a clearly restorative return to reality. In the 1970s the focus moved toward more traditional themes and forms.

The remarkable course taken by Hans Verhagen and Armando, who had prepared the way for “hard” new realism in the Netherlands, can be seen as representative of this shift. Both Verhagen’s Thousands of Sunsets (Duizenden zonsondergangen, 1971) and Armando’s Diary of a Perpetrator (Dagboek van een dader, 1973), marked the transition to neo-romanticism. They replaced the cool, objective registering of external reality with an admittedly still-veiled representation of subjective sensations and an atmosphere of melancholy and yearning. It was the concealing or veiling of individual emotions that turned out to be significant. Neo-romantic poetry would voice the “eternal” longing for lost harmony in a multiplicity of ironic registers.

A feature all the different offshoots of neo-romanticism have in common, aside from the subject matter of wistful nostalgia, is the return to traditional forms. In the 1970s the sonnet made a comeback, especially in the work of Jan Kal (1946–) and Jan Kuijper (1947–). Traditional rhyming schemes and metrical patterns were also in vogue again, together with an archaic poeticizing idiom that trivialized grand gestures and exalted feelings, covering them with a sheen of irony. Relativism, irony, pastiche, and ambiguity set the tone.

The most consistently surprising of the neo-romantic poets was Gerrit Komrij (1944–), who also made a name for himself as a critic and compiler of trend-setting anthologies. His debut collection, Magdeburg Hemispheres and Other Poems (Maagdenburgse halve bollen en andere gedichten, 1968), complete with dazzling craftsmanship and a motto taken from A. C. W. Staring, claimed a direct line of descent from nineteenth-century poetry, leapfrogging both modernism and the Fifties Movement. It immediately drew comparisons with the work of Piet Paaltjens. The tart, dark-romantic content of his poetry links Komrij with the neo-decadent undercurrent of the Romantic heritage. At the same time he distanced himself from Romanticism. For Komrij poetry is not an expression of personal feelings; rather it is designed to achieve the aestheticism that has always been his conscious aim. His aversion to Romantic confessional literature is laid out in the final stanza of “Reticence” in the collection Tutti-Frutti (1972):

They’ll plant the roads with pine and yew,

They’ll use their hats to shovel shit,

Before I bare my soul to you

And tell you what’s tormenting it.86

If Komrij’s poetry is hard to categorize in literary-historical terms, this is also true of most other neo-romantic poets. They do not form a group as such but, having turned away from the depersonalized poetry of the 1960s, they opt in one way or another for a more direct connection between individual feeling and the world around them — even though the feelings they write about are ambivalent, ironic, and underplayed. Among these poets Levi Weemoedt (1948–) and Jean-Pierre Rawie (1951–) took a turn toward gentle mockery and teasing banter, which earned them a broad readership. With Doctorandus P. (pseudonym of Heinz Polzer, 1919–), quick wit combined with virtuoso technique to become almost a party game which borrowed many of its attributes from stand-up comedy. Doctorandus P. became the most celebrated representative of light verse, a genre in which poets like Hans Dorrestijn (1940–) and Willem Wilmink (1936–2003) also found success among the public at large.

Alongside this playful, light-hearted use of irony by the poetic humo ludens, irony was given a quite different function by Anton Korteweg (1944–) and Kees Ouwens (1944–2004). In their work it was a question not of non-committal banter but of an inner divide reminiscent of “true” Romanticism. Here irony is cultivated as a survival strategy, the only defense left against melancholy and pathos, as in Korteweg’s “The Romantic Poet”:

After I had grown aware, once and for all,

of tragic splinterings in my existence

— I was sure that things would never turn out right —

since discontent with here and now, and even pain

at unfulfillable todays, aching desire

for who knows what, had gained the upper hand —

I never failed to keep on dying young.87

In this neo-romantic climate there was again room for traditional poetry, with renewed interest in older poets who had been drowned out by the exuberant iconoclasm of the Fifties Poets and who had in many cases kept their distance from any movement. Ida Gerhardt (1905–97), Chris J. van Geel (1917–74), and Jan Emmens (1924–71) were among them. Leo Vroman (1915–), who belonged to the same generation as the Fifties Poets, was only now able to come to prominence with spontaneous and personal poetry that questioned just about everything. His profession as a biologist left its mark on the subject matter of his poetry and may explain his searching for connections in the chaos of his observations. However, Vroman played no role of importance in postwar Dutch literary life, having emigrated to the United States in 1946.

In Flanders too, the 1970s saw a boom in the kind of poetry that articulated the values of human harmony and respect for tradition. There was fresh interest in priest and poet Anton van Wilderode (1918–98) and in Hubert van Herreweghen (1920–), while Christine D’haen (1923–) was in a sense rediscovered. The change in appreciation for D’haen’s work was particularly striking. Seen at first in the context of erudite and classical-rhetorical Flemish poetry, in the 1980s she came to be regarded, virtually overnight, as preparing the ground for postmodernism, not just in Flanders but in Holland as well. The verdict half a century after her debut appears to be that she writes old-fashioned poetry that grows more contemporary by the day.

The same climate of restoration also favored the successful debut collections The Hares and Other Poems (De hazen en andere gedichten, 1979) by Ed Leeflang and What Remains Never Comes Back (Wat blijft komt nooit terug, 1979) by Jan Eijkelboom, who both uphold the “non-spectacular” modernist tradition of Martinus Nijhoff, J. C. Bloem, and Vasalis. Leeflang (1929–2008) and Eijkelboom (1926–2008) wrote a very personal poetry that incorporated the autobiographical and anecdotal, yet without sentimentality or self-pity, treating topics like fear, awareness of death, mortality, and the search for happiness in their immediate everyday environment. With his long narrative poem “Visit to the Freight Ship,” inspired by Nijhoff’s Awater, Ed Leeflang, like D’haen, created a bridge between himself and the postmodernism of the younger poets.

The poetry of Leeflang and Eijkelboom shows affinities with that of Rutger Kopland and Judith Herzberg. Theirs is a type of verse that looks back to the Forum tradition and is sometimes referred to as parlando poetry, after Edgar du Perron’s collection Parlando of 1930. In this tradition “personality” is all, as are strictly individual attitudes, reflections, and feelings. Nevertheless, the confessional lyricism of these poets is restrained by the factual, anecdotal approach of new realism. Their verse consequently offers an expression of human emotions wrapped in a protective layer of irony. They chose poetic forms to match: free and unfettered, uncontrived, anti-rhetorical, but at the same time polished and refined, with subtle connections that reveal fresh and startling meanings.

The early work of Rutger Kopland (1934–), who made his debut in 1966, was imbued with a nostalgic awareness that everything is transitory. The publication of An Empty Place to Stay (Een lege plek om te blijven, 1975) denoted a shift toward poetry that was more focused on language as such. Whereas his earlier verse had imitated the informality of spoken language, now his style became more spare and distilled, as if subjective emotion was being pushed aside in favor of greater objectivity and abstraction. Kopland’s evolution as a poet therefore led from lyrical anecdotes about transience and loss to carefully crafted meditations on space and time, emptiness and longing, and an increasingly skilful use of form. His fundamental conception of poetry remained unchanged, however. As he said in countless interviews and in the essay “On the Making of a Poem” published as part of the collection All Those Fine Promises (Al die mooie beloften, 1978), poetry is the expression of feelings and the poet’s intention is “to move people.”

The poetry of Judith Herzberg (1934–), a translator, playwright, screenwriter, and scriptwriter for musical theater as well as a poet, is characterized by a subtle but clear-headed handling of familiar feelings. Behind its apparent simplicity there lurks a complex of veiled, unarticulated emotions, as in the famous “Sickbed Visit” from the collection Meadow Grass (Beemdgras, 1968):

My father sat an hour in silence by my bed.

When he had put on his hat, I said:

this conversation will

be easy to sum up, you know.

Oh no, he said, it won’t—

just you give it a go.88

Not all her poetry has this degree of plainness. Sometimes it is phrased in a hesitant, searching manner with the smallest, closely observed detail triggering an intensely personal response. In the closing lines of “The Morning-After Pill” in Skimming Light (Strijklicht, 1971) the subject is the fundamental insignificance of life, but the tone and style remain close to everyday speech:

Such a little crayfish even thinner than

a gnat-wing, so ill-suited to defend itself —

it could be anyone89

When he published his debut collection, Lithe Love (De lenige liefde, 1969), Herman de Coninck was regarded as the leading light among the Flemish new realists, but in many ways he was closer to the Dutch parlando poets, about whom he wrote insightfully as early as 1970. The collections As Long as Snow is Lying (Zolang er sneeuw ligt, 1975) and With an Oboe Sound (Met een klank van hobo, 1980) confirmed how far he had moved away from his earlier new realist assumptions. A journalist and influential poetry critic as well as a poet, De Coninck helped to define the literary landscape of his time. His death during a conference in Lisbon came as a shock to many, and Leonard Nolens was among those inspired to create a series of moving elegiac poems:

We shuffle up in straggling lines

Between the graves and stare unspeaking

Into those depths in which you lie.90

Leonard Nolens (1947–) made his debut in the tradition of Hugues C. Pernath (1931–75) and Paul Celan with poems exhibiting a trenchant and emotionally charged verbal power. Nolens is incontestably Romantic in the sense that poetry is for him a vital means of self-expression, but his linguistic daring and use of rhetoric lend even his earliest confessional lyricism an experimental character. Gradually his work grew softer and more balanced and he broke out of the narrow confines of the Flemish literary circuit. From the 1980s onward he was published in Holland, a move that reflects a much broader exodus of young Flemish writers to the North. Many found homes with major Dutch publishers, which immediately brought them a far larger readership. At the same time there was a noticeable shift toward the norms and developments of the northern Netherlands. In Two Forms of Keeping Quiet (Twee vormen van zwijgen, 1975) the experimental, baroque style of Nolens’s early lyricism had already given way to greater sobriety; in his more recent work this even takes the form of parlando-style verse. The pivotal collection in this respect is The Dreamed Figure (De gedroomde figuur, 1986), in which the dilution of his prophetic and absolutist poetic aspirations is allied to a markedly less overburdened and exuberant style, although one that is still intensely personal. Nolens believes the poet must forever be a testifying presence in his poetry, which makes it revealing, indeed essential, to read his poems in the context of his published diaries. As a diarist he reflects in an authentic, self-tormenting manner on his own identity, on love, friendship, and the relationship between poetry and identity. The collections that followed, including Birth Certificate (Geboortebewijs, 1988) and Declarations of Love (Liefdes verklaringen, 1990), confirmed the course of his evolution.

The rapid change in De Coninck’s poetic development shows just how short-lived the new realism was in Flanders. Roland Jooris too evolved quickly toward a meditative poetry in which descriptive anecdotes deepen into revelations of underlying essentials. The work of De Coninck and Jooris also makes clear that in Flanders, as in the Netherlands, the neo-romantics remained firmly tied to reality, although Flemish poets expressed their emotions more openly and directly. Irony and understatement are certainly present in De Coninck and in the slightly later work of Luuk Gruwez (1950–) and Miriam Van hee (1952–), representatives of the new generation of neo-romantics, but the strongly rationalizing, ironic distance that characterizes the “true” neo-romantics in Holland — Komrij, Korteweg, Weemoedt, or the early Benno Barnard (1954–) — is much less pronounced among Flemish poets.

Nevertheless, the poetic world of Luuk Gruwez, for example, displays a predilection for the dark side of Romanticism. The cult of beauty is bound up here with the cult of death, mortality, and loss, and the atmosphere is one of melancholy, hyper-romantic spleen, or ennui. Later this narcissistic and dandyesque pose gave way to a more balanced, if still pessimistic, acceptance of reality. The most undiluted form of dark Romanticism and neo-decadence can be found in the work of Jotie T’Hooft (1956–77), who had become a cult figure among the young by the time he died of a drug overdose. The myths that had grown up around him were compounded by his self-inflicted death, but at their root lay the extraordinary talent of a precocious poète maudit, who articulated his problematic life experience in intoxicating confessional verse, which sometimes is extremely moving and sometimes verges on cliché.

In line with this confessional poetry but in every respect an entirely separate phenomenon is the work of the Frisian poet Tsjêbbe Hettinga (1949–). Hettinga describes, in Frisian, the landscape not only of Friesland but of other parts of the world, such as Wales and Greece. He is a great admirer of Dylan Thomas, much of whose work he has translated into Frisian. Hettinga’s poetry has unprecedented musical and epic qualities, which only really come into their own during his live performances.

IV. The Ego Looks Back, 1980–

Anne Marie Musschoot

The New Prose

The debate between Frans Kellendonk and Maarten ’t Hart, touched upon earlier in this chapter, hardened in 1980. Over preceding years ’t Hart had appealed in interviews, reviews, and essays for an accessible, readable literature of the kind that draws readers directly into the story so that they can identify with the characters. In place of the tradition of high modernism in the style of Joyce, Nabokov, Kafka, Gombrowicz, and D. H. Lawrence, ’t Hart called upon the “great” realist tradition, most notably storytellers like Scott, Trollope, Thackeray, Austen, Dickens, and Hardy. The popularity of his own work confirmed that readers preferred a well told, exciting, and credible story. After A Flight of Curlews in 1978 ’t Hart continued to publish successful story collections and novels, including The Undertaker’s Men (De aansprekers, 1979), The Dream Queen (De droomkoningin, 1980), and The Crown Witness (De kroonge­tuige, 1983).

Other authors too gained a large readership with realistic stories, including the slightly older F. B. Hotz (1922–2000), whose debut came relatively late, and A. Alberts (1911–95), who worked as a government official in the Dutch East Indies and wrote in a detached, ironic, but compact style about characters who withdraw into themselves. A new generation of realists has since emerged, including the Flemish author Kristien Hemmerechts (1955–), an academic who lectures in English literature and made her debut with stories written in English, published by Faber & Faber in 1986. Hemmerechts is a controversial figure who likes to explore tough feminist standpoints and tends to focus on female protagonists. Her stories and novels evoke a directly recognizable world with problems such as failing relationships, divorce, and bereavement, to which the characters are helplessly exposed by their inability to communicate. Hers is a sober, coolly observant style in which her female characters casually reveal details about their erotic lives. The intimacy of these details had a remarkably provocative effect on some readers, especially men. This was certainly the case with Christmas and Other Love Stories (Kerst en andere liefdesverhalen, 1992). Patricia de Martelaere (1957–2009) records reality in ways that are often no less chillingly analytical. In The Painter and His Model (De schilder en zijn model, 1989) she presents a series of dialogues that depict archetypal love relationships. In her later work the philosophical component is increasingly foregrounded. A philosophy lecturer, De Martelaere describes life as a circular motion, always returning to its source and hence encompassing both progress and stasis. Like Maurice Blanchot, she characterizes writing as “a nil-operation.” The sources of inspiration for her work, including Nietzsche, Freud, and Wittgenstein, are described in her eminently accessible essay collection A Longing for Inconsolability (Een verlangen naar ontroostbaarheid, 1993). The fundamental philosophical doubt and its conviction that love is impossible persist in her last major novel The Unexpected Answer (Het onverwachte antwoord, 2004).

In the 1980s, however, realistic narration incorporated a vision of reality that allowed for ingenious and often self-conscious fictionalizing. The “grand narrative” seemed to have become acceptable again, and the sometimes quite complex structures do not form a barrier to readers keen to immerse themselves in a story. Harry Mulisch’s The Assault (1982) and The Discovery of Heaven (1992) were examples of this, as we saw. Two further examples are Flemish: The Sorrow of Belgium (1983) by Hugo Claus and The Accursed Fathers (De vermaledijde vaders, 1985) by Monika van Paemel. There are several striking similarities between the two: both concern a central character’s search for his or her own past and family background, a search firmly embedded in the larger context of political and social history. This is no accident. A decade earlier Walter van den Broeck (1941–) had prepared the ground for the resurrection of a type of bildungsroman that offered at the same time a social and historical panorama; his Notes of a Guardian of the Clan (Aantekeningen van een stambewaarder, 1977) were a case in point but had passed largely unnoticed at the time. The combination of autobiography and broadly-based historiography was taken up by other authors.

The title of Hugo Claus’s monumental The Sorrow of Belgium refers to everything that went wrong in Belgium, and especially in Flanders, before, during, and after the Second World War. Through his main character, Louis Seynaeve, Claus describes his own background and his growth as a writer. An imposing and at times hilarious portrait of a Flemish family in Nazi-occupied Belgium, it traces a determination to survive that takes the form of opportunism, deceit, and compromise, in a country marked by the excrescences of a protracted language conflict. In painting his picture of small-minded bourgeois parochialism and cultural mediocrity Claus constantly pushes toward caricature, thereby placing himself in the grotesque tradition of visual artists like Hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Breughel, and James Ensor. Ingeniously constructed, the book is both an autobiographical coming-of-age story and a mercilessly satirical chronicle of an era. It is undoubtedly Claus’s masterwork, in which he gives free rein to all his private obsessions and uses the full scale and range of his prodigious linguistic power, but it also provides a direct and keen insight into the extraordinarily complicated ideology of Flemish nationalism and its intricate web of right-wing political factions.

No less ambitious in scope and execution, The Accursed Fathers by Monika van Paemel (1945–) is another disguised self-portrait and at the same time a spectacular novel about the emancipation of women. The book describes the life of Pamela from her birth in 1945 to the point where, as an emancipated seventy-six-year-old grandmother, she looks back on her life and recognizes herself in her granddaughter. This is another quest for identity set against the background of social and historical reality, including the impact of the Second World War, on the lives of ordinary citizens. In Van Paemel, as in Claus, the portrayal of the war is informed by a powerful personal vision, but Van Paemel’s vision, unlike Claus’s, has a strongly feminist hue. She too denounces provincialism, paternalism, and opportunism, but she puts the main responsibility for all the misery caused by the war on the power-hungry, authoritarian, and brutal behavior of the “gentlemen,” the born rulers, personified here by the “accursed” father. In a long monologue directed at her father the narrator expresses her resentment at the belligerent and tyrannical behavior of men:

But you can sleep soundly. I haven’t become a half-baked pacifist. No willing victim. I still feel like kicking back. (A healthy reflex, don’t you think?) My other cheek? Sure, but for a kiss. I want no warmonger at my side. No oppressor in my bed. No destroyer in my kitchen. No father who leers at his children. What I’d like best is to beat those gentlemen to a pulp, to scatter the evil seed of discord.

This is followed by a call-to-arms that begins with the forceful imperative: “Come on, girls, go for it! Bomb the lot of them! Greet them with the bread knife between your teeth. . . . Don’t let them take you for a ride with their sweet talk any more.” In later novels, written in her characteristically associative style, Van Paemel would make an even more emphatic connection between feminist issues and world politics. The First Stone (De eerste steen, 1992), for instance, is concerned with the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis in Jerusalem.

Many of the “new” novels of the 1980s featured a style of narrative reminiscent of Reviser prose, in other words, a skillfully crafted form with different narrative levels and multiple mirror effects, clever internal references, allusions, quotations, and the like. More importantly, however, they paved the way for new developments that also chimed with international trends and did not come to maturity in the Netherlands and Flanders until the 1990s. Perhaps the most conspicuous new phenomenon was the return to autobiographical writing; in these years, after all, every self-respecting nouveau roman author in France produced autobiographical specimens. The search for identity served as a stimulus to paint broader historical and documentary frescoes. A related tendency was to devise ambitious cycles of novels, some of which were mentioned above. The postmodern novel apparently brought back a desire to tell stories.

The documentary tendency goes back to the 1970s, as we have seen, and is part of the international vogue for “faction” and the new journalism. In Flanders Louis Paul Boon allied himself with this trend in his last great works, which include two masterful historical novels, Pieter Daens (1971), about the beginnings of Christian Democracy in a Flemish industrial town around the turn of the nineteenth century, and The Beggars’ Book (Het geuzenboek, 1979), the epic story of the sixteenth-century Beggars’ Revolt in the Protestant Low Countries against the rule of Catholic Spain. In the Netherlands it was mainly the postmodern type of historical novel that stayed the course, specifically the genre described by Linda Hutcheon in her studies of postmodernism as “historiographic metafiction.” Louis Ferron was not the only author to use this form of fiction to re-imagine the past. Willem Brakman (1922–2008), Nelleke Noordervliet (1945–), Leon de Winter (1954–), and P. F. Thomése (1945–), all rewrote literary history, or history in general, as did Hella Haasse, the “grande dame” of Dutch literature and the historical novel, who won the Dutch Readers’ Prize in 1992 with the documentary historical novel The Tea Merchants (Heren van de thee). The book looks back to the time of the colonial Dutch East Indies, making conspicuous use of archival material, including letters, to trace several generations of tea planters. This is a novel, but not “fiction,” the writer asserted in an afterword. “The material is not invented, but it has been selected and arranged according to the demands of the genre” so that “individual fates and developments are singled out.”

J. Bernlef too, in whose poetry the observation of reality had always played a central role, devoted his prose to an analysis of mental processes such as memory and forgetting. In his successful novel Public Secret (Publiek geheim, 1987) he describes the production of a television documentary in an unnamed country under a totalitarian regime (in fact clearly Hungary, then behind the “Iron Curtain”). The main theme is the “delicate” critical representation of reality. Bernlef achieved his most pregnant evocation of the insight that we delude ourselves if we believe that we can know the world and get a grip on reality in Out of Mind (Hersenschimmen, 1984). The novel tracks, to haunting effect, the process of advancing dementia and the depersonalization that results, as seen from the perspective of the sufferer himself. The question it seems to pose is how far reality exists outside language and to what extent memory serves as a way of structuring our world, a typically postmodern subject. Particularly remarkable is the way Bernlef manages to show the decline in brain function through the disintegration of language:

Headache, headache and thirst. Move these lips, maybe words will come back into this head.

Turn the light on! (Good boy.)

What was before this? As if I’ve come up from a hole in the ice. And so hot. Must get out. (Get out, then!) Wasn’t there always someone lying beside you?

Step by step. Luckily there is light burning in this corridor. Wooden floors, straight boards, with joins it would be better to avoid. Watch out for splinters. Pull up your knees, high up!91

Like Bernlef, Margriet de Moor (1941–) combines precise and thorough documentation with a desire to experiment within the limits of realistic portrayal and to expand the boundaries of the literary self. Music plays an important part in her work. In The Virtuoso (De virtuoos, 1993) and in the love story The Kreutzer Sonata (Kreutzersonate, 2001) musical forms are integrated into the composition. The Virtuoso attempts to evoke in words the art of the eighteenth-century castrato Gasparo; the narrative perspective switches repeatedly, so much so that the structure is not unlike an opera seria. In The Kreutzer Sonata, De Moor enters into a dialogue not only with a sonata Beethoven dedicated to the violinist Rodolphe Kreutzer but also with Tolstoy’s story of the same name and with the composer Leoš Janácˇ ek, who had earlier responded to Tolstoy with a string quartet. De Moor’s descriptions are swathed in a peculiar, dreamlike atmosphere that many readers find deeply affecting.

Thomas Rosenboom. Photograph: Jerry Bauer.

With Thomas Rosenboom (1956–) historical “faction” takes a completely different form again: his works are colorful and often hilarious. In two remarkably accomplished psychological novels, Washed Flesh (Gewassen vlees, 1995) and Public Works (Publieke werken, 1999), Rosenboom reconstructs the past of the eighteenth and late nineteenth centuries respectively, from the peculiarly distorted viewpoint of eccentric main characters, most of whom are victims of complicated intrigues as they move inexorably toward their tragic fates. Public Works is both historical fiction and a psychological novel in the tradition of Simon Vestdijk. A novel “like an imposing building,” as the critics called it, it has a tightly constructed plot centered on a dual storyline. At its heart is the story of the struggle to save two tiny houses in the center of Amsterdam from demolition. They can still be seen today, built into the front façade of the Victoria Hotel directly opposite the Central Station. They were saved from the aggression of the entrepreneurs who wanted to build a luxury hotel by Walter Vedder, violin-maker and resident, who forced up the price of his house as far as possible. In the end Vedder inevitably fails, just like a nephew of his, an apothecary who lives in the provincial town of Hoogeveen and becomes concerned about the fate of a colony of peat-cutters living just outside town. The two central figures decide to patch up their battered public image by helping the entire peat-cutting colony to emigrate to America with the proceeds from Vedder’s as yet unsold house. Public Works is a novel full of surprises, which reconstructs everyday life in a rapidly growing city but also presents a number of hilarious losers who suffer from hubris and an unrealistic self-image. Both Bernlef and Rosenboom delight in concrete details and a sense of location, yet the new historical fiction also shows history as always to some degree invented, impossible to represent with total accuracy.

As mentioned above, there is an equally pronounced trend toward autobiographical writing, and it may or may not be appropriate to see it as an expression of the same documentary tendency in late-twentieth-century literature. Certainly the back-to-the-roots phenomenon and the desire to depict an entire recent era come together in the work of Hugo Claus and Monika van Paemel. The same is true of an author who has painted a broad fresco of his own times: A. F. Th. van der Heijden (1951–). After making his debut under the pseudonym Patrizio Canaponi he began publishing an ambitious cycle of books, The Toothless Era, under his own name. This was initially presented as a trilogy but eventually took the form of four substantial volumes preceded by a prologue and interrupted by an intermezzo. Taken as a whole the cycle creates a panoramic image of life in Amsterdam, written from the point of view of heroin addict Albert Egberts. The final volume, Lawyer to the Punks (Advocaat van de hanen, 1990), involves the fate of a squatter who dies in a police cell. Van der Heijden weaves innumerable symbols into his story and gives a metaphorical dimension, in stark contrast to the reality portrayed by J. J. Voskuil (1926–2008) in a series of seven books totaling more than five thousand pages about the claustrophobic environment of an Amsterdam Institute for Dialectology, The Bureau (Het Bureau, 1996–2000), where literally nothing ever happens. Both series were hugely successful with the public at large, a success perhaps due to their autobiographical nature, which helps readers to identify with the protagonists. The boundary between fiction and reality is as permeable here as in many popular television serials and docudramas.

We encounter a similar attempt to make sense of confusing times in the work of Tom Lanoye (1958–), a versatile Flemish poet, playwright, and prose writer who in a three-volume cycle of novels — the so-called “monster trilogy,” published between 1997 and 2002 and named after its first volume, The Divine Monster (Het goddelijke monster) — denounced the corruption in Belgium’s social and political establishment. Lanoye owes his fame at least in part to his undeniable talent as a polemicist and public performer, his stage appearances combining powerful rhetoric with an absurdist humor. His achievements as a playwright include a poetic and highly individual adaptation of Shakespeare’s history plays (known collectively as the “Wars of the Roses”); the twelve-hour-long performance entitled To War! (Ten oorlog! 1997) proved extremely succesful not just in the Low Countries but also abroad, especially in Germany.

In 1998 P. F. Thomése published a fierce attack on the literary climate in the Netherlands, which he described as a “narcissistic conspiracy.” The main target of his wrath was Connie Palmen, whose novel The Friendship (De vriendschap, 1995) gained wide recognition without literary critics paying much attention to its style. In Thomése’s view, the critics were too willing to conform to popular taste. His essay sparked a debate about autobiography in Dutch fiction. All sides, incidentally, ignored the fact that the “narcissistic turn,” like the increasing interest in historical fiction, was an international phenomenon. Following the structuralist premise that the author was dead, the 1970s saw a change in direction that resulted in a new ego-centered era, in which authors are emphatically present in their work. In this climate there was a growing interest in eyewitness accounts and diaries. The publication in the 1980s of An Interrupted Life (Het verstoorde leven), the diary of Etty Hillesum (1914–43), who died at Auschwitz, attracted a great deal of interest, and the diaries published by poet Hans Warren (1921–2001) from 1981 onward reached a huge readership. In this Secret Diary (Geheim dagboek), of which the sixteenth and last volume was published posthumously in 2004, Warren noted his responses to daily life down to the most intimate details. It is regarded as a personal document unique in Dutch-language literature. The personal memoir also flourished in the work of the Fleming Eric de Kuyper (1942–), for instance, and several authors who gave harrowing accounts of their memories of Nazi concentration camps, including Hellema (pseudonym of Alexander van Praag, 1921–2005) and Gerhard Durlacher (1928–96). Adriaan van Dis (1946–) recalled his childhood in the Dutch East Indies in My Father’s War (Indische duinen, 1994).

Differentiation within the genre suggests, meanwhile, that its success cannot be attributed merely to the voyeuristic desires of the masses. The popularity of confessional or testimonial literature is probably also attributable to the exploration of the boundaries between experience and fiction, and the accompanying tendency to color factual observation with an inevitably slanted personal view. A representative example of this blending of the personal and the factual, and indeed the negation of the distinction between them, is the work of Charlotte Mutsaers (1942–), who was a painter and book illustrator before becoming an author. Mutsaers’s prose defies characterization. Each book is different, exploiting and combining different forms. The novel Rachel’s Skirt (Rachels rokje, 1994) tells a highly imaginative story of puppy love, not in chapters but in dynamic layers like the pleats of a skirt, or like the skins of an onion that can be peeled away without ever revealing a core. The story has no causality and no development; it is told in fragments that generate themselves associatively. The same is true of Sea Pine (Zeepijn, 1999), a novel that could equally well be described as an essay collection, with opinion pieces, imaginative disquisitions, and reflections stalking the recurring image of a pine tree or related graphic forms such as the fishbone pattern. Out of this loose web of images an overall picture emerges that seems to be autobiographical, recalling a troubled youth with an unapproachable father.

Toward a New Poetry

The poetry of the final decades of the twentieth century also shows increased diversity centered on well-known and recurring polarizing elements: on the one hand a powerful awareness of form and an orientation toward language itself, on the other a primordial need for self-expression, for direct personal testimony and communication. Around 1985 a new generation came to prominence in the Netherlands, one that favored a traditional type of poetry, an extension of Romanticism and symbolism. The tone is set by smooth, simply formulated, rather detached poetry, in which the emotions are always restrained and the verse often follows the narrow course of an anecdote. The master of this kind of anecdotal and ironic realism is Willem van Toorn (1935–). In the tradition of Judith Herzberg and Rutger Kopland, Van Toorn starts out from a concrete observation, conveyed in “ordinary” language but always suggesting that human beings are estranged from the landscape and the people around them. For the onlooker in these poems, the world remains unfathomable, human existence is experienced as “incurable loneliness” directed by chance and decay, and the march of time is an ever-present threat. Like many other “mainstream” poets, Van Toorn uses clear, natural, almost everyday language, eschewing grand words and big emotions. Some of his poems resemble prints or photographs. In fact, in some of his verse cycles he included photos and paintings of landscapes alongside the text.

Eva Gerlach (1948–) is another passionate photographer. In her case, however, observation is always accompanied by remarks on how memory fixes and stores all that we see. By taking as her subject the evanescence, dissolution, and distortion of what is observed, or what she calls “the power of paralysis” (which was also the title of a collection published in 1988, De kracht van verlamming), she arrives at an associative structure for her poems that gives them an open, unfinished, fleeting character. What you see is always “what gets lost” (the title of a collection published in 1994, Wat zoek raakt), the observed reality is forever transient, threatened by death and finitude. The parlando style and anecdotal character of her work place Gerlach within mainstream poetic traditions, but her against-the-grain view of reality and the increasingly gnomic nature of her formulations make her position unique.

Equally exceptional among her contemporaries is the poet and novelist Anna Enquist (1945–), a psychoanalyst and trained musician. Elements of her own background are powerfully present in her prose, but her poetry is most notable for the hard-hitting images in which she puts into words the loss, death, and separation she has experienced in her personal life. In the work of Esther Jansma (1958–), a scientist, the autobiographical element is again very prominent, including the impact of “being gone,” in other words death.

Alongside and in contrast to this expressive lyricism stands the work of several poets who navigate within the tradition and reference points defined by Gerrit Kouwenaar and Hans Faverey. The most hermetic among them is Huub Beurskens (1950–). For him a poem is a “a language object,” a construct that exists independently of its creator and of the world outside it. Beurskens evolved as a poet (and as a writer of prose) toward a style that has been described as postmodern, a term that, in the Netherlands at least, started out with negative connotations. This was not the case in Flanders. There the word was used with fewer reservations, and it carried less negative baggage. In the work of the leading Flemish author of the 1990s, Stefan Hertmans (1951–), it is possible to discern a development from high modernism to postmodernism. Apart from poetry, Hertmans has also published narrative prose and incisive essays about current affairs and art, including illuminating pieces on jazz and classical music. He evolved from hermetic writing in the style of Willy Roggeman and his German model Gottfried Benn to a more relaxed international style, often including references to other texts and works of art but leaving space for personal confessions of faith and questions about his own identity. The highly imaginative poetry and prose of Peter Verhelst (1962–), a determined fabulist, also fits the broadly postmodern mold.

Little of the poetry written in Flanders in the late twentieth century displays the reserved detachment that set the tone for so long in the Netherlands. Symptomatic of this difference is the pervasive influence in Flanders of Hugues C. Pernath, with his penchant for extravagant linguistic experimentation and very personal expression of emotion. Pernath’s work is diametrically opposed to everything Dutch poets valued most highly; unsurprisingly, he is almost unknown in Holland. But while the younger generation in Flanders acknowledge their debt to Pernath, they also present themselves as emphatically postmodern. Dirk van Bastelaere (1960–) and Erik Spinoy (1960–) freely refer even to the theorists of postmodernism and the deconstructionist philosophers who inspired them, such as Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard.

By the start of the twenty-first century the distinction between North and South in avant-garde poetry was no longer so clearly defined. In the Netherlands there was now a distinct group of “interrelated” postmodern, form-conscious poets, a group that included Arjen Duinker (1956–), Elma van Haren (1954–), K. Michel (1958–), Tonnus Oosterhoff (1953–), and Anneke Brassinga (1948–), whose work combines an objective tendency with personal elements and caprice. Meanwhile a generation of extremely form-conscious poets had emerged in Flanders, including Paul Bogaert (1968–), Peter Holvoet-Hanssen (1960–), and Jan Lauwereyns (1969–).

Conclusion and Prospects

It is difficult to discern clear lines of development in the literature of the past few decades. The recent history of literature in Dutch presents itself as a multitude of authors, works, and tendencies, all jockeying for position. So much is obvious: ever since the 1960s literature has oscillated rapidly between two poles. On the one hand there is an outward movement, featuring a direct and necessary engagement with society, and on the other hand a movement inward, a sense of being thrown back on one’s own resources in the face of economic regression. The polarization of ideas about literature cuts right through, and interacts with, this rapid sequence of historical developments.

Among the most striking recent developments is the ongoing internationalization of literature. In the postmodern world, dialogue with cultural history and with other art forms has led to an increasingly radical dissolution of national boundaries. Literature in the Low Countries closely follows developments elsewhere in Europe and beyond. Two major tendencies have emerged in this respect. First, there is the novel of ideas, which has grown into a kind of truly philosophical fiction in the work of Harry Mulisch and, to a greater or lesser degree, Marcel Möring (1957–), Connie Palmen, M. Februari (1963–), Patricia de Martelaere, and others. Second, autobiographical writing continues to flourish, manifesting itself not only in such ambitiously conceived cycles as those by A. F. Th. van der Heijden and Eric de Kuyper, for example, but also in smaller, more fragmented poetic frescoes by Margriet de Moor, Adriaan van Dis, and Leo Pleysier.

For good measure the turn of the new century also saw the emergence of a wayward if heterogeneous group of writers who held everything regarded as mainstream at arm’s length. Arnon Grunberg (1971–), Ronald Giphart (1965–), Paul Mennes (1967–), and — to an extent — Joost Zwagerman (1963–) seem to have a predilection for themes like boredom, drugs, and sex. They were quickly labeled the “Dutch bratpack.” Their disillusionment, and the cynical disdain with which they describe the world they live in, is reminiscent of Bret Easton Ellis, Jay McInerney, and Douglas Coupland. As a result they also became known as Generation Nix (from Generation X, “Nix” echoing the Dutch word niks, “nothing”). Their video-clip culture introduces a contemporary version of the corrosive pessimism that was so hauntingly expressed in Reve’s The Evenings.

Another new feature is the growing number of immigrant writers and writers of immigrant extraction. They include Hafid Bouazza (1970–), Kader Abdolah (1954–), Abdelkader Benali (1975–), Mustafa Stitou (1974–), Ramsey Nasr (1974–), and the promising newcomer Rachida Lamrabet (1970–). Although they do not form a group, they have, individually and collectively, given literary expression to an increasingly multicultural society.

We identified factual non-fiction (or “faction”) and the autobiographical turn as the main tendencies in Dutch-language literature during the final decades of the twentieth century. As we reach the present day and thus the end of this literary history, it would appear that those tendencies have also dominated the first decade of the twenty-first century, with this proviso — that both types of fiction, the documentary and the autobiographical, often go hand in hand. Naturally, in an increasingly globalized world, the tensions and events that shape world politics are bound to leave their imprint on literatures across continents. In response, contemporary writers seem inclined to delve into their own histories in an effort to understand both themselves and the world around them. This may be an escapist reflex, and indeed it seems hard to deny that, as the first decade of the new century draws to a close, pressing social and political realities demand the sort of attention that makes self-centered soul-searching appear out of place. But alternative responses have already begun to appear. A book like Omega Minor (2004) by the Flemish novelist Paul Verhaeghen (1965–) may be symptomatic of the new direction. The author, who works as a cognitive psychologist in the United States and translated his own manuscript into English, was awarded the 2008 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for it. The novel takes the form of an eyewitness account which gathers Europe’s apocalyptic modern history, including the Second World War, the Holocaust and the Berlin Wall, into a sprawling, ambitious, encyclopedic whole. Omega Minor may well be a sign of the kind of literature to come.

— Translated by Liz Waters

 

67 Unless indicated otherwise, translations of quotations in this chapter are by Liz Waters.

68 Translation Ina Rilke.

69 Translation Francis R. Jones.

70 Translation Francis R. Jones.

71 Translation Paul Vincent.

72 Translation Francis R. Jones.

73 Translation Peter Nijmeijer.

74 Translation Francis R. Jones.

75 Translation Francis R. Jones.

76 Translation Francis R. Jones.

77 Translation James S. Holmes.

78 Translation Peter Nijmeijer.

79 Translation Kendall Dunkelberg.

80 Translation Francis R. Jones.

81 Translation Francis R. Jones.

82 Translation Peter Nijmeijer.

83 Translation Francis R. Jones.

84 Translation Theo Hermans.

85 Translation J. M. Coetzee.

86 Translation Francis R. Jones.

87 Translation Francis R. Jones.

88 Translation Francis R. Jones.

89 Translation Francis R. Jones.

90 Translation Francis R. Jones.

91 Translation Adrienne Dixon.