Arnon Grunberg

Immune to the Word

In the year 2000, it is hard to imagine the appearance of a dangerous novel. From Cervantes to W.F. Hermans, writers have long held up a gruesome mirror to their readers. Meanwhile the public at large has grown weary of their pessimistic certitude. Yet, in our "economy of experience", only doom awaits the author who abandons moralism, Marek van der Jagt fears.

On June 7, Hans Goedkoop wrote a refreshing essay in the book section of this newspaper in which he explained that neither money nor the market are the enemies of good taste. In elegant fashion, he punctured the graveyard pong of writers like Franke, Thomése and Wessel te Gussinklo. Because Goedkoop sees things blossoming around him, in fact he anticipates only more prolific blossoming, and he is not entirely wrong.

Goedkoop cited a visual-arts duo: "We don't want to take a stand against the world, but to embrace the world, the way it is, good and bad, beautiful and ugly." That embrace does not exude rage or even irritation, simply resignation.

Perhaps it is from the soil of such resignation that the new art, including novelistic art, will blossom forth. If that is the case, then something is happening here, something that requires a more thorough explanation than Goedkoop's acute observation that creation is destruction. My following remarks can therefore be seen as a few notes on a blossoming woodland. Notes from a sapling that says "go ahead and blossom if you wish, I shall refrain."

In the year 2000, it is almost impossible for us to imagine a dangerous novel being written and published. A novel that encroaches on something, something we don't want to have encroached upon. In the Netherlands no one need be afraid of the word, and certainly not of the word as it is found in fiction. The striking thing is that those rulers who remain in power by virtue of the bullet are more afraid of the word (we need think here only of the former DDR, Iran, Syria, etc.) than are those presidents who have come to power in a neatly democratic fashion and who do not even need a water cannon to consolidate that power. Not so long ago, H.J.A. Hofland complained in this newspaper that the novelist of today sidesteps the big issues and keeps to the sidelines. Without saying it in so many words, his column bespoke a certain skepticism about whether anything of importance would ever proceed from a novelist's pen. While in this part of the world the artist of today, and with him the novelist, enjoys an unprecedented freedom.

The less dangerous we consider someone to be, of course, the more freedom we allow him. For Don Quixote, the chivalric romance was a dangerous form of literature. Such stories clouded his view of reality; he wanted to imitate the illusion created by of the chivalric romances and behave like the fictive knights-errant in them. But in the end he was cured of that illness. And what tends to be forgotten amid the enthusiasm concerning the blossoming of art today is that the novelists have already won. The novelists as we have known and canonized them since the days of, say, Cervantes and Rabelais.

It would be fair to assume that the novelist's art deals with the portrayal of mankind. And throughout that portrayal runs, or at least once ran, an unbroken line. From Cervantes by way of Balzac, by way of Faulkner, by way of Céline, by way of Kafka, by way of Grass, all the way up to Hermans. That line is the unmasking of mankind, and it even runs through the way in which that unmasking takes place - with a rage and aggression that could not possibly spring from a heartfelt desire to embrace the world.

Untiring those novelists were in their attempts to prove that mankind tends towards the bad, unless he is forced towards the good. And reality proved them right, as time went by the evidence piled up and things began looking increasingly black for the defendant. For these writers saw mankind as the defendant, and perhaps they even wished to embrace him but could not, because they had read the dossiers.

Perhaps we have grown a bit weary of their certitude. A certitude one can refute only by locking one's self up in the bathroom. Perhaps it is more than fatigue, perhaps we have grown immune to words, and particularly to certain words. Like a young girl who has been told too often that she is the fairest of them all. The words no longer reach her, she wants deeds; the surest experience, after all, is a deed.

We are like Don Quixote, but then without having been cured; reality and the courtly novel coincide completely. No courtly novel can pose a danger anymore, because the courtly novel is everywhere. The unmasking of mankind can no longer amaze us, because no one contests it, because the person being unmasked is everywhere. And nonetheless, we wish to embrace him.

It reminds me of the way the assistant to the police inspector in the French film "L'humanité" embraces the man who has raped and murdered a young girl. That embrace is disturbing, to say the least. Has the inspector's assistant gone mad? Or is he so civilized that he extends his pity even to the monster? Does the person who, at a crucial moment, knows no pity have a right to pity himself? That policeman's embrace is imbued with blood, guilt, repulsion, opportunism, loneliness, and with compassion as well. Compassion over which we ourselves have no control, compassion as mishap, compassion as fender-bender.

The economy of experience is an economy that trades in experiences. That economy, to which - it seems - belongs both the future and the present, says: we think everything is equally fantastic, as long as it provides us with an experience. A wrecked car in a museum, a website on which we can monitor a gray mouse around the clock. Fantastic. For art, the market comes as a blessing. One's sense of reality would have to be nil to deny that. Yet if everything is equally fantastic, well, then…

In the past, writers and artists broke through borders in order to show where those borders lay. Sometimes that activity led all the way to the courtroom. These days, exploring the borders of freedom seems more like exploring the borders of a black hole in space. Which makes of art a game with very low stakes indeed. Experience or no experience, that's as far as it goes, and apparently we expect nothing more.

Imagine a Don Quixote who had always known in his heart of hearts that the windmills were windmills and the peasant girl was a peasant girl. He knew that, but he pretended, because he could not and would not embrace the world. Because he rejected and opposed the world, he pretended in the eyes of that world that the windmills were actually giants.

But then the worst possible scenario presents itself. Someone whispers in his ear: "but you were right, the windmills were giants, that peasant girl really was Dulcinea." Then it makes no more difference, he can read two courtly novels, or thirteen, or stop reading altogether: they reflect only what he already knows and already sees. The borderline between what he reads and what he experiences has been erased once more, but this time it is not his illness, it is reality. The tree he clutches at is a stage prop, and behind that tree there are only more props. And more props. Each prop there to offer him an experience he has never had before.

The economy of experience is a fact. And the novel is doomed to entertain. You will not hear me berating entertainment - but if entertainment is to be found everywhere, who needs a novel? And it behooves us to note that Dutch literature really does exhibit a striking resemblance to a wrecked car in a museum. Quasi-intelligent entertainment for lethargic narcissists (Palmen, Grunberg, Ruebsamen), quasi-refined entertainment for the fatigued salon aesthete (Thomése, Rosenboom, Möring), quasi-respectable entertainment for the lady of standing (Enquist, De Moor), quasi-therapeutic entertainment for the depressed office worker (Voskuil, Van Dis), and quasi-humorous entertainment for the bored student (Brusselmans, Giphart).

And then another thing. The writer who looses the economy of experience on his own work will, sooner or later, become a slave of that readership. I am not saying that a slave to the public can never again write a good book, merely wondering whether any self-respecting slave would actually feel like serving such a master.

The economy of experience assumes that the struggle against the world has become superfluous. If everything constitutes an experience as long as the public at large sees it that way, and if everything is equally fantastic, you would have to be mad to kick against the world. And should you accidentally do so anyway, the economy of experience will simply decide that it is a unique experience, and assimilate you.

No novelist can embrace the monster and say: he is good and bad, lovely and ugly at the same time. Anyone who says that does not know what he is embracing. Even worse, he does not know the meaning of an embrace. The monster is still there and must still be portrayed, and that portrayal may be safe as mother's milk, but not for the novelist. Whatever choice he makes, that choice will infect him. Whether he decides that the monster deserves to be executed, or that the monster must first be embraced and then gradually cuddled to death. A frische und fröhliche embrace it cannot be.

To deny the moralistic kernel of the novel is to put the novel to bed with a shovel. That moralism is not the kind that advances a given cause, or tries to point the way, it does not attempt to forbid or to allow anything, or even to offer a toehold. It is leagues removed from the open letter to the Dutch government from forty Dutch writers, in which they call on that government to, among other things, offer its apologies to the survivors of Srebrenica.

Five years after the fact, the armchair generals of Dutch letters have awakened and come to the astounding conclusion that the world is bigger than the western Dutch conurbation. Or is their letter simply another experience, a public-relations stunt? The moralism of the novel signs no open letters, it does not deny the consequences of choosing between injustice and injustice. It is a moralism that rules out neither humor nor airiness nor self-questioning. On the contrary, it is a moralism that acknowledges the presence of the monster, even in the writer. The novelist, too, cannot abstain from playing the game. He can, at most, raise the stakes.

The visual arts may have had their fill of mankind, the novelist has not. He still has a bone to pick with the monster. Welcome, the novelist says, take off your coat. Forget your cares. Here everything is fantastic. This, after all, is the economy of experience. The paper is fantastic, the binding is fantastic, the writer is fantastic, even his words are fantastic.

Don't take it personally, but he wants to pulverize you. Reality has not left him cold, you are reality, you are the last thing left that is not a stage prop. His last customer. Would you mind if he placed his foot on your leg? Don't you recognize him anymore? What a tender throat you have, and your Adam's apple, so soft. To struggle against the world is senseless, but the struggle must go on.

Marek van der Jagt, Vienna