Nederlandse Letterkunde - Volume 22, Issue 2, 2017

Strayed from the path. The portrayal of lesbian love in Edith Werkendam’s and Johan de Meester’s prose

Walmende lampen (1921) by Johan de Meester (1860-1931) is one of the first few literary novels that has descriptions of lesbian love. Although the novel addresses several sensitive matters, it was received relatively positive. The appreciation for the depiction of sexually deviant behaviour or perversions in literature was not self-evident: works of contemporary writer Edith Werkendam (1896-1952) received no such acclaim. That difference in reception raises a few questions, to which this article will try to find answers. Aided by the discourse analysis by Dominique Maingueneau both writers’ choice of scenography for the description of their topic, which normative position they take in choosing so and how this suits the contemporary societal discourse regarding homosexuality, will be analysed.

Courtly Love in Elsschot’s Het Dwaallicht (The Will-o’-the-wisp)

Willem Elsschots novel Het Dwaallicht (The Will-o’-the-wisp) (1946) contains a story about a miserable, rainy November evening in seaport town Antwerp. Four Afghani sailors are looking for Kloosterstraat 15, the whereabouts of a girl who worked on their ship that morning and promised them a rendezvous after nightfall. Desperately looking for the right direction they run into a neat, respectable married elderly man, Laarmans, who wants to protect these vulnerable foreigners against the suspicion and patronizing attitude of his discourteous citizens. He presents himself as their guide and all evening he leads them through the nocturnal labyrinth of streets and alleys, secretly hoping to get a piece of the pie.

Their quest for the girl fails but little by little Laarmans and the Afghani get closer to each other. They end up in an obscure night bar comtemplating their different conceptions of morality, politics and religion. At last they part as dear friends, but before heading home Laarmans does a last but vain attempt to reach the girl at an address he withheld, Lange Ridderstraat 71. Then he bids ‘his brothers’ farewell.

Since the sixties of the 20^th century this novel has brought about a history of interpretation, to which this article hopes to offer a contribution. It reads the novel as an imagination of the process of sublimation as well as of desublimation. Therefore it follows the track of the Freudian psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Two theses come forward, both concerning the lacanian concept of anamorfosis. Primarily the novel as a whole is read as an anamorfosis revealing itself to the reader as a story of courtly love. Secondly the enigmatic fragment about the Lange Ridderstraat, at the very end of the novel, is taken as anamorfosis revealing two things to Laarmans (and via Laarmans to the reader): it puts him off his ambiguous attitude as ‘guide’ and divulges the final meaning of his longing.

The (de)construction of the ethnic other in the novel Schaamte (1972) by Hugo Claus

Schaamte (Shame) is a complex and obscure novel in which Hugo Claus ridicules the postcolonial, imperialistic attitude of the members of a European film crew spending a working holiday on a sunny island. This article uses the analytic concept of othering as it was coined by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak to investigate the ways in which the novel ironically constructs the identity of the native people on the island as different from and inferior to that of the tourists. It demonstrates how it makes use of strategies of exclusion, which are based on naive ideas and misconceptions, to keep the islanders at a social distance. But exclusion is only one side of the story. What will be shown is that Schaamte deals with the warring forces of exclusion and inclusion, distance and relationship, difference and exchange. The novel ultimately reveals the crossover between the two groups and deconstructs the demarcation line between cultural identities (the discursive opposition between self/other or us/them). It blurs the idea of cultural identity as a unitary totality.