Nederlandse Letterkunde - Volume 19, Issue 1, 2014

By Dutch literary scholars Willem Bilderdijk is often represented as an unhappy man with a miserable life, full of poverty, illness and underestimation. He is, indeed, famous for his endless complaining and his burning desire for death. There were good reasons for him to be unhappy: he was often ill, lived in exile, suffered the loss of children and had the constant feeling he couldn’t find his way in life. In spite of all this, the case of Bilderdijk’s poethood is more complicated. Because of the dominant biographical focus on Bilderdijk’s life and work, one aspect of his authorship has until now largely been neglected: the way in which he created a ‘branded identity’ and presented himself as a celebrity. This article focuses on the manners in which Bilderdijk created an image of himself as a poet of mythical proportions. In other words: it will examine the different ways in which Bilderdijk established his celebrity cult.

Willem Frederik Hermans’s second collection of short stories, Paranoia (1953), opens with a short prose piece entitled ‘Preambule’ that for decades has been regarded as an introductory essay to the book. The italicized sentence ‘There is only one real word: chaos’ has often been understood as summary of the author’s own epistemological views. However, Hermans himself always insisted that ‘Preambule’ was a story; but the author’s claim has had little impact on its reception. This essay first brings together various explicit or implicit authorial indicators of the genre of ‘Preambule’, ranging from its typographical presentation to explanations in interviews. Second, against the background of the fundamental pattern underlying Hermans’s creative work as established in Hermans scholarship, I attempt to provide a coherent interpretation of the piece as a story, with an argument centered on but not limited to a comparison of the protagonist’s philosophy of language with his own practice. I argue that the narrator turns out to be a self-caricature rather than a genuine self-portrait. The essay concludes by assessing how the story fits into the group of stories that make up the collection, and whether there is any significant order involved.

This article aims to highlight the prominent place and role of the animal in the literary and visual work of the Dutch writer and artist Charlotte Mutsaers (1942-). The border-crossing between human and animal will be dealt with on the basis of the interaction between image and text in Mutsaers’s oeuvre. In this intermedial perspective, I first focus on three images of Mutsaers’s visual work exemplifying the human-animal masquerade. Secondly, I consider her novel Koetsier Herfst (2008) in which the animal also enacts a crucial function through the figurative and performative force of Mutsaers’s writing. Recent research in the field of Cultural and Literary Animal Studies (CLAS) and ethico-philosophical reflections are used as theoretical frame. Starting from Steve Baker’s ‘representational strategies’ (1993) of the animal (i.e. theriomorphism and therianthropism) and Gilles Deleuze’s theory on the ‘becoming-animal’, this article sheds new light on the subversive functions and non-restrictive meaning of the animal in Mutsaers’s artistic practice in the broadest sense of the word. The analysed figurative strategies in Mutsaers’s work bring a significant reversal of perspective to light: from the human to the animal.