The most controversial Dutch -language novel of all time is and remains Max Havelaar from Multatuli. That masterpiece appeared in 1860 and was a literary splinter bomb. With nothing to be compared at home or abroad, disconcerting and moving in content, still shockingly up-to-date in analysis, at the same time astonishingly modern in shape. It mixes many moods and genres, and it operates all those genres with the same convenience. Multatuli’s Dutch is often jealous funny and superior light -hearted. This in fiercely contrast with the language of most of his contemporaries, both politicians and literary colleagues, both in the Netherlands and in Flanders.
Max Havelaar also contains more virable sentences and famous sayings than all other novels from that period together. That already starts with the preface, a play (“Barbertje must hang”). Immediately afterwards, the legendary opening sentence follows, which will often and increasingly hilarious. “I am a coffee broker, and I live on the Lauriergracht, n ° 37.” These words are pronounced by Batavus Droogstoppel. He is just blown up and self -righteous as Baas Gansendonck, the main character in a novel that was written barely ten years earlier by the ancestor of the Flemish Literature, Hendrik Conscience. But his Gansendonck was still an innkeeper by profession, just as had to be the most comic character in every literary work for centuries. Multatulis Droogstoppel, on the other hand, is broker, envoy of modern times. No longer a market vent around the corner, but an international merchant who has no limits, except for his own imagination and empathy.
Multatuli succeeds in turning the caricature that is drying stopping to make a person of flesh and blood. Still by letting him speak extensively. In this way, the Herraut of global entrepreneurship often becomes more unintentionally more comical than its last name suggests. At the same time, he remains a perfect model of his first name: the successful Dutchman, Batav Avant Toute Chose. Krantig, knowledgeable, proud – and yet extensively showing off with his ‘habit’. His true, perhaps some ideology consists of open -wing clogge and doctrinair realism. Outside Scripture, which supports him in his existence and in his right to trade anywhere under his conditions, he does not need words with capital letters. No hassle for him, except his guilders and his God. No art for him unless those of the directly observable reality: an expensive state portrait of himself, in the staircase of his canal house.
The genius is that Multatuli illustrates this mentality through the literature itself. “I have nothing against verses,” Batavus claims, at the same time raising his nose for the clear literary ambitions he has found in a disorderly pack of documents and manuscripts. It was handed over by Sjaalman, a former vague knowledge, now clearly as a lower shore – a leprosy, in the world of elbow workers and beer elichards. “Do people want to put the words in line?” Contains Batavus. “Good! But don’t say anything that is not true.” The sky is bleak and it’s four hours. ” I let this apply if it is really bleak and four hours for three minutes, I can only say my words: the air is bleak and it is fifteen minutes for three. ”
Those who cannot laugh at this passage can skip the entire oeuvre from Multatuli. All others I recommend using the pressing hinge moment in which we live to re -read Multatuli’s Magnum Opus. It is as current as the nits. Just because of his subtitle: Max Havelaar, or the coffee auctions of the Dutch Trade Company.
There are investors who claim to be able to read an imminent world crisis from the rapidly rising prices of gold, silver, diamond and – yes – coffee. If that is correct, a disaster hangs over our head. As exclusive as champagne? The time of cheap coffee is over. That headed Het Financieele Dagblad on June 6 this year. In addition to unrest due to Trump rates, a statement was suggested that in many business circles are happy to be denied: our climate is to the ball. On July 9 it carries it FD however, a connoisseur on Those few dare to contradict. Giuseppe Lavazza, current president of the Turin brand of the same name, also great-grandson of the founder. Giuseppe is furious. “The fault of the high coffee price is with hedge funds.” According to Lavazza, eighty percent of the price increases is not caused by our climate, but by speculation and false tug of war on the world market. One tectonic plate has already been crackling there. The ancient Dutch coffee house Douwe Egberts came into the hands of an American company, called K and Did Pepper at the end of last month. Cost price? Fifteen comma seven billion euros. To paraphrase Herman Heijermans: “The Bakkie Troost is paid dearly.” And I bet the profit of our cup is still not fairly paid to small, local producers. Despite the international quality mark for just coffee, not coincidentally called Max Havelaar, little has changed bitter about it.
Politics has, admittedly, changed things. On August 17, Indonesia celebrated eighty -year independence, bloody fought at the Netherlands colonizer, which in March 2020 finally apologized for ‘the violence of violence’ during that battle. Before that, the imperialist penalty expeditions, executed just after the Second World War, were referred to as ‘the police actions’ for decades. Many tens of thousands of Indonesians died in these ‘police actions’, as well as a few thousand Dutch soldiers.
The apologies were pronounced by King Willem-Alexander I, the back-of-grandson of William III. That is the monarch to whom Multatuli focuses directly at the end of his book, as if his power tour was not hybrid enough. Not only from a story, but also in terms of content, this procedure still forms a smoke. You can hardly imagine what the effect must have been for readers at the time, given the state of both society and literature. Forget them – the preceding and sometimes comic lists full of essayistic turns in ‘The Pack of Sjaalman’. Forget them – the wonderful whining of a grumpy ass (drought stopping), the romantic empathy of a good -hearted colleague (Stern) and the desperate testimonies of Sjaalman himself. Forget them – the famous thunder to “the heads of Lebak”, the standing poetic novella about a tragic love couple (Saidjah and Adinda) and the striking nature descriptions of a sometimes violent paradise, which is too colorful to be on a North Sea. Their author thanks them all. Multatuli blows up the structure and characters of his book with a gesture that is still shocking and moving, and of which there is no equal in world literature. “Enough! I created you, you can go. (…) I, Multatuli,” who worn a lot, “I take the pen.”
Later, as the blowpiece of the four furious final pages, it sounds like this: “I am giving up my book, Willem de Dereld, Koning, Grand Duke, Prince … Keizer of the beautiful rich in Insulinde that winds around the equator, as a belt of eMaragd. I dare to ask with the mud and drying: that? There, your more than thirty million subjects are mistreated and sucked out in your name? “
Allow me to choose a dissonant as a decision of this homage. Halt, reader of this splendor! Enough now, with my jellybis about books from a distant past! Forget them and imagine that today an author would blow up his high -minded novel himself and end with a political pamphlet! This time not for a medieval battle or a colonial scandal from just before the Belle Époque. About – I mention what – the genocide in the ghetto of Gaza, who has been taking off slowly but unmistakably before our eyes for many months, in all its gore scents and colors.
Suppose that such an activist author would express himself accusively about the delicious slowness and the accomplice cowardice of some of our dignitaries, including this time not the King – Enfin: the Belgian King Filip 1, he spoke of “a scandal for humanity”. Suppose one of my dear colleagues, for example Marente ‘er-to-very-activist writers’ de Moor, Wouldn’t it be explicitly selected Kant? By suddenly the policies of Netanyahu as well as the Dutch government at the end of her novel. The spot and rejection that Multatuli fell for years would now resound. Not only in literary criticism. (‘Does that really have it? So awkward explicit?’) Key-borders such as Wierd Duk, Leon de Winter and all other Telegraaf columnists would also be ready to do the unimportant. Because he dared to write something like: ‘I would like to swing knives-law-laws in the minds of the poor martyrs to whom I promised help. Rescue and help, on a legal way, where possible … on a legal way of violence where you have to. ”
This would give Geert Wilders and other Twitter greats extra courage to stir, totally in addition to the actual issue. By also turning against activist writers. And through them against the ancestor, not just such writing but even, they will say, from music groups such as that Bob Vylan and their ‘calling for violence’. In fact, they will say, “Multatuli has already started that fashionable nagging about decolonization”-so already in 1860. He will say, was the precursor and inspirator of the soft and decadent ‘road-with-useration’ that today systematically undermines our principle-resistant society. He, they will say, was also the first to make a perpetrator of the West, while our Western excellence is being sacrificed more and more in this way. He, they will decide fashionably, was ‘Woke’ avant la lettre. The father Abraham by Antifa!
I dare to ask all those trolls with confidence here: don’t wait for such a new novel. Immediately re -read Max Havelaar and go against it scornfully. Proof thus that they still exist: the drying stubble, the Batavians, the hypocrites and shaderors of and with ‘the Western values’.
Yes, Léés Multatuli – again. Pelieve him – again. He deserves that. And so too.
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