Finally another writer’s polemic, some readers responded eagerly to the recent, public battle of pens between writers Rob van Essen and Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer. It was in 1981 that literary scholar Ton Anbeek made a controversial call for Dutch writers to incorporate “more street noise” into their books. An echo of this can be heard in the discussion between Van Essen and Pfeijffer, two acclaimed writers.
Van Essen started. On October 20, 2024, he gave a lecture in Nijmegen that, after a quiet start, suddenly culminated in a philippica against colleague Pfeijffer. “But literature is dead,” he noted halfway through his lecture. He had noticed it at the Leipzig Book Fair, where he felt “completely without danger” and “alienated” among the numerous dignitaries.
“The funeral of literature” took place for him earlier in Antwerp on an evening where Pfeiffer presented his new novel Albikiades presented. Van Essen sat in the stands and was extremely annoyed by the solemnity of the whole event. “It was a funeral service, and the dead person, that was the literature.”
At the launch of such a book, Van Essen complained, it is constantly emphasized that it is actually a current story about the decline of democracy. He called this “the eternal misunderstanding that a novel should say something about the current time, and preferably something committed, of course.” He summarized his aversion to it later as follows: “Novels in which the world is interpreted – nothing worse than that (…). Has anyone, a reader, ever picked up a novel to understand the world better?”
Yes, certainly, Pfeijffer replied in his reply HP/De Tijd: ,,I open all the novels I pick up in the hope of understanding the world better.” He had also read some of Van Essen’s novels “with pleasure”, but “the lack of urgency leads to a form of non-commitment. It was a nice story, okay, but it could just as easily have been a different story.”
In other words: Pfeijffer criticizes the escapism that Van Essen prides himself on as a writer. “It is precisely those demands of topicality and relevance that often make today’s literature so solemn,” says Van Essen.
My question: why shouldn’t those two views on literature, the escapist and the committed, coexist? I know readers – I am one of them myself – who can appreciate novels in both genres. It may even be advisable to strive for variety to avoid boredom. Van Essen seems to me more absolute (“nothing worse than that”) in his rejection than Pfeijffer in his. For Van Essen, the death of literature is even a fact, although it does not apply to all literature, he adds in a curious sentence; Pfeijffer finds the escapist genre at best a nice, but not very important “pastime”.
Who wins? Van Essen’s pessimism is too much for me, Pfeijffer sounds a bit too condescending, so as an independent literary ring judge I would like to keep it ‘undecided’ for the time being. The winner is rather Dutch literature, which thanks to this polemic has again gained two very readable texts.