De ernst van het spel: Willem Frederik Hermans en de ethiek van de persoonlijke mythologie

Abstract

In the ongoing discussion on the societal engagement of modern literature, a bad name was given to a specific group of modernist writers (chapter two). Among them is the Dutch writer that goes by the name of Willem Frederik Hermans. The critique was aimed specifically at the proclaimed ‘unrealistic’ and ‘amoral’, ‘disengaged’ and ‘autonomous’ poetics of the so-called exclusive modernists like him. Unlike writers of other modernist movements, such as the writers of the Historical Avant-garde, the prototypical ‘exclusive modernist’ (one can think of writers such as Kafka, Joyce, Woolf and Mann) hesitates to occupy the ‘moral high ground’ in order to act like a diagnostician of a universal reality of man and society, and refuses to take a stance in societal and ethical debates. This book questions the antisocial image of the modernist writer. It takes a closer look at Hermans’ poetics of the personal mythology (chapter three) and came to the conclusion that his literary endeavor should be considered far from unethical and disengaged. Of course, Hermans always refused to make any critical statements about (unmediated, true) reality, and rejected those who made claims about reality outside the borders of human subjectivity. Nonetheless, he considered it to be the task of the modern writer to criticize and write about the subjective reality where we are declined to live in: the symbolic play, constructed by language games: constitutive fictions that cover up the chaos of the real, thereby making a society possible. To be an engaged writer, he figured, is to be engaged with the ongoing construction and deconstruction of the symbolic game that we cannot escape from and is called society. This thesis argues that Hermans is not so much a nihilist who turns his back to the societal world, but a literary equal of philosophers such as Umberto Eco and Jacques Lacan, who took symbolic reality completely serious and valued the gravity of the game we play, and tried to make an ethical distinction between destructive (‘imaginary’) games and (‘symbolic) productive games. The literature of Hermans (like the famous short story ‘The House of Refuge’ and the novel Beyond Sleep) shows the same critical philosophy and can also be thought of as an aesthetic medium which counters dangerous play-forms.