the scream
by Douglas Messerli
Hugo Claus De
Verwondering (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1962), translated from the Dutch by
Michael Henry Heim as Wonder (Brooklyn,
New York: Archipelago Books, 2009)
Like the other fictions and poems by Claus (who died in 2008) Wonder is an extraordinarily powerful
and original work. With its numerous shifts in time and tense—often within the
space of few paragraphs—and in its uses of dialect and an internal, almost
privatized language, Wonder, as I
confessed to my friend, Michael Heim, the translator of the book, must have
been nearly impossible to translate.
"Claus writes brilliantly," he observed, "and he writes
like no other writer." I might have even gone further and declared Claus'
writing as somewhat eccentric, in the positive sense of that word.
Indeed. Even the story of this wondrous work is purposely as strange as
story can get. A middle-aged school-teacher, bored with the bourgeois
proprieties of his job and the mediocrity of his peers and superiors, is slowly
moving toward a mental shutdown. Despite a life of subservience to all and
impeccable obedience, he has sex with one of his underage students and soon
after carefully arranges to marry her. But the young girl, predictably, is
frustrated with her life with the confused pedant, and soon after leaves him.
On the day in which the fiction begins the teacher, Victor-Denijs de
Rijckel is asked by the principal to introduce him that evening at a lecture he
is giving on "the function of classical music in our society" to the
Association for Flemish Culture Friends of Music. Unpredictably, de Rijckel
misses this event, instead wandering, somewhat drunkenly, into the midst of the
hundreds of revelers come to town for the annual costumed White Rabbit Ball.
There he passively watches and speaks to a beautiful woman who ends the evening
walking into the ocean along the beach, doing a kind of dance in the moonlit
waves.
Claus' fiction moves suddenly into a future time, where de Rijckel is
evidently locked away in a house where he is recovering from the mental
breakdown by, in part, keeping a daily journal. But we quickly discover the
facts behind this breakdown as Claus, almost like a magician drawing a rabbit
out of a hat, introduces the teacher to a young male student who has evidently
witnessed de Rijckel's behavior at the ball, and tells the teacher that he
knows where the mysterious woman of the night before lives. Before the reader
can even assimilate this strange encounter, the two are off by train to
Veldonck, a small village where the young woman, Alesandra Harmedam, lives in a
castle.
Neither teacher nor his unusually clever guide know what they intend to
do if they can reencounter the woman. And as they take stock of the situation,
it appears that the castle, backed by a series of strange sculptures, is highly
fortified; they escape their foray with their lives, retreating to a nearby
inn, where the teacher pretends he is the boy's uncle.
On the second day, they take a more conventional approach and are
greeted as if they were expected, even toured about the place. Soon we realize
that the castle is preparing for a significant gathering of supporters of an
obscure Flanders wartime figure, Crabbe, who, siding with the Nazi's, fought a
kind of individual war based on nationalist beliefs. De Rijckel and the boy are
thought to be a doctor and his son from the Netherlands come for the event,
and, accordingly, Alesandra readily entertains them. Yet suspicions are clearly
aroused by some of de Rijckel's comments, and a former aide to Crabbe, Sprange,
who lives at the castle, looms as a fearful skeptic.
Strangely de Rijckel's sexual instincts seem to have been right;
Alesandra is attracted to him as the two clumsily engage in sex. But the
teacher's instincts for self-survival diminish as he loses his glasses which
blurs his vision. Intellectually, he dangerously toys with the now-gathered
fanatics of Crabbe and his ideas. Before long they reveal that they know he is
a pretender, threatening him with death. De Rijckel and the boy attempt escape,
with the both the figures from the castle and the villagers, angry with him for
other reasons, chasing the two down in a cornfield where they are hiding.
The house where he is now incarcerated is apparently where Sprange,
after torturing him, has taken de Rijckel, who is so incapacitated by events
that he even allows other inmates to piss upon him in the small derelict nook
wherein he sleeps.
In many senses, Claus' story, in short, is so absurd, so illogical that
the reader really does not have a sense of any one truth, much the way the
Flanders locals had no coherent picture of the war. Villagers clearly lived out
the war supporting any side that seemed momentarily about to win, sometimes
even hiding Jews and others from the Nazis less out of principle than financial
gain or plain stubbornness. And there is also in Claus' preposterous plot a
great deal of humor, just as there is the dark and dangerous activities of
Crabbe, who believed in principles so confused that is hard to understand
whether he is a mad fanatic or a ridiculous hero.
Like Flanders during the war, de Rijckel ends this fiction so confused
that even his escape from his confines is half-hearted, and he is returned to
imprisonment, weakly imaging alternatives: "I was thinking of phoning the
principal from the telephone both by the Hazegras Bridge as soon as I went out.
I would have told him I was alive and hoped he had cancer or polio. And I might
have gone to school afterwards as if nothing happened. Nothing. No boy."
That, so Claus suggests, is just the problem. There is no outrage in the
society—for anything or anyone. There is no righteousness, no fury. Things
simply happen, and even the strangest of events are unflappably
assimilated.
We in our country of two
hundred and ten airplanes and two
submarines, we work hard
and have a good reputation abroad—ask
anyone—because we are
flexible in our transactions and give our
all. On Saturdays we'll
go for a spin in our big American cars
(ninety percent of which,
my good man, are brought on credit) to
the coast, our coast. We
study the rim of West Flanders that lies
on the sea.
...Circumstances, if we are to be believed, are in the
hands of others....
Yet this little man who has so
willingly engaged the catastrophes that have befallen him, finally does act;
ultimately he rises again, if nothing else, to explore his own imprisonment;
and in the process and despite possible punishment, de Rijckel lets out a long
righteous scream against the perverted Ensor-like landscape surrounding him:
A gray-haired mother
sitting on a terrace opposite the esplanade said
to her son, "Did
you hear that, darling?"
Her son, though
fully grown, was wearing shorts. He was in a wheel-
chair, and saliva
dripped from his lips onto his pink, hairy thighs.
"No, no,
no!" he said, swinging his heavy head. She carefully dabbed
his lips.
Los Angeles, April 17, 2010
Reprinted from EXPLORINGfictions (April 2010).
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