Belgium and the Outsider's Perspective
In the Belgian Château (1994) doesn't have a real castle on the jacket, but rather Magritte's Empire of Lights (1954), a mysterious mansion in fascinating chiaroscuro. The subtitle, The Spirit and Culture of a European Society in an Age of Change, makes clear that this book is not a tourist guide like Frommer's A Masterpiece Called Belgium. Actually it is an exceptionally astute analysis of the relationship between character and society. On the basis of thirty-five years of fieldwork the eminent American sociologist Renée Fox shows that Belgium ‘makes a difference’, no matter how obstinately separatists have been maligning their country as a non-state, an unfortunate union of Dutch- and French-speaking areas.
Dr Fox first descended on Belgium in 1959 to investigate medical research. She shrewdly managed to penetrate into the symbolic temples (or castles) of the Establishment, and her portraits in Part One (‘Public Houses’) include Jacques Errera (the then Commissioner of Atomic Energy), Corneel Heymans (a Nobel Prize-winning medical scientist), and Jean Willems, the director, vice-president, treasurer and dinosaur of the National Research Fund (who disliked her for spilling the beans about flaws in Belgian science policy, particularly inbreeding).
From the second part, (‘Private Houses’), we gather how the scope of her investigations widened so as to include average Belgians as well as artists. She takes her cue from her friend Michel de Ghelderode in explaining her attraction to Belgium as a felicitous coincidence of ‘obsessions and cosmic phantoms’. This social scientist is not afraid to expose herself as a self-avowed romantic, thus affirming a truly humanising scepticism about neutral perception. Her way of rendering a young woman's death and the family's mourning implicates her at every point, showing how narrative cannot be bypassed when defining what life is all about.
A third part deals with her experiences in Zaire, the land that ‘provided Belgians with a horizon, and with an existential as well as geographical frontier’. Regrettably, the loss of this horizon in 1960 contributed to Belgium's becoming too self-absorbed. While often preferring the company of Africans to that of Belgians, not only for purposes of participant observation but also out of genuine sympathy, she wisely refrains from idealising the liberated Africans. One of the most amusing passages relates how she was warned against ‘the Flemish’: ‘There was a certain irony in the fact that Papa Cyrille and other Congolese employed the term “Flamands” in the derisive way they had heard many of their French-speaking Belgian colonisers apply it to Flemish compatriots.’
Dr Fox's gift of wonder exudes perhaps most intensely from the final chapter, ‘Belgium Revisited’, based on her latest visit in November 1993. While the media coverage of King Baudouin's death reaching her in Philadelphia had led her to believe that this event was evidence of Belgium's resurgence, she was at first ‘perplexed’ to get the inside line from Belgians about the crucial difference between the realm of ‘symbolic reality’ and the ‘instrumental reality’ of the country's everyday life. It transpired that the latter was very much fraught with negative competition between vying groups, each of which defined itself as an oppressed minority. However, on closer inspection this insight fitted into the complex culture pattern she had encountered throughout her decades of questing: ‘the tendency of Belgians to be highly sensitive to the sphere of their individual and collective existence where emotions and beliefs, values, and symbols reside, while verbally denying their importance in daily life and systematically excluding them from their intellectual and scientific work.’
As a part-time Freudian I'd like to venture the educated guess that this denial of uncomfortable knowledge is typical of a country that kept on excluding Freud even half a century after he had been productively assimilated in the Netherlands, thus perpetuating cultural deprivation and a terrible inferiority of Belgian mental health care to boot. While the American literary scholar Frederick Crews may deplore his culture's indulgence in Freudian platitudes, surely a culture steeped in pre-Freudian platitudes is much worse... As Luc Huyse has argued, Belgians do not really want to know certain societal data which are readily available in neighbouring countries, especially the Netherlands. Hence eye-openers from foreigners are very useful for recognising flaws, for even if these were pointed out by native writers (e.g. Louis Paul Boon in Chapel Road - De Kapellekensbaan, 1953), such intuitive political analyses were not taken seriously until they were independently conceptualised by American political scientists. Subsequently these inspired the pioneering work of Huyse and his associates about the lack of transparency in Belgium's ‘tutelage democracy’.
Hopefully, Dr Fox's masterpiece of intercultural perception will equally inspire Belgian researchers to pursue her lines of investigation in a rapidly changing scene, where early in 1995 the latest government crisis was not settled in a château, where the King prefers an
Auteursrechtelijk beschermd