The Low Countries. Jaargang 13

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Rudy Kousbroek and the Art of Memory
[Reinier Salverda]

Rudy Kousbroek was born in 1929 in Pematang Siantar on the island of Sumatra in the then Dutch East Indies, present-day Indonesia. After the war years, which he spent with his father in a Japanese internment camp, he came to the Netherlands and began to study mathematics, Japanese and Chinese in Amsterdam. In 1950 he went to live in Paris, where he met his wife, the American writer Ethel Portnoy, whose work he translated into Dutch (see TLC 12). After a few years in The Hague in the seventies he moved back to Paris in 1978, and finally settled in the Netherlands in the mid-nineties. Today he lives and works in Leiden, the author of an oeuvre of mesmerising richness and diversity, ranging from poetry and language, photography, the archeology of motorcars, travel, literature, children, cats and other animals, through memory, emotions and the study of the human mind, to critical scrutiny of the Dutch colonial past and the modern history of Indonesia and Japan.

As a poet but also a translator and critic of poetry, Kousbroek's central preoccupation is with language. Very early on, with his friend the poet Remco Campert, he set up the poetry magazine Braak (1950-1951), which made a leading contribution to the experimentalist revolution in post-war Dutch literature. As recently as 2003 his Animal Languages (Dierentalen) brought together in a single volume the poems he had published over many years on the children's page of a leading Dutch newspaper. In between, in 1987 he published a study on the Greek poet Konstantinos Kafavis of Alexandria, and in 2001, with Hans Teeuw, a Dutch translation of the pre-war poetry of Indonesia's greatest poet, Amir Hanzah.

Beyond this there is his original study of the language of cats of 1983 and The Logological Space (De Logologische Ruimte, 1984), a collection of essays about language, which opens with a scintillating ‘Hommage à Georges Perec’. One of my favourites in this volume is his ‘Memorandum on Scientific Language Renovation’ of 1977, a wildly successful April Fool's joke on Dutch spelling reform. The book is full of language games, puns, anagrams, palindromes, Tom Swifties and other jokes which mark him as an external Dutch member of the Oulipo Laboratory, the international writers' collective established in Paris in 1960 by Raymond Queneau, whose Exercices de style (1947) Kousbroek translated into Dutch in 1978. The same pleasure in shifts and transpositions shows itself in Kousbroek's fairytales for children, collected in The Empire of Yes-Bear (Het rijk

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van Jabeer, 1984), every one of them as cruel and irresistible as anything that Angela Carter ever wrote.

But Kousbroek is best known for his essays. In the sixties, writing under the pen name Leopold de Buch, he reported from Paris on the upheavals of 1968 in the leading progressive weekly Vrij Nederland. Under his own name he published many more essays, in journals and magazines such as Hollands Maandblad, De Gids and NRC-Handelsblad. From 1969 onwards, the most important of these have been collected in a long and often reprinted series of volumes, beginning with Anathemas and The Strokeability Factor (De aaibaarheidsfactor) and continuing to the present day. In 1978 he was awarded the highest honour in Dutch literature, the P.C. Hooft Prize, but in a sense this was only the beginning, since his most important works were yet to come.

Central to Kousbroek's writing is his running battle against superstition and the irrationalism of those who feel more attracted to incomprehensible ‘deep’ ideas than to disciplined abstract thought. As an antidote Kousbroek offers analysis and criticism - in his playful and taboo-breaking essays of the sixties, on the discovery of sexuality, on sexual freedom and toleration, and on the rhetoric of pornography, just as much as in his fiery polemics against the obscurantist tendencies of fellow Dutch writers such as Gerard Reve and Harry Mulisch. The former is taken to task for his bourgeois sentimentality and his bigotry, the latter for the scientific ignorance that underpins his philosophical system. Like a second Voltaire, Kousbroek is taking the moral temperature of the nation, and his essays - whether they attack the Dutch lack of a sense of their own history, the imbecility of children's TV, or the disappearance of a basic human emotion such as misericordia from the Netherlands - amount to a sustained critique of the cultural poverty of Dutch society today.

The same sharply critical approach also informs his many contributions on the history of Dutch colonialism. In 1992 the most important of these were collected in The East Indies Camp Syndrome (Het Oostindisch kampsyndroom). The centrepiece of this volume is a comparative study of Studs Terkel's The Good War (1986), the searching French war documentary Le chagrin et la pitié (1970) by Marcel Ophuls, and the silences and clichés surrounding the Dutch actions during the Indonesian war of independence (1945-1950). Other case histories expose the tissue of myths and fictions that holds sway in Dutch colonial historiography. Here again, we find many fiercely polemical exchanges with other writers such as Jeroen Brouwers, whose account of life in a Japanese internment camp, in his novel Sunken Red (Bezonken rood, 1981; tr. 1992), was comprehensively demolished by Kousbroek. Both because of its critical approach and its documentary value, The East Indies Camp Syndrome is required reading for anyone trying to understand the colonial culture and society of the former Dutch East Indies which came to an inglorious end under Japanese and Indonesian attack.

On a more personal note there is his Return to the Lan of Ori Gin (Terug naar Negri Pan Erkoms, 1995), an account of a journey back to the land of his early youth. Some of the most haunting memories in this book revolve around his time in boarding school in Sumatra before the war, compared to which, as he once remarked, the Japanese internment camp was almost a holiday. Ever since the war Japan has been one of Kousbroek's most central interests, and one can only hope that his essays on this subject will soon be collected into one volume too. What we do have, in his travelogue In the Time Machine through Japan: the Court Journey of 2000 (In de tijdmachine door Japan: De Hofreis van

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2000), is a fascinating reconstruction, in text and on film, of the lengthy official journey which Dutch colonial officials had to undertake almost every year between 1609 and 1858, from their trading post at Deshima near Nagasaki to the court of the shogun at Edo.

But ultimately, whatever the subject matter, Kousbroek's essays are dedicated to the art of memory. They are the work of a rationalist who explores this domain while in full possession of his intellectual powers, and who knows only too well that memory is deeply fraught with emotion, desire and imagination. This shows clearly in The Lake of Remembrance (Het meer der herinnering, 1984), where he describes his mother's curious menagerie of Indonesian pets - cats, dogs and rabbits, of course, but also squirrels, mouse-deer, badgers, pigs, snakes, chameleons, tropical birds and monkeys - on their plantation in Sumatra. At the same time, the volume contains an essay on Stendhal's analysis of emotion and make-belief in his autobiographical Vie de Henri Brulard, and an elegiac study of a ninth-century painted Chinese chronicle of the city of Kaifeng and the deep longing of its exiled citizens after it had been destroyed. In each case, what Kousbroek does is to describe as exactly as possible the details that matter, and then to explore with great lucidity the emotions they evoke. This technique was perfected in his writings about travel in the colonial era, such as A Passage to East India (Een passage naar Indië, 1978), and his essays about the lost harbours of Genoa and Alexandria. There is a pervasive sense that this era is now all but gone forever. As he put it himself, ‘the saddest feeling I have ever had is to know your way around in a house that no longer exists’.

Few authors can write as precisely as Kousbroek does about memory, emotion and longing. Very often his memories are triggered by seeing an image, a picture, a landscape, in a photograph or a dream. Images also play a central part in his novel Vincent and the Secret of his Father's Body (Vincent en het geheim van zijn vaders lichaam, 1981), a surreal love story written to accompany a series of 241 old engravings which he took at random from the nineteenthcentury French illustrated periodicals he had bought in a Parisian flea market in the 1950s. The uncanny narrative in this novel reveals the internal logic that connects those engravings. It is a logic of irreality that is as strange and fantastic as that of the writer Raymond Roussel and his republic of dreams. The same goes for Kousbroek's recent Recovered Miracles: Photosynthesis (Opgespoorde wonderen: Fotosynthese, 2003), in which he presents a series of almost seventy extraordinary photographs, each accompanied by a single page of text in the most witty, dream-like and erudite prose, which elucidates not just the miracle we can see before our eyes on the facing page, but also its hidden meanings and the forgotten longing it evokes.