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Max Havelaar and the question of the novel
Jason M. Wirth
After 150 years, what are we to make of Eduard Douwes Dekker's (Multatuli's) Max Havelaar specifically as a novel? What does it, as a novel, still have to teach us about the practice of the novel?
As a historical phenomenon, its impact is well known. In many Dutch literary circles, knowledge of this work is de rigueur. Willem Elsschot dubbed Multatuli ‘the true Prometheus’ for these circles, who adhere to the novel almost as if it were a ‘religious duty’. It was the subject of Fons Rademakers' well-regarded 1976 film of the same name and it has been required reading for many Dutch high school students, and, on more advanced levels, it is celebrated by some for its formal novelistic advances, as if, for example in Beekman's view, its intricate and multiply displaced authorial structure were an exercise in Bakhtin's ‘heteroglossia’, or carnival of multiply valid authorial perspectives. Although I think that this is a misplaced reading, and that there is a clear perspective guiding the novel throughout, there is no question that the novel, especially given the naïve, conventional, and often mawkish poetry found within the novel, is nonetheless stylistically unexpected, challenging, and, in its context, even startling. The enduring value of these literary devices, however, must first be separated from the other major facet of its historical event, namely its indictment of colonialism in the former Dutch East Indies, the cultuurstelsel, and the Dutch hypocrisy regarding it.
The Indonesian novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer called it ‘the book that killed colonialism’, reflecting that this novel, also studied by the elite Indonesians who could read it in the Dutch original (at the time of independence at the end of the Second World War, only 3,5% of the Indonesians were literate in any language), ultimately inspired the birth of post-colonial Indonesia. In so doing, Toer conclud- | |
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ed that it ‘also sparked the call for revolution in Africa, which in turn awakened ever more of the world's colonized peoples and signaled the end of European colonial domination’. In a historical corrective to the legacy of colonial extraction and labour exploitation throughout the world, the Stichting Max Havelaar launched the Max Havelaar brand in 1988 as the first ‘Fair Trade’ certification mark in the world, and it has spread to other parts of Europe and the industrialized world.
This is a far cry from the strategy of the cultuurstelsel of forced cultivation, which Toer describes as the policy by ‘which farmers were obliged to surrender a portion of production from the land to the colonial Government. Through this plan, the government was able to reverse the Netherlands’ decline in just three years.’ In the novel, Multatuli decries this exploitation of Indonesian labour. ‘The Government compels him to grow on his land what pleases it; it punishes him when he sells the crop so produced to anyone but it; and it fixes the price it pays him.’ There is no way to produce generous profits ‘than by paying the Javanese just enough to keep him from starving, which would decrease the producing power of the nation.’ This produced the following paradox: as the Netherlands grew rich on Indonesian agriculture, the Indonesians themselves were subject to famine. ‘Mothers offered their children for sale to obtain food. Mothers ate their children.’
As important and - for its time - especially challenging, as this ethical critique may be, even if the critique itself is not as thoroughgoing at it could have been from the perspective of contemporary post-colonial studies, what was gained by positioning this critique within a novel? Could this not have been a more straightforward ethical treatise? If the retort is simply that such a treatise would either not have been published or not have been read, and therefore its novelization was a stealth form of the treatise, its status as a novel is simply that it is a treatise by other means. It is the novel doing what the treatise more straightforwardly does and the task for the reader is to distill the essential ethical treatise from its integument in the accident of the novel.
The novel as stealth ethical treatise has its tradition. Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, which appeared eight years before Max Havelaar, is a classic exemplar. In fact, the authorial persona Stern, himself rewriting the authorial persona Sjaalman, cites it on behalf of his own project: ‘May one deny the truth which underlies Uncle Tom's Cabin because little eva never existed?’ This was a novel whose immortality was grounded not in the literary ‘talent’ of its author, ‘but because of its purpose and the impression it makes.’ Indeed, in his introduction to the 1927 English translation of the novel, D.H. Lawrence considered Max Havelaar ‘irritating’ to the extent that it was a ‘tract or a pamphlet very much in the same line as Uncle Tom's Cabin’.
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The tract-novel, that is, the novel as treatise by other means, lives and dies by the timeliness of its ethical and political enterprise and then, when it is no longer relevant to contemporary affairs, it survives as a historical curiosity, a relic or monument that serves to render a historical period intelligible. Such works tend to maintain their vitality as long as their ethical and political agenda retains its vitality. It is rare to find someone who reads Uncle Tom's Cabin exclusively for its literary qualities. It is more often read to appreciate its role in the US abolition movement. Few even read it all, because it survives most of all as a truism: this novel was a critical factor in awakening the abolitionist cause. It has secured its place in the stories we tell about our past precedents. It no longer has anything new to teach us.
Furthermore, Max Havelaar has another political limiting condition: it is a novel about the exploitation of the ‘Javanese’, but it is not a novel in which any Javanese character has a fully developed voice. The ‘Javanese’ do not speak; they are spoken for. The travails of Saijah, whose lamentable story includes the rape and murder of his love and Saijah's consequent suicide, generates outrage and ethical indignation, but it is not the story of a developed character, but rather the iconic profile of a victim. It is a tale ‘addressed only to those who are capable of holding the difficult belief that a heart beats beneath that dark epidermis’. It serves to generate our ethical sympathy for Saijah as emblematic of the overall victimization of the ‘Javanese’. ‘What is fiction in particular is truth in general.’ This is a rhetorical strategy for bearing witness to a general condition of oppression.
However, this aspect of Max Havelaar, if it is successful in raising our appreciation of this deplorable condition, cannot have a lasting impact. If the condition to which it aims to sensitize readers no longer obtains, the text has done its job and we are finished with the work. Moreover, if the victims are one day going to cease to be mere victims, then they will have the possibility of developing their own voices. When they speak for themselves, they no longer need the voice of another to speak for them. Moreover, the ‘Javanese’, in being spoken for, were not spoken for in the vivid terms that characterize the interior life of a first person voice like a Droogstoppel. The voiceless are in the third person and ‘they’ are largely made visible as an abstraction.
As we move beyond ‘those coffee- and sugar-producing machines we call “natives”’, in all due respect to Spivak and the problem of the inarticulate subaltern, there are more voices in more diverse contexts and modes and values of intelligibility then the colonial administration could have tolerated. As such, Max Havelaar, as a warning about what not to do, is of little value to the contemporary pluralistic debates about what to do. This is further complicated by the fact that it is not altogether clear that Max Havelaar is criticizing colonialism as such, but rather cruel practices like the cultuurstelsel. As Zook argues: ‘Multatuli did not denounce the
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Dutch colonial empire because it was unjust, but rather because it refused to assume the power to which it was entitled in order to protect the inhabitants from the injustices of native society.’ Even if one does not accept this critique, and I for one find it oversimplified, one can only be troubled by the fact that Dekker sought reinstatement into a reformed colonial service. It is hard now to imagine ethically that a just form of colonialism, or a just form of imperialism, could be anything but oxymorons.
When, eighty-five years after the publication of Max Havelaar, Indonesia gained its independence, and hence when the novel's immediate ethical impetus - ‘the javanese is maltreated’ - was no longer immediately relevant, what is its lasting literary value? It is not sufficient to say, for example, that it is valuable as an ongoing ethical critique of the neocolonial oppression that remains in the economic structures that persist largely intact in the wake of decolonization, as Frantz Fanon so clearly discerned already operating at the dawn of decolonization: ‘In its narcissism, the national middle class is easily convinced that it can advantageously replace the middle class of the mother country.’ It also does not suffice to lament the intensification of neocolonialism in globalization. As urgent as these kinds of issues may be, they were not the concerns of this novel. The specificity even of its analysis of the problem of colonialism already dates the ethical agenda of the novel. Yet, given that Max Havelaar is a novel with an impressively complex rhetorical structure and not a pamphlet or a tract, is the fact that it is a novel only an accident, of is there something of value that a novel can do that a pamphlet cannot do and that, as such, outlasts an assessment of the novel as a treatise by other means?
Writing of his practice of the novel over a century later, the Franco-Czech writer Milan Kundera, referring to the modern novel's disavowal of the totalitarian march of History, argued that it ‘would be wrong to read their novels as social and political prophecies, as if they were anticipations of Orwell! What Orwell tells us could have been said just as well (or even better) in an essay or pamphlet. On the contrary, these novelists discover “what only the novel can discover”.’ Kundera borrows the latter phrase from Hermann Broch, who had left doctoral studies in philosophy at the University of Vienna because he concluded that the philosophical treatise could no longer address the matters of great value in an age when values as such were degenerating. To address the crisis of value in a novel was not simply to write a stealth treatise. It was to undertake what only the novel can undertake. When Broch (and Kundera) wrote novels that engage thought seriously as an exercise in novelistic thinking, this was not a trivial happenstance.
What, then, if anything, does Max Havelaar do that a pamphlet could not? The novel begins as an immense hall of authorial mirrors (Dekker writing as Multatuli
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writing as Sjaalman being rewritten by Stern and supplemented by Droogstoppel), yet by the end, Dekker (himself the ultimate character in the novel?) suddenly intrudes, announcing that he is not the quixotic ‘half-baked’ dreamer, Max Havelaar. From the perspective of literal truth, this book was a contrived, immensely complex lie. Contrasting novelistic truth (what is fiction in particular is truth in general) with Droogstoppel's dismissal of poetry as nothing but lies because it is not a precise statement of the facts of the case (and therefore just a flight of fancy), it is clear that Multatuli recognizes the capacity of the novel as a superior form of speaking the truth. To what is it superior? It is more powerful then simply articulating the facts of the case to those in power. Would Stowe's book have been ‘heard’, that is, would it have a forcibly audible voice, ‘if she had given it in the form of a court deposition’? Novels can speak truth to power in a way that simply speaking truth to power cannot. Further aligning himself with Stowe, Multatuli pleads, ‘Is it her fault - or mine - that truth, in order to find an entrance, so often has to borrow the guise of a lie?’ The novel as the ‘guise of a lie’? Why is the lie (the fiction of the particular) necessary to convey truth in general? Multatuli is unequivocal: ‘I want to be read!’ The value of the novel is for Multatuli extrinsic to the actual novel itself: ‘It is all the same to me whether I am considered an incompetent artist, provided the admission be made that the ill-treatment of the native is: outrageous!’
Why do the guise of the lie and the fiction of the particular make the text legible and deserving of careful consideration? A naïve answer would be that fiction is the sugar that makes the bitterness of the treatise more palatable. If that is the case, then the form of the novel is not only an accident, but also a trick, a sleight of authorial hand in a world in which no one bothers with treatises. Such a reading, however, would fail to see another major accomplishment of this novel, a discovery that only the novel can make: Multatuli demands to be heard and read precisely because he lives in a world in which he appears eccentric, extravagant, dreamy, and unconcerned with the real truths of the world. In a sense, Max Havelaar attempts to bring about the conditions of its own legibility.
In a world in which Parson Blatherer is a moral paragon, even though he argues that the ‘the Javanese shall be brought to God by labour’ and thereby spared the ‘crackle of the flames in the eternal Gehenna’, the belief that it is not the irreligious ‘natives’ who are in need of saving but rather the parsons and their approving congregations, sounds quixotic. In a world where Droogstoppel is ‘a man who loves truth’, the conviction that this love is precisely a defense against the very possibility of truth, sounds mad, or prophetic. Indeed, in Stern's rendition, the character Max Havelaar has almost too much moral integrity to be interesting. His ethical independence makes him appear abstractly good. Yet in a world that has no sensitivity
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for what is concretely good, but rather takes refuge in the safety of abstractions, he can be either apostle, prophet, Don Quixote, or a devil. ‘That's the sort of thing which is said by people who love injustice because they live by it, saying there was no injustice so as to have the pleasure of calling you and me Don Quixotes and at the same time keep their windmills turning.’
In this sense, the novel discovers and dramatizes the conditions of its own inaudibility. The ‘incomprehensible blindness’ of a Government that wants only ‘favourable reports’ creates an immense, almost Kafkaesque echo chamber in which everything is going well because we all constantly say that it is going well, and every one of us expects every other one of us to continue to report the immense good news of our colonial accomplishments, to confirm again and again the ‘realistic’ practicality of the menial business mind (Droogstoppel), and to be endlessly inspired by the colonial ‘charity’ of our parsons (like Parson Blatherer). A voice that does not yet again confirm the tacit insularity of our echo chamber is quixotic, and not worthy of being taken seriously. How does one dramatize the conditions of inaudibility and illegibility in order to become audible and legible?
In dramatizing the immense dissonance reduction in which it would take generations to discover that colonialism was not part of our Christian largesse and a reasonable and responsible business venture, Multatuli discovers the invisibility that Hannah Arendt located in the Eighteenth Century European esteem for the United States. The New World, unlike France with its rebellious, Bastille storming poor, was a reasonably wealthy country, a ‘good place to be poor’. Yet how could the United States ever have been a good place to be poor if the institution of slavery enforced the immeasurable violence of a kind of poverty that exceeds the lack of material means? For Arendt, the United States appeared rich because slaves did not appear at all:
As it is, we are tempted to ask our selves if the goodness of the poor white man's country did not depend to a considerable degree upon black labor and black misery - there lived roughly 400.000 Negroes along with approximately 1.850.000 white men in America in the middle of the eighteenth century, and even in the absence of reliable statistical data we may be sure that the percentage of complete destitution and misery was considerably lower in the countries of the Old World. From this, we can conclude that the institution of slavery carries an obscurity even blacker than the obscurity of poverty; the slave, not the poor man, was ‘wholly overlooked’.
Slavery was not on the radar screen of the problem of poverty because, even though we do not help the poor, we were not oblivious to their existence, nor did
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we imagine that the humiliation of poverty was a virtue. Slavery, however, largely did not appear at all to be a problem. It was hidden in the invisible privilege of whiteness. Edward Saïd, in distinguishing colonialism from imperialism, argued that many criticisms of the de facto injustice of colonial policies like the cultuurstelsel do not question the underlying assumption of white European moral, cultural, and economic superiority. As Parson Blatherer proudly proclaims: ‘The ships of our Holland sail the great waters, to bring civilization, religion, Christianity, to the misguided Javanese.’ One can explicitly criticize the ethical status of colonialism while tacitly still assuming the imperialism of white superiority. ‘Liberal anti-colonialists... take the humane position that colonies and slaves ought not too severely to be ruled or held, but - in the case of Enlightenment philosophers - do not dispute the fundamental superiority of Western man, or, in some cases, of the white race.’ Contrary to positions like that of Zook, Saïd exempted Max Havelaar from what one might here call anti-colonial imperialism. ‘During the nineteenth century, if we exclude rare exceptions like the Dutch writer Multatuli, debate over colonies usually turned on their profitability, their management and mismanagement’, etc., but ‘an imperialist and Eurocentric framework is implicitly accepted’.
The silent, tacitly operating imperialism of the elevation of Western (white) man is successful in direct proportion to its capacity to appear normal, obvious, and even natural. By making the adversary to the novel's very intelligibility a theme of the novel itself, this novel does more than attempt to break through the conditions that would render its ethical concerns eccentric. It discovers a problem that not only enabled colonialism, but one that transcends it. Over a century later, Herbert Marcuse would draw attention to the spell of presence that characterizes a one-dimensional society, a society whose spell of presence can no longer be shattered from the outside, and in which the ‘efficiency of the system blunts the individual's recognition that it contains no facts which do not communicate the repressive power of the whole’. Max Havelaar shows us that such a world is topsy-turvy. One would have to be eccentric, outside the immense power of the normal, like a prophet, or an apostle, or some other Don Quixote, to suddenly question the tacit moral imperialism that allowed colonialism to be business as usual (Droogstoppel) and an exercise in Christian charity (Parson Blatherer). Does it not follow that when sanity appears as madness, it is the ‘sane’ who are mad? In a world currently engaged in business as usual amidst the global climate emergency, the sixth great extinction event, immense, unfathomable environmental degradation, and reckless overpopulation, one can appreciate in Max Havelaar a literary accomplishment that survives the timeliness of its specific ethical agenda.
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Literatuur
Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, New York: Viking 1963. E.M. Beekman, Troubled-Pleasures: Dutch Colonial Literature from the East Indies 1600-1950, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1996. Frantz Fanon, ‘Pitfalls of National Consciousness’, in: The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington, New York: Grove Press, 1963, p. 148-205. Anne-Marie Feenberg, ‘Max Havelaar: An Anti-imperialist Novel’, in: mln 112 (1997), p. 817-835. Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel trans. Linda Asher, New York: Harper 1988. Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man, Boston: Beacon Press 1964. R.P. Meijer, ‘Introduction’, in: Multatuli, Max Havelaar or the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company, trans. Roy Edwards, New York: Penguin 1987. Multatuli, Max Havelaar or the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company, trans. Roy Edwards, New York: Penguin 1987. Edward W. Saïd, Culture and Imperialism, New York: Knopf 1993. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in: Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, Urbana, il: University of Illinois Press, 1988: p. 271-313. Pramoedya Ananta Toer, ‘The Book That Killed Colonialism’, in: New York Times Magazine, April 18, 1999, p. 112-114. Darren C. Zook, ‘Searching for Max Havelaar: Multatuli, Colonial History, and the Confusion of Empire’, in: mln 121 (2006), p. 1169-1189.
De reliëfglobe van Douwes Dekker, gekocht in Wiesbaden en bewaard in het Multatuli Huis.
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