Vestdijkkroniek. Jaargang 1978

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Jane Fenoulhet | ‘A novel within a novel within a novel...’ (1)

All novelists are self-aware to a greater or lesser degree, and realise that they occupy a special position in society because they have it in their power to express their ideas and opinions to society at large, and, if they so wish, to influence society by their writing. Their response to this awareness varies, of course: in some authors it arouses a sense of moral responsibility - they have social consciences, writing with an aim to expose, even change whatever it is that they feel strongly about. They have consciously decided to use their influence to try and impose their views on society. Other novelists who are philosophically inclined rather than politically, tend to be more individualistic and subjective in their writing, and their thinking is directed inwards in the first place. They are interested in society in so far as it is composed of individuals who all have their own response to a particular literary work. There is no doubt that Vestdijk fits into this last category.

A characteristic of such authors is, then, that their self-awareness has become self-consciousness, which means to say that they are constantly aware not only of their own position in society, but also of the actual presence of the reader. They are concerned purely with that part of society which relates directly to them - the reading public, on whom they are dependent for recognition of their writing ability and the validity of their ideas, but not, as is the case with the other group, with any social or political message.

In a few cases, this kind of self-consciousness has manifested itself in a particular literary phenomenon which I shall term the ‘novel within a novel’ (I have taken this term from the title of one of Vestdijk's chapters in Open boek, the second novel of the ‘Slingeland’ trilogy, which I have also used as the title for this article.), as found in the work of Simon Vestdijk, André Gide and Aldous Huxley. I am not using this term in the strictest possible sense of two actual novels, an inner and an outer one. We must take the characters' word for it that the inner novel exists in most cases, although sometimes we are

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allowed a glimpse of the author's notes and journals pertaining to the work in hand. Reinhard Kuhn has talked about the ‘Künstlerroman’^1. which began with Goethe's Werther and continued through the Romantic movement up to the present day, where some of its representatives are André Gide's Les faux-monnayeurs; Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds; and Iris Murdoch's Under the Net. The term ‘Künstlerroman’ is too general for my purposes, despite the fact that most of the novels mentioned do contain a writer-figure. Vestdijk himself uses the term, which he explains in the essay ‘Het lyrisch beginsel van de roman’.

‘Hier (in the “kunstenaarsroman”) schept de romancier niet alleen een roman, maar bovendien nog een schepper in de roman.’^2.

This quotation describes the novels I am writing about, except that they go one step further - the creator within the novel is actually engaged in creating yet another novel.

Steven Kellman has isolated a sub-genre which he calls the ‘selfbegetting novel’,^3. whose main features are that the central action is the writing of a novel; the central protagonist is a novelist; and the actual novel begets both a self and itself, i.e. it represents a self-portrait. However, if there is such a novel, I have yet to find a true one. Les faux-monnayeurs and the Symfonie van Victor Slingeland come the closest to it, but neither of them possesses all the characteristics listed above because the action never hinges on the writing of the fictitious novel. I shall, then, simply refer to the ‘novel within a novel’. The two works mentioned above, with the addition of Point Counter Point by Huxley, have certain features in common: firstly, the inner novel is written by a character who contains so much of the author's own personality that one automatically compares and even identifies the two with each other. Secondly, the fictitious writers' comments on their own work - the inner novel - and the judgement of the other characters are in general applicable to the outer one, providing the reader with a built-in critique. Finally, since the novelist figure is writing about people and events around him (the very ones with which the actual novel is

1. Kuhn, Reinhard. ‘Proust and Sartre: the heritage of Romanticism’ in: Symposium, Winter, 1974.

2. Vestdijk, S. De leugen is onze moeder, Den Haag, 1965.

3. Kellman, Steven. ‘Sartre's “La Nausée” as self-begetting novel’, in: Symposium, Winter, 1974.

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concerned), what we see and hear of the inner novels presents a mirror-image, distorted, it is true, of the outer novel. This acts as an effective device for awakening the reader's awareness of perspective.

The Slingeland trilogy is one of the best examples of the novel within a novel. It constitutes the memoirs of a writer who is known simply as ‘S’ throughout the books, which are ostensibly concerned with the life and work of S's conductor friend, Victor Slingeland. During the course of these memoirs, S is also engaged in writing a novel, but apart from this - despite the fact that Slingeland is the intended focal point of the memoirs (but not necessarily of the trilogy, bearing in mind that this work has two authors, a fictitious one and a real one), - he emerges as vitally important, not only for the story-line as Victor's best friend, but also as the story-teller. To elaborate: without S the books would not even exist. What is more, it is entirely up to him what he will include in his account, and this is naturally governed by what he is interested in, and which aspects of Victor's life he considers to be important. Since there is no omnipresent, invisible narrator, what we learn of Slingeland is limited to what S himself has either experienced at first hand or heard second-hand. Thus it is not Vestdijk's intention to present the reader with an objective study of a conductor, but a subjective one as seen through the eyes of a fictitious novelist character.

The matter is further complicated by the fact that the books are narrated in the first person singular, which results in a kind of double subjectivity, so that the reader is forced to consider them from two points of view: firstly S's, and secondly Vestdijk's own, because when he uses the first person, not only the fictitious author is speaking, but Vestdijk too, according to the author himself in conversation with Nol Gregoor on the subject of these books:

‘Ja, ik had toen de behoefte - ik had een tijd niet geschreven door ziekte -, om me echt eens los te schrijven, en dan kies je de ik figuur.’^4.

It is necessary, though difficult, to bear in mind that S is a fictional character. This is not so much due to the obvious similarities between

4. Gregoor, Nol. Nol Gregoor in gesprek met S. Vestdijk, Amsterdam, 1967, p. 44.

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them, such as name (or rather initial, presumably of first name) and profession, as to the fact that Vestdijk uses first person narration. Whereas in Gide's novel, Les faux-monnayeurs, - because it is narrated in the third person - one is at a sufficient distance from Édouard to be in a position to compare Édouard's work with his creator's and realise where they differ, when one is reading the Slingeland novels, there is a tendency not to differentiate between S and Vestdijk.

Another possible reason for this is tradition. The emphasis in the classical novel is placed entirely on event and character - in fact, any narration using the first person singular was usually only included in the form of extracts from diaries and occasional interpolations by the narrator. One is not conscious of the character of the narrator, and assumes he is the author, and the tendency to identify the one with the other does not lead to a fundamental misunderstanding of the work in question. The temptation to do this is almost second nature, but it can be very dangerous in the case of a modern novel where the emphasis has shifted away from telling a story to propounding ideas - and the ideas which S puts forward need not be those to which Vestdijk would subscribe.

On the other hand, once one has become aware of this complexity, it gives another dimension to the novels. The work can be taken on two levels. There is the primary story level where one reads of Victor's various affairs with women, for example, and where one becomes intrigued with his psychological problems. This is basically what one is led to expect from the trilogy's title. However, one can take a step further back - outside S, as it were, - and become the all-seeing eye oneself. From this vantage point it is interesting to look at the relationship between the two friends, and at S's character.

S and Vestdijk are both novelists writing in Holland at the same time, with similar personalities, especially with regard to their inclination towards deep depressions which would come over them suddenly and without any apparent cause (‘een zwaarmoedigheid even onbegrijpelijk als ongewenst’). They are even writing novels about

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the same people - Victor Slingeland, S.., Nettie, Adri Duprez, and so on, with the important difference that these characters are fiction (based on real life) for Vestdijk, and ‘real life’ for S. However, whilst making the effort to distinguish between fact and fiction, the reader must also bear in mind that both novelists base their characters on what is real life for them, i.e. they both use people around them as starting points for the figures they are creating. Does this method also apply to the authors' treatment of themselves? Relevant comments in the ‘Symfonie’ on S's new novel serve to help the reader clarify this particular issue.

Take Frits's letter to S in De arme Heinrich in the chapter entitled ‘Interview over een mieters boek’.

‘... maar het is gek, S.., ik herken jou niet.
Je bent het, je bent het niet, het is zo tussenbeide, en ik zou willen weten.’^5.

This could indeed apply to the ‘Symfonie’ itself, and I think Frits is expressing the thoughts of many readers who are struck with the similarities between S and Vestdijk. In the actual interview with Frits it becomes clear that, whilst the inner novel reflects many aspects of the outer novel, it does not present us with a perfect mirror-image. The most significant difference is that S's central character, who is indeed a conductor, is in fact a ‘mengpersoon’ consisting of the conductor figure inspired by Victor, and another novelist character. So it appears that there is a possibility that S's novel could be the antithesis of Vestdijk's trilogy. The former has one central character created from two people in ‘real life’, and the latter has two main characters representing the same two branches of art as S's models. Could they in fact be created from one person in real life? Could they perhaps stand for different aspects of Vestdijk's own many-sided character? He did after all have a musical side (and a medical one, which is where Bert Duprez could fit in). In a very general sense, this is probably true, so that where the main characters are concerned, one could consider the inner novel to be the antithesis of the trilogy, but where the actual method of creating characters employed by the two writers is concerned, then S and

5. Vestdijk, S. De arme Heinrich (AH), Amsterdam, 1974, p. 58.

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Vestdijk are anything but each other's opposite: in fact they employ the same method. Vestdijk imparts this quite unambiguously to Nol Gregoor during one of the radio conversations:

‘V. “Maar aan de andere kant is het wel zo, dat je nooit een precies lijkend portret levert. Ik geloof niet eens, dat dat door de romantechniek kan. In ieder geval probeer ik het nooit. En ik combineer vaak personen... Dat zal van meer romanschrijvers bekend zijn. Dat ze altijd mengpersonen nemen.”’^6.

Compare the first sentence of this quotation with a similar pronouncement by S:

‘.. want wat zijn mijn mensenportretten waard? Ik kan niet eens instaan voor de juistheid van mijn telkens hernomen beschrijving van een persoonlijkheid zo scherp afgetekend als die van Victor Slingeland..’^7.

There are, then, striking similarities between the real author and his author character, and one can therefore conclude that Vestdijk has given S some of his own characteristics, although it is not yet clear to how great an extent.

In the inner novel S includes a number of ghosts of himself which Frits finds rather difficult to grasp:

‘De normale mate van vereenzelviging tussen schrijver en romanfiguren daargelaten, is het toch niet gebruikelijk om steeds maar zijn Ik te projecteren, en voor zover ik je werk ken is het ook jouw gewoonte niet.’^8.

The original writer figure who forms half of the final ‘mengpersoon’ was something of an alter ego, but not a self-portrait, which S feels would have been impossible - yet at the same time, he feels that a certain degree of identification is inevitable.

‘Het is bijzonder moeilijk voor een schrijver, om zich niet te vereenzelvigen met een schrijver, die bezig is vorm aan te nemen onder zijn pen. Het is geen zelfportret.’^9.

6. Nol Gregoor in gesprek met S. Vestdijk, p. 31.

7. Vestdijk, S. Het glinsterend pantser, Amsterdam, 1974, p. 80.

8. AH, p. 67-8.

9. AH, p. 65.

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Identification between an author and a character so akin to himself is not only unavoidable, but often unintentional. Yet another S is included in the form of the narrator.

‘Welgeteld kwam ik er dus driemaal in voor, want ik gebruikte bovendien nog de ikvorm. Een voorbeeld van het bovenpersoonlijke in de kunst was dit boek niet.’^10.

This might well have been said of the ‘Symfonie’ itself.

The third S mentioned in the quotation above appears in the shape of a friend of the conductor, who, according to S, represents a caricature of himself. The idea of an author including such a caricature immediately calls to mind the character of Bert Duprez, the schoolfriend of Victor and S, in relation to Vestdijk himself. The three boys spent a lot of time together, and so whenever there is a flashback to these adolescent days, Bert appears. He also reappears during S's student days in Amsterdam. It is significant that it was Bert who studied medicine like Vestdijk, not S. Finally, the Bert of the present occasionally puts in an appearance: he is now a qualified doctor with a flourishing practice, wife and family. Doctor Duprez is a purely fictional creation because he is a projection of what Vestdijk might have become, had he no artistic side to his character. In a way, Bert Duprez forms a complement to the character of S: one must sometimes ask oneself if S, with all his problems stemming from his writing, would not have been better off as a ‘normal’ bourgeois citizen like Bert, or if Vestdijk might have been happer had he carried on with medicine. The answer is made quite clear by the inclusion of this caricature, since the essence of caricature is to point out someone's faults by ridiculing him, the subject of the caricature representing in no way, then, an ideal.

The young Bert is a caricature of Vestdijk as a child. Consider S's description of his friend in the chapter ‘De scheidsrechter’ in Het glinsterend pantser: an only child, Bert was pale and delicate, a disappointment to his father, and overwhelmed by his mother's attentions. The descriptions of the family do tend to coincide with those of the Wachter family, with the similarities extending to the

10. Vestdijk, Simon. Open boek (OB), Amsterdam, 1974, p. 103.

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parents. This harking back to the Anton Wachter novels serves to strengthen the impression that Vestdijk has reached another stage of development in his study of himself, for Bert is a parody of the self he found so interesting that he wrote a series of eight novels about it. Towards the end of the period in his life which they cover, Vestdijk had already begun to write, yet this activity receives hardly a mention. Either he was deliberately excluding this side of himself because he felt it did not belong in a study of his development as a person, but in one dealing with him as an artist, or because he simply was not interested in this facet of his personality until later. It is probably a combination of these reasons which resulted in the Anton Wachter series stopping where it did - where the artist in Vestdijk began to prevail over the medical man. Whereas S seems rather far-removed from life and women, leading an apparently celibate existence, Bert fathers several children, runs his incredibly busy practice, and even manages to fit in a mistress in Amsterdam. Thus his main function is to highlight the emphasis in the trilogy on S/Vestdijk as an artist. The main characters could even be regarded as variations on the underlying theme of art and the artist. S represents the creative artist, Victor the interpreting artist, Bert has nothing of an artist in him at all, and Tante Stan is something of a modern Werther - a person with artistic temperament, who has failed to find expression for this in any form.

The interview with Frits is one of the most relevant parts of the trilogy for this article (the other being the chapter ‘Een roman in een roman in een roman..’). As well as furnishing facts about S's writing (i.e. when the reader's outlook is contained within the bounds of S's consciousness), it provides an autocritique, since any comments on the novel in general, and on S's work, may be applied to the actual novel (i.e. when the reader steps outside S's consciousness level). Within the confines of the interview itself, the subject is considered from two viewpoints - Frits's and S's - although one's judgement is inhibited by the fact that S looks down on Frits, who comes over as the weaker personality. Therefore one is tempted to listen to S's views rather than Frits's. After one of the latter's questions, S adds in parentheses:

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‘(Hiermee had ik Frits erg geholpen.)’,

and earlier on in the interview:

‘(Dit had Frits op mijn aanraden geschreven.)’,

which suggests that S was behind the questions as well as the answers. The reader has been able to read S's mind, as it were, in chapters such as ‘Een roman in een roman in een roman..’ and ‘De provincie losgebroken’, and has been in the know all the way along, for which reason Frits may seem slow on the uptake of ideas. Rather than present a point of view, he acts as a catalyst for the expression of S's theories.

On the question of the genesis of the novel, it is S's experience that the impulse to write does not come from external stimuli, such as events around him, although these are obviously important for his work, as so many of his friends and acquaintances appear in it. In other words, one should not approach the novel in the first instance from the autobiographical point of view. This is a very clear message which emerges from the interview, intended to be taken on both levels. Frits's interest is directed towards correspondences between S's characters and people he knows, and S feels that this attitude has obscured his insight into the novel:

‘Dat hij bepaalde moeilijkheden had gehad bij het lezen, begreep ik wel, al geloofde ik niet, dat hij er zulke primitieve denkbeelden op nahield over het “gelijken” van een roman als Nettie indertijd tegenover mij had doen voorkomen.’^11.

It is indirectly suggested here that there is something rather primitive and basic in the desire to get behind the characters - an understandable urge, though, if one thought one might find oneself among the characters. S finds the desire annoying, presumably because it means that the reader's attention is effectively channelled away from the real substance of the book. S carefully steers Frits away from this aspect towards his actual method of writing: firstly his theories on creating characters, and then the way he puts them into practice.

S is aware that his views are not shared by many writers and critics.

11. AH, p. 59.

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He considers general opinion to maintain that figures in a novel should be larger than life, their destinies predetermined and controlled by the author, whereas he believes that it should be left up to the reader to realise all the possibilities for the development of a particular character. Given that there are three determining forces at work shaping a person's character, namely fate, environment and personal disposition (De arme Heinrich; p. 63), there are numerous ways open for the development to take, depending on the interaction of these forces. S is not saying that his standpoint is anti-determinist. A novel must have a deterministic background against which the characters operate, and the element of determinism already there must never intrude on the reader's relationship with the characters, so that he will have freedom to use his imagination. The key to S's approach is contained in the following quotation:

‘...dat iedere romanfiguur anders had kunnen zijn dan hij is.’

S does not feel that he has failed because Frits is left with this very impression, namely that characters and their actions could have turned out differently. Implicit in this is the idea that the ending of a book is, to some extent, arbitrary, and it is true that in the trilogy events and situations are never brought to an absolute conclusion. Het glinsterend pantser was not planned as the first book of a trilogy, but after he had drawn it to a conclusion, the author himself was conscious of the variety of possibilities for the development of the S/Victor relationship, which he went on to realise in Open boek and De arme Heinrich. The reader is free to carry on where Vestdijk left off, for De arme Heinrich makes no attempt to resolve all the threads of the story, nor can we confidently say that we know what will happen to S and Victor, and the woman they are both in love with, Eva. Gide's novelist expresses a similar approach in terms of plot, not character.

‘“Vous devriez comprendre qu'un plan, pour un livre de ce genre, est essentiellement inadmissible. Tout y serait faussé si j'y décidais rien par avance.”’^12.

To return to S's method of character creation, let us look at how S actually arrives at a character who is to be subjected to the

12. Gide, André. Les Faux-monnayeurs, Paris, 1972, p. 185.

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determining forces: this is apparently a highly conscious, objective activity for him, calculated, rather than intuitive, judging from descriptions in the chapter ‘Een roman in een roman in een roman..’, where the most striking thing is the distance which S seems to put between self and characters to enable him to execute his ideas. Gide, on the other hand, felt that his characters grew out of him, came into being and took on a life of their own. Curiously enough, the results of these two seemingly opposed attitudes are remarkably similar: since Gide's characters have a life of their own, according to their creator, one must always have the feeling that anything can happen to them, which is exactly the effect aimed at by S.