Reinhart: Nederlandse literatuur en slavernij ten tijde van de Verlichting

6.2. Reinhart as an epistolary novel: presentation and themes of an epistolary communication

In Chapter Two I describe the communication-chain ‘author→text→reader’ as much as possible from the reader's viewpoint.

The epistolary communication between Reinhart and Karel is subordinated to that between the author and her actual reader. The latter is a person who reads over Karel's shoulder, the reader within the novel. The presentation of Reinhart's history is such that the reader, together with the letter-writing hero and his addressee, remains uncertain about the future. The live-story is not told teleologically; no editor's fiction is concretized in order to safely conduct the streams of information. Only the author's providence stands above the characters of the novel. Within the fictional work it is Divine Providence which determines the fortunes of Reinhart: Reinhart may propose, but God disposes. The reader is able to share Reinhart's deliberations, his hopes and fears, his certainties and his doubts, his joy and his sorrow in a very intimate way, because Reinhart confides his innermost feelings and thoughts ‘to-the-moment’: coinciding with the moment of occurrence or very soon thereafter, or, in the event, a larger narrative distance has occurred, by experiencing them anew. Because of this, the novel becomes for the reader an open book about Reinhart's inner life.

The message of the author lies in the themes of the work. Earthly existence and earthly values are perishable; temporary existence enables man to undergo a process of preparing himself for eternal life. On the path of life which is often incomprehensible and rendered difficult by adversities, friends and lovers support each other especially through oral or written (epistolary) communication. They enhance each other's virtues, specially the virtue in placing trust in Divine Providence. Reinhart claims that he cannot live without this friendly communication and motivates his correspondence in this way.

Life according to nature offers man the most favourable opportunity to develop virtue and faith. Nature brings man closer to his Creator, natural life stimulates contentment, simplicity and other virtues. To a large extent Reinhart lives with his family and his slaves in a pastoral idyll. Reinhart's life illustrates as it were that happiness and misfortune are determined by Divine Providence and that they have a function in man's process of preparation. Before one can come to accept the blows of fortune with complete resignation (i.e. with heart and mind, with ‘reason and feeling’) an immense struggle may be required. The theme of the novel, adequately reflected in its formal structure, can be formulated as follows: man proposes, God disposes; what remains to man in adversity is the hope for a more favourable dispensation.

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For the reader in 1791-1792 these themes must have caused little surprise: literary works in which virtue, love and friendship, nature and religion, preparation and immortality, wrestle with Providence, have determined the themes, were common features in the second half of the 18th century. The epistolary form, too, was not new and derived from a century long tradition. Reinhart could have surpassed the reader's expectations by the sustained monologue structure combined with the brief narrative distance through which Reinhart's inner life was disclosed to the full: his observations, feelings and reflections. In this regard the description of tropical nature, life of the noble savages in this environment, will have been viewed as a novelty - at least in Dutch literature. The few concrete reception-data that are known concur with this hypothetical reception.