Who is the de Rijckel figure in De verwondering?
The protagonist is a 37-year-old who teaches English and German at a school in Ostend. His name is Victor-Denijs de Rijckel and his life is far from satisfactory. At school he makes so little impression that he doesn’t even have a nickname. What’s more, he’s divorced from his wife, a former pupil with whom his relationship was initially an illicit one. De Rijckel sees himself as a failure. At the Bal du rat mort (White Rabbit Ball), he is intrigued by a woman, a rather sluttish type, who is playing games with a man who is infatuated with her. The next day a boy at school, Albert Verzele, claims to be able to take him to that woman. Verzele and de Rijckel go on a bus journey to the fictitious village of Hekegem in West Flanders. She turns out to be Alessandra, the daughter of the local castellan Richard Harmedam. In the castle there is permanent, almost messianic worship of a fascist leader who disappeared, Crabbe.
Who is Crabbe? Is he a historical figure?
To begin with de Rijckel doesn’t know who Crabbe is. He assumes he is the lieutenant of a certain de Keukeleire, who was murdered in France in May 1940. That can of course only be Joris van Severen, a leading figure in the Flemish Movement who went on to found and lead Verdinaso, a fascist-inspired political party in the 1930s. It is not certain if Crabbe is based on a real person, but the story is set against that far-right backdrop. Because of de Rijckel’s ‘cultivated’ accent, those in the castle mistake him for doctor Heerema, a Northern Dutch specialist taking part in a meeting of Crabbe experts. De Rijckel takes on that role and becomes entangled in Crabbe’s life.
Where does the focus lie in your adaptation?
What I took from the book and perhaps even magnified is the right to be an individual. The right to be who you are, with all your inadequacies and faults. One of the extraordinary things about Claus’ book is that he defends that right with his rather ambiguous story by reconstructing the character of Crabbe, a full-blooded fascist. Crabbe grows up with the fascist ideas which were very much alive in Flanders between the two world wars. He also acts on them. But gradually Crabbe comes to see things in a new light. He acquires not the insight of the Social Democrat, but the insight of the individual who realizes he is alienated from his own community and certainly feels no connection with a people or a state. So Claus found a very unusual way of defending the right of the individual to his individuality. That really fascinated me and I emphasized it in my adaptation.
Yet in your adaptation you also go to some lengths to paint a picture of the village community’s fascist sympathies, don’t you?
Crabbe is an unusual character partly because he is at odds with the community around him. In the words of Claus, that community is “an inert mass”, which during the war can sympathize with one ideology and after liberation simply switch its allegiances to the victor. People are not democrats by nature; that is a process we have to work on every day. It is often a slow process, leading to murmurings of “let’s get the damn show on the road”, “let’s clean things up” and the like. In times of difficulty – and particularly in the extreme situation of a war – all that sounds very attractive and things can move very quickly. You have to watch out for that. Claus paints a picture of two figures, de Rijckel and Crabbe, who opposed this, each in his own way. They are both (mentally) ill. Crabbe’s sanity begins to crumble after seeing a camp in Poland where children are murdered. Decline was already setting in, but that camp is the real breaking-point. In the book he deserts, but I scrapped that in my adaptation. Crabbe disappears and people begin to speculate. The villagers in Hekegem, including the residents of the castle, want to honour Crabbe’s glorious past, not reflect on how he met his end, how he fled.
And gradually De Rijckel also learns more about Crabbe. He comes to lean on that complex figure. There are moments in the play when the other characters ascribe Crabbe’s characteristics to de Rijckel. This gets inside his head. At times he imagines he is Crabbe.
Where did the suggestion of identification between de Rijckel and Crabbe come from?
It was triggered by the interpretation of a Dutch professor, Maarten Klein, who has been studying Claus since his early years. He scoured De verwondering in minute detail for facts and contradictions and he arrived at the conclusion that de Rijckel and Crabbe are one and the same person. In Klein’s reading of the book de Rijckel is actually Crabbe who wants to start a new life after the war as an English and German teacher, but still struggles with the trauma of what he has once been. At Almout castle in Hekegem, de Rijckel-Crabbe wants to confront that past in the hope of being cleansed of it. You could draw a parallel with Claus himself who as a child growing up during the war also had fascist sympathies, and who in this book delves into his past to look right, justice in the eyes. But while adapting the novel, I realized that complete identification was too rigid an interpretation for me to develop fully. What I did retain of it is the – albeit temporary – desire of the two of them to identify with each other: de Rijckel is intrigued by Crabbe, a role he is more or less pushed into by the crazy environment he finds himself in and at times he seizes upon that identification so as to be able to tell his story.
What weren’t you able to retain in your adaptation?
Lots of things! For example, the character of Richard Harmedam, the castellan, is fully developed in the book and I had to leave that out because that would have been going too far. It’s a pity because with this character you see that rather than just choosing the side of the ‘goodies’ in the war, Claus gives us all sides of the story. There is a wonderful passage during the liberation when Harmedam is dragged from a lorry: Richard is a blackshirt and he will pay the price. An old woman tramples on his head when he is made to kiss a stone on the ground and he loses all his teeth. That was Claus’ way of portraying the other side of liberation, not just the victory, but also the anger, the settling of scores, the misery. Given his own background, we should not be surprised that Claus can distance himself sufficiently from all the parties and adopt a derisive attitude to them. The world he depicts in his novel is truly kaleidoscopic and not merely an indictment of fascism, of everything that collaborates. It is much more complex than that and I fear I have not been able to get all the complexities across in my adaptation.
You have retained the madhouse setting of the novel, haven’t you?
An aspect of the novel I was less keen on is Claus’ choice of a psychiatric setting for the narrator. At the time, the early 1960s, it was certainly topical, but I believe it is dated now. These days you can be sick in the head and at home. So I don’t regard the actual psychiatric institution as important; what is important is the situation: that you are inside your head in your room and reliving everything that traumatizes you, hopefully in a therapeutic way. The fact that you are writing in a notebook at a table establishes a link with literature: writing, being inside your head, trying to make sense of things … In my production psychiatry is replaced by the room and the writing. The table plays a very important role: it is the table of reflection, the table of reliving, the table of therapy, of literature. That table never disappears from the set. Wherever you are in the story, it is there and it symbolizes the struggle to find a holdfast.
How do you view the novel now?
This production has only increased my love of Claus. De verwondering is a book you can read over and over again and still discover new things. It was said of James Joyce that “you don’t read Joyce, you study Joyce” and the same applies to Claus’ De verwondering. The book contains references to all kinds of theories, to classical literature, to popular culture, but disguised in a very playful way. Claus loved to make a playground of things and to mislead people, set them on the wrong track. It’s a book that will last you for years; you never tire of reading it.
*Maarten Klein, Twee in één: een doodgewaande fascist en een leraar Duits-Engels. Over De verwondering (1962) van Hugo Claus. In Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde jg. 120.
