Author and director Bart Meuleman was fascinated by this early work by Claus and is now adapting it for the stage. He talks to An-Marie Lambrechts.

Bart, why did you choose Claus and why specifically De verwondering?

That’s a long story because, as far as I was concerned, Claus was not exactly love at first sight. Around the age of twenty I was even anti-Claus for a while. It was all too Flemish. His work was everywhere; Claus was a monstre sacré. I couldn’t stand that at the time. I had a lot of difficulty with his plays; I thought Suiker (Sugar), for example, was pure melodrama. Gradually I also began to read his prose, Omtrent Deedee (About Deedee), De hondsdagen (The Dog Days), De Metsiers (The Duck Hunt and Sister of Earth), but I didn’t really like any of it; I couldn’t ‘believe’ it. I also had difficulty with the language, I found it bombastic and staid. In those days I thought Claus was massively overrated.

What happened to change your anti-Claus feelings?

A few years later I read De verwondering and I had to admit that the bizarre adventure continued to haunt my memory. Much later, in 1997, I was working on Koen Brams’ De encyclopedie van fictieve kunstenaars (The Encyclopaedia of Fictitious Artists), which involved reading novels and stories featuring artists. We wrote an entry for each fictitious figure as in a real encyclopaedia. I concentrated on Flemish literature and this led me to Het verdriet van België (The Sorrow of Belgium). I read the book in seven days, lying in a deckchair on the Costa del Sol. I was completely sold on it! Having admired it so much, I then started reading Claus again, always with the question in the back of my mind: ‘How is it I now think this is so fantastic when before I had such difficulty with Claus?’ I began to view everything in a different light and suddenly I saw Claus as a man who was constantly putting up a fight, especially when it came to the language. I could see him in my mind’s eye asking the question: so what language should I write in? I saw the distress this caused him, his struggle, sometimes the failure, but increasingly also the vitality and enjoyment of it. From that perspective I reread De verwondering, a benchmark in Claus’ work, along with Het verdriet van België.

What is De verwondering about?

You see a man of 37 who teaches English and German in a college in Ostend. His name is Victor-Denijs de Rijckel and all is not well in his life. 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. An incident which I personally find very enjoyable sets the events in motion: the headmaster, who de Rijckel feels despises him, has to give a lecture at the cultural centre and he asks de Rijckel to introduce him. You can picture the awkwardness of the situation: de Rijckel is actually ordered to introduce that man in an ingratiating way. He decides not to do it, and instead goes off to the Bal du rat mort, which Claus also refers to as the White Rabbit Ball. There a rather sluttish woman, who is playing games with a man who is infatuated by her, catches de Rijckel’s eye. The next day a boy at school, Verzele, claims to be able to take him to that woman. Verzele and de Rijckel go on a bus journey to the fictitious Hekegem in West Flanders. She turns out to be the daughter of the local castellan. In the castle there is 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 ‘a Crabbe-like figure’ ever existed, but the atmosphere of the story is entirely convincing. Because of de Rijckel’s ‘cultivated’ accent, those in the castle mistake him for doctor Heerema,  a Dutch specialist taking part in a meeting of Crabbe experts. De Rijckel takes on that role and becomes totally entangled in Crabbe’s life and gradually begins to identify with him.

And then things really go wrong for de Rijckel, don’t they?

Claus suggests that the story is a reconstruction by a psychiatric patient who is writing down his experiences for the doctors while awaiting institutionalization. That account paints a picture of an individual in an existential crisis who stumbles upon unsavoury goings-on during the war. Ingeniously Claus has the personal and the social / historical intersect: he uses de Rijckel’s experiences to depict a dubious episode in Flemish history, and at the same time he shows how that Flemish history lives on in the village. The Germans may have lost the war, but the question is whether anything much has changed in people’s heads because they still speak about that fascist leader Crabbe in the same tones.

Why do you find that aspect of Flanders’ history so fascinating?  

Why did so many people simply carry on with their lives when their country was occupied by the Nazis? I understand that something like that is partly a survival tactic, but there was also much sympathy for the occupiers and a great deal of active involvement. Democracy was still very young at the time. When they were overrun, all kinds of resentments and suppressed authoritarian feelings surfaced. People enjoyed the fact that the clock was turned back. They didn’t want that weak and complicated system of democracy. Claus shows this graphically. Moreover, there are enough elements in the book to suggest that not that much has changed. I think it’s very important to give an account of what the generations thought and did for us, particularly if it impacts on the present.   

So is De verwondering also a benchmark in Claus’ work?

I don’t know another book from that period that you could compare De verwondering to. It’s lonely at the top, you might say. I see it as an attempt to do something totally different from what had previously been written in the Dutch linguistic community. Claus was 33 but he had already proved highly innovative. De verwondering is the work of a young person, but it is also a culmination point in which he experimented a great deal. Lots of books about the war and the collaboration had already been written, but not as Claus does it here. He works with different sorts of fragmented narrative, sometimes written in the first-person singular and sometimes in a descriptive third person, and sometimes in the first-person plural. Sometimes you don’t know who’s speaking. You sense traces of le nouveau roman, except that Claus has more humour than most of the nouveau romanciers. Some parts are very cinematic, others tend towards a stream of consciousness. The book also reflects a great interest in visual art. Some passages even seem to be descriptions of paintings.

De verwondering is obviously an early tour de force. With Het verdriet van België I feel far more that Claus has discovered how he should write. There is no other way and to show this he sustains it for hundreds of pages without flagging. It is a very mature, well-considered work. De verwondering isn’t, it is a sensual, strange book, kaleidoscopic with successful and less successful passages, also in terms of style.

What do you want to achieve with your production of De verwondering?

What I would like to do is to stage a ‘state of being’ of a character like de Rijckel, as I did in, for example, Half elf zomeravond (Ten-Thirty on a Summer Night). It is really a question of creating a conscious experience in the audience, an experience that corresponds to that of the protagonist: someone who has already begun to lose the plot and who you see go further and further downhill.

Why does that fascinate you so much? Maria in Half elf zomeravond (after Marguerite Duras) is another figure who deteriorates.

Because I sympathize with it. It has been drummed into us that it is good to ‘endure’ something, to do what is required of us. But there are situations where people lose it completely and go off the rails. I want to show that. Also because it is interesting theatrically. If you succeed in having the audience get inside the head of someone who has lost it, then you allow them to experience something they recognize from a distance – because it is in fact in all of us –, but which they prefer to steer clear of. Theatre can show something like that, by aestheticizing it. By giving it a sublime form. In that way you can also reconcile people with that derailment, with their own abyss.

Claus’ world is much racier than that of Duras, and much more humorous. I want to reflect that in this play too. In that sense it is a counterpart to Duras. When I have made a play, I want my next play to respond to it, to run counter to it; yes, contradict it. This play should also be much ‘uglier’ and 'more brutal' than Half elf zomeravond, albeit in a pleasurable way. Just compare the two casts, preferably with the portraits of the actors to hand, and you see the difference.

How can you make that social derailment in that village all those years ago relevant in the here and now?

The world Claus paints with the veneration of ‘the hero’ as the focus is dangerous. It could seriously threaten what democracy is. Just because we are seventy years further on, doesn’t mean that sort of danger is a long way off. But I certainly don’t want to discredit Claus by making it into something caricatural. The richness of Claus must remain.

Interview by An-Marie Lambrechts