for Memory Colonial Literature from the Former Dutch East Indies
The colonial literature of the Netherlands is, with the possible exception of Spanish and Portuguese letters, the most voluminous and innovative of colonial literatures in the Western world. It also has one of the longest traditions. If we restrict ourselves to the literature produced in the former colonial East Indies, now the Republic of Indonesia, we can speak of an uninterrupted tradition that began around 1600 and ended, in a formal sense, at the end of the Second World War. One should qualify this by saying that the true colonial life from which fiction was constructed then ceased to exist, but the minds which contemplated that life were active well beyond 1945. In fact, some would argue that even in the last decade of this century one still finds reverberations of this genre of literature, though I would argue that most of these texts were written by a generation that no longer has any kind of firsthand knowledge of a place and a society that was once known as tempo dulu or 'time past' . This literature that lived for at least three-and-a-half centuries has several unique features. First of all, one must discard the usual notions of what can be called 'literature' . Beginning with the journals of the sixteenth-century mariners, great texts were produced by men who were totally ignorant of aesthetic canons in the European mother country. They also unwittingly established a model prose style: simple, demotic, wary of rhetoric, pungent, and enlivened with striking detail. In the eighteenth century this style was further modulated by the influence of native story-telling and it remained the major mode of colonial fictional representation well beyond the Second World War. It goes without saying that, being the individualistic medium that it is, this literature also includes several exceptions to this stylistic rule; the work of Louis Couperus (1863-1923) being perhaps the best known example. Dutch colonial literature starts with the prose of the mariners. The journals which such men as Lodewycksz., Van der Does, Turck and Kackerlack wrote during Holland's fateful first voyage to the Indies (1595-1597) constitute the first significant colonial texts. They provide us with vivid accounts of life on board ship (almost always a most miserable existence), with depictions of unusual sights, sounds and scenery, and with the way
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