Internationale Neerlandistiek - Volume 55, Issue 3, 2017

The rise of naturalism in the Netherlands and Flanders was accompanied by a growing interest in a motif that had drawn attention to itself on several occasions in earlier literary epochs: fate or fatum. At least up to the mid-20^th century, this motif went on playing an important role in Dutch-language literature. It is striking in this connection that two different notions of fatum are to be found there. On the one hand, an ‘external’ fate is identified – thought of as a supernatural, metaphysical power which determines the course of events in advance. On the other hand, though, an ‘internal’ fate is postulated – a conglomerate of psychological dispositions and hereditary character traits that determine a person’s behaviour. In literary texts, it is not always easy to see whether an ‘external’ or an ‘internal’ idea of fatum is predominant. The present article investigates where the reasons for this ambivalence lie. A thematological procedure was chosen for the purpose, with Deirdre en de zonen van Usnach (1920) by Adriaan Roland Holst serving as a reference point – a novel in which the author made an explicit decision in favour of an ‘external’ idea of fate. Furthermore, two other novels are analysed: Noodlot (1890) by Louis Couperus and De waterman (1933) by Arthur van Schendel.

Ernest Claes is among the many interwar Flemish and Dutch writers who have gone down in history as so-called “storytellers” or “vertellers”. Although this concept is very often used to describe their authorship, its cultural-historical connotations have never been studied systematically. This article aims to fill this scientific lacuna by analyzing the relationship between narrative texts of the interwar period and the themes and techniques of the folk tradition of oral storytelling. Claes and two of his narrative texts function as representative case studies. To begin, the present paper zooms in on Claes’ views on the tradition of oral storytelling and links them with an essay on the same topic by Walter Benjamin, a contemporary of his. Next, two narrative texts by Claes are interpreted as literary revitalizations of the storytellers’ tradition and of its epistemic functions. The knowledge of storytellers, so the argument goes, exceeds the merely regional but also concerns the exotic.