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‘Juggling with big words’: Register variation in Hugo Claus’s De verwondering (1962)

The prose of Hugo Claus has been the subject of broad scholarly interest, regarding – amongst other things – intertextuality and allegories. The presence of various, contrasting language registers has been briefly touched upon, but has – mainly because of the lack of an appropriate research method – never been studied in greater detail. This preliminary article analyses some excerpts of De verwondering (1962), the first novel in which Claus experiments with register variation, based on the stylistic methodology developed by Leech and Short (2007). The analyses demonstrate that this methodology is highly applicable to analyse not just ‘the style’ of a text, but also to ‘zoom in’ on various registers. In doing so, numerous aspects that help constitute (but at the same time undermine) a certain interpretation come more profoundly to the fore, showing that the study of register variation is promising, especially regarding novels in which different varieties of the same language appear.