Flat by Design
Essay for Berlin Review (March 2024) about the dangers of literature's increasing gentrification.
«Anything but flat», is the promise of this year’s Leipziger Buchmesse with The Netherlands and Flanders as its guests of honor. Yet one of the problems of today’s literary production is that it takes place within an increasingly flattened landscape, marked as it is by Anglo-American hegemony. If this is a global phenomenon, it affects Dutch literary production with particular force. Sure, the resulting porosity of cultures has some advantages, affording freedoms and possibilities that a rigidly national tradition precludes. At the same time, it has created a vastly inflated bubble in which a handful of titles – mostly novels recognizable as realist – float around, unmoored from each other and the contexts that give them meaning.
Much like literary awards, bookfairs – Buchmessen – are prone to blow even more hot air into these bubbles, highlighting blockbuster narratives from a given area for their commercial potential in today’s global literary market. In a recent episode of the publisher’s in-house podcast Hanser Rauschen, Hanser Verleger Jo Lendle pointed out a remarkable truth when he implied that the Scandinavian and Dutch book markets were practically dead because people either watch Netflix (in English, of course) and don’t read, while those that do have become too good at reading English translations.
What seems to be in danger is a sense of culture immune to commercialization and lopsided internationalization, a force resistant to the cultural gentrification that swallows up local traditions and crowds out influences from non-English language sources.
German and French literatures used to be well known to Dutch writers, who have always been keen to adopt major currents from the bigger linguistic centers. Today, however, adaptation and transfer occurs mainly at a remove, once major currents have passed through the publishing centers of New York and London. Annie Ernaux is a prominent example: translations had appeared continuously throughout the eighties and nineties, but her breakthrough in The Netherlands came only after she excelled in Anglophone markets. Pace Pascale Casanova, even Paris now seems demoted.
Book fair spotlights such as this one in Leipzig or 1993 in Frankfurt may have spiked interest in The Low Countries and sparked a moment of dialogue across borders. In most other respects, however, the gulf between The Netherlands and Germany has never been wider. Knowledge of German among the Dutch has withered, with universities struggling to attract new students or slotting German into European Studies programs – a fate that had already befallen smaller languages long ago. The situation is a bit different in trilingual Belgium, a country composed of linguistic minorities. If the Netherlands could afford to internationalize (read: Americanize) at breakneck speed, Belgium’s notoriously complex linguistic and political situation helped to fend off the tabula rasa approach so dear to Dutch elites. As a result, the Humanities in Belgium are less orphaned than outre-Moerdijk.
It Is Warm in the Hivemind
Anglo-American cultural production not only holds sway over commercial publishing, it also affects the more explicitly intellectual and avant-garde circles. Dissenting voices can be sensed, at times ambiguously, in unexpected places. Maxime Garcia Diaz’ 2021 poetry collection Het is warm in the hivemind [It is warm in the hivemind] is one of the first poetry books to come out in Dutch that betrays an author’s origins as a woman who grew up (very much) online. Far from being an internet gimmick, the volume encapsulates a complicated promise of both personal and collective liberation. Unlike a normative biography, Diaz’ book is laid layed out as a digital, lateral exploration of possibilities, or as the writer – borrowing from Audrey Wollen’s Sad Girl Theory – puts it, as «Non-linear girl-history».
Sad Girl Theory is, perhaps, one of the few floating references that a relatively large portion of the younger, internet-educated literary crowd around the globe might have in common – or perhaps not. The book spans the whole gamut of internet culture from the 2010s – xenofeminism, inchoate tumblr politics, the ravishing density of meme culture – and accounts for the fluid subjectivities of myriad aesthetical microcurrents that are, potentially, already passé. These days, the life-span of generations is akin to those of fireflies. Despite rampant cognitive overload (or rather because of it), they have little information about themselves, no shared culture, and no access to a generalized form of experience other than the infinite succession of internet singularities.
er was niets om je ledematen bij elkaar te houden
je vroeg aan het duister wil je me knuffelen
het duister probeerde je te knuffelen
het duister probeerde je te knuffelen het lukte niet
het duister was ook van te weinig gemaakt
jullie zweefden samen & verlangden naar meer substantie
jullie wilden dingen zijn je wilde niet meer deze rotzooi
van huid & haar & chemicaliën
extract from «Aan de rand van de dode ruimte» by Maxime Garcia Diaz from Het is warm in the hivemind (2022)
A product of such conditions, Diaz’ poems enact and analyze them without trying to outdo or undo their giddy affective kernel. We are reading a digitally native auto-ethnography wrapped in verse. Still, there is something ambivalent about this book and its treatment of subjectivity. Diaz’ poems both dramatize and cohere into a narrative of becoming a commodified girl. At the same time, they dissolve said subject by pushing against the materiality (in)to which it turns, only to match the disembodied flows of the internet. The result is a display of ravishing fantasy worlds that feel oddly immobile, as if seen from the outside by a new master signifier: the countercultural, young and critical poet, a figure devoid of actual subjectivity.
This tension adds an extra layer to the texture of an already rich book, but it also illustrates the limitations with which it is faced. Furiously semiological, Het is warm in the hivemind remains a search for a practice. It contains descriptions of political protest — maybe echoing the 2015 Maagdenhuisbezetting in Amsterdam, a student protest against the neoliberal university that was crushed by the police with crass violence— yet those allusions remain curiously void of content.
In-between Decades
In its search for a practice outside its own ambit, Het is warm in de hivemind can be read as a symptom. Published in 2022, it precariously follows up on a decade that saw an uptick in mobilizations and new protest movements yet it is already enmeshed in the gloomy new era we have just started to inhabit, one inaugurated by the ravages of Covid-19 and an outbreak of war, all of which have precipitated many developments long in the making. After all, the kind of internet so euphorically celebrated in this book is long gone, as are the bustling city centers, a fact that one cannot help but relate to the political economy. Amsterdam used to be a cozy, liberal city with a knack for experiment and DIY culture. It may have been expensive and gentrified for some time, but it has now become unaffordable and, thus, as Geert Lovink quipped, boring.
Perhaps sensing the exhaustion that had seized Amsterdam’s once vibrant but now thoroughly marginalized counterculture, Diaz – who was part of it – has packed her bags and moved to the US to attend Iowa’s famous Writers’ Workshop. Her newest poetry, as yet unpublished in book form, suggests a slight change in orientation. In a dream-like manner that is both speculative and analytical, Diaz dissects the uncanny work of mushrooming big data in The Netherlands, wondering how long it will take before the internet fully Americanizes the Dutch people. Her poems reveal a serious engagement with the political economy of The Netherlands, which over the past fifteen years has been incrementally hollowed out from within.
Under Mark Rutte, the Netherlands seems to have found no higher ambition than to flatten its profile into an infrastructural hub for the unencumbered circulation of capital, goods and people. Tellingly, his self-professed biggest regret in office was that he had not been able to muster enough support to abolish the tax on corporate dividends. This attempt to further escalate financialized plunder is thrown into sharper relief if we juxtapose it with the infamous Toeslagen scandal, which saw families on child benefits’ programs, mostly from immigrant backgrounds, racially profiled as fraudulent profiteers and driven into poverty. This glaring injustice exposed the moral baselessness at the heart of a government that could, at the same time, outwardly show its progressive neoliberal face.
The Vissicitudes of Community
Literature is a weak business (and poetry no business at all), and it would, thus, be misleading to say that literature has been able to amend or even revitalize decaying public culture in the Netherlands. However, a minor fraction of said literature – and poets more so than writers of prose – have not ceased to insist on the costliness of this void. The Dutch left never really galvanized into a broad formation in the early 2010s. Their experience of the crisis may have been less intense than in other European countries, yet many precarious younger poets threw in their lot with an abstract celebration of community as a bulwark against the onslaughts of neoliberal governmentality, others conjured up vague collectivities out of thin air.
This was mostly a poetic gesture that lacked political substance. There is nothing wrong with that in principle, but as the ravages of the 2010s dragged on, it became clear that the usefulness of community as a «shibboleth with poetic capital» (in poet and essayist Çağlar Köseoğlu’s terse formula) had worn off. Many poets started to probe deeper, exposing the fault lines in political and social communities, the body politic and their own histories. The most interesting work in this regard splices formal innovation with a turn to the subjective experience of oppression and silencing.
During the 2010s, Köseoğlu himself took the counterrevolutionary outcomes of the uprisings of Occupy, the Arab Spring and Gezi Park as focal points for his devastating 2020 book Nasleep [Aftermath]. Searching for signs of other temporalities that continue to pulsate underground, Köseoğlu sifts through the personal and political detritus left by the «blasting open» of history engendered by the movements of the squares.
This «ontological solution» for the problem of political poetry in search of an adequate form can – for recent Dutch-language poetry at least – be traced to Jeroen Mettes (1978–2006), a brilliant poet and theorist who sadly died far too young. His influence has been immense and we probably owe it to his work, published posthumously in 2011 as N30+, his collected poetry, and Weerstandsbeleid (Policy of resistance), a collection of his critical writings, that capitalism could be reformulated as a problem for poetry. His epic poem about the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999, inspired by Ron Silliman’s new sentence and which the Mettes himself described as «the definitive end of my social and political exhaustion», is assembled entirely from linguistic, affective, and rhythmic intensities.
For many of us, Jeroen’s work opened up a radically new path for Dutch poetry. The same is true for marwin vos (born in 1962), one or one and a half generations older than us, who carved out an original trajectory in Dutch poetry, fusing historical research, life writing, documentary and the lyric. Both militant and full of mourning, her work could perhaps most succinctly be described as a fragmented, embodied inquiry into the intersecting histories of violence and oppression, as well as their affects on the body and the psyche, whether such violence is perpetrated against (communities of) people, the earth or animals. Every new book is richer than the previous one, displaying a formal acuity, thematic range, and breadth of resources that is unique in Dutch poetry.
The Private Never Was That Political
In general, the question of speaking in a public or in a private voice never impinged on Dutch literature with the weight that it had in other countries where the model of the engaged intellectual was much more deeply rooted. Unlike countries such as Germany, France, or Italy, where the exigencies of social and political involvement weighed on intellectual culture, Dutch writers have shown a tendency for the private and metaphysical. Politically, there has been a preponderance for either liberal-conservative pessimism or softened skepticism and detached irony, a leftover of an intellectual landscape first dominated by, and then completely freed from, religion. The lack of a political culture of contestation can still be detected today. Discussions of engagement have long been outmoded in a world where norm entrepreneurs and media pundits tend to their small businesses of commodified outrage and expertise. In this landscape, what remains of the old forms of ideological parti pris?
Starting out as a poet of existential ennui, Hannah van Binsbergen’s Kwaad gesternte (Bad omen, 2017) took the Dutch poetry world by storm, earning her the most prestigious poetry award as the youngest ever laureate (she was 24 at the time). The book combined a pose that was weary yet never cynical, too smart for this world yet thoroughly endearing, with a hope – flimsy but never renounced – for a project of collective liberation.
This latter vein intensified in her novel Harpie as well as in her second book of poetry Kokanje (referring to a joyous land of plenty and abundance found in popular imagination), in which she dares to speak, even more than in Kwaad gesternte, with an unironically public, perhaps even prophetic voice. Misunderstood by many critics as a representation of a paradisic afterworld, Kokanje is, in fact, thoroughly materialist, and deliciously free of the metaphysical pessimism and ironic realism that are so pervasive in all genres of Dutch literature.
Van Binsbergen both references and turns away from a homegrown tradition of socialist verse by Herman Gorter and Henriette Roland Holst. Abroad, Gorter may have been noted as one of the staunchest adherents of council communism, but at home, he is considered by some as the most important poet the country has ever produced. Having started as a late romantic with the epic poem Mei (May), he went on to publish a proto-modernist book of blank verse simply called Verzen 1890 (Verses 1890). After that, he felt he had reached an endpoint of sorts. Some of his fellow Tachtigers, a group of formally innovative writers that shook up the tranquil landscape of Dutch poetry in the 19th century, would escape further into this ethereal realm rivalling the impressionist painters of the time but with poetry and prose.
Others, and Gorter in particular, felt that their poésie pure was too far removed from the concrete material realities of everyday life and became, after a telling detour through Spinoza, Marxists. In an ostensibly open-minded and liberal country like The Netherlands, his decision to «convert» to marxism is, to this day, still absurdly controversial. Scholarship and the readers’ reaction heavily skews towards Gorter’s individualist period, with revisionist account of his work that includes his communist verse and epic having re-emerged only in the last decade or so. Van Binsbergen’s work is clearly a product of this rehabilitation, but without the religious overtones that can be sensed in Roland Holst’s or Gorter’s work.
Becoming Minor Through Poetry
Even today, the passions of the late nineteenth and twentieth century linger in one form or another when the country has to reckon with political poetry. It is nigh impossible to do justice to the manifold manifestations in the field over the last few years. Compared to the overwhelmingly flat production of prose, poetry is clearly more alive., Just this month a Dutch publisher, mimicking the British magazine Granta, released 11 onder 35 [11 under 35], an anthology of 11 promising new voices for the future of Dutch letters. 11 onder 35 may have included an international Booker Prize winner (Lucas Rijneveld) as well as other commercially successful poems, but it is hard to see what on this list qualifies as new, promising or even just interesting, despite the presence of genuinely engaging writers such as Lieke Marsman, Nadia de Vries, and Simone Atangana Bekono.
The traditional male bias of its British role model has been corrected, in sync with the magazine’s own recent adjustment to gender parity, but by privileging market conforming success that hardly reaches outside the Amsterdam bubble, it comes across as a rather feeble attempt at shoring up an unimaginative center, stuck with a version of progressive neoliberalism to which it offers no real antidotes. In this constellation, poetry, far from being elitist and esoteric, is clearly much more responsive, much more in touch with reality than an instantly obsolete subset of novels that, though eminently marketable, remain wedded to the crumbling fantasies of the neoliberal order.
Of course, we could shrug at the contemporary distribution of power in all of today’s globalized working world and resign ourselves to American cultural imperialism, whose sheer dominance seems impossible to penetrate. But I would argue that it is much more liberating to forge a path out of this relentless narrowing of available trajectories, compounded by the platformization of a few stellar artistic and critical practices. Rather than uncritically chasing the aesthetics of flatness and a worldliness mediated by US-American infrastructures and media apparatuses, why not boldly embrace a minority status, and stop copying the forms (or rather formats) of yonder to produce untranslatables?
The majority of interesting Flemish writers always understood this significantly better than most of their colleagues from the North. Marginalized by both Amsterdam and Brussels, Flemish literature became ideally positioned to thread a line between regionalism and modernism, producing a strain of works combining avant-garde and vernacular sensibilities. Even if the starkly peripheral conditions of Flanders have been long since been removed, recovering these strains is at least more audacious and interesting than passively suffering an intellectual and cultural hegemony of US import. An important new project in this respect is the Flemish Review de la Poëzie, a monthly newsletter on poetry nurturing a local sense of community that has been famished by what has come to be known as culture tout court. Do we allow forms of life to be imposed on us, or do we revitalize our own? These are the stakes.