Searching for Max Havelaar: Multatuli, Colonial History, and the Confusion of Empire

Abstract

Must everything in modern Dutch literature begin and end with Multatuli?1 So much has been written on Multatuli and his work, and so many different things have been attributed to his influence, that his presence in modern Dutch literary history nearly overwhelms both his contemporaries and those who have followed after. Only a decade or so after his death, Multatuli’s novel on Dutch colonial rule in the Netherlands Indies, Max Havelaar, had become nearly required reading and something like a badge of identification for both radical and mainstream political groups in the Netherlands.2 Gerard Brom, writing in 1931 about the influence of the Indies on Dutch culture, could only wax poetic about Multatuli and his work: “so great was the influence of Max Havelaar for life in the Indies, and so great was its significance for Dutch culture,” that the book’s presence had become “a fact that no writer could hope to avoid.”3 Even Queen Wilhelmina (r. 1898–1948) found inspiration in the writings of Multatuli when she began to entertain the idea of writing the story of her own life as part of the moral and material rebuilding of the Netherlands in the postwar years.4 Other writers speak of Multatuli as the “true Prometheus” of Dutch literature, the observance of whose literary “cult” is nearly a matter of “religious duty” for Dutch literati.5 Multatuli’s influence has indeed been immense, both in Dutch literature and in the literature of empire, but one wonders at times if the stories of the life and work of Multatuli had perhaps taken on a life of their own and become a