Young Man Go East! Investigating colonial topoi in Dutch literature

Abstract

Dutch colonial literature of the East Indies has its roots in the seventeenth century, in the famous mariner's Journal (1646) of Willem Bontekoe no less than in the exotic tale of Javanese black magic contained in Johan van Heemskerck's learned and elegant Batavische Arcadia (1637), the first attempt at a novel in Dutch literature. The colonial themes and topoi first presented in these two early works have found a clear literary echo in the early twentieth century, in the colonial novel John Companye (1932) by Arthur van Schendel just as much as in Johan Fabricius's popular boys' adventure tale De scheepsjongens van Bontekoe (1924). Through a critical-historical and postcolonial examination of these literary works we can identify three colonial topoi in particular. First of all, there is the cultural confrontation between, on the one hand, the deceitful and untrustworthy Javanese, with their black magic and their superstitions, and on the other, the soberminded, critical, perspicacious and protestant Dutch, who are not taken in by these adversaries. Secondly, the four texts under investigation are marked by the foregrounding of a strong sense of Dutchness, which is defined in terms of a belief in fair trade and the freedom of the seas, injustice and in toleration. The presentation of these Dutch values in the idyllic and fairytale-like frame of the Arcadian myth creates a strong illusion of innocence. But all the while, the rather more unsavoury realities of colonial history and its violence, cruelty, torture, plunder, corruption and commercial genocide, form a noticeable subtext that can be detected in (and gives the lie to) the main text, in all kinds of unexpected ways. Thirdly, what emerges from this analysis is how ‘Going East’—to trade, to conquer, to overcome dangerous adventures, to make a fortune, to build an empire—has for centuries been a central Leitmotiv in Dutch culture, a centrality underlined by the fact that we encounter these topoi equally in popular reading material and in works of high literature.