Although I think that this is a misplaced reading, and that there is a clear perspective guiding the novel throughout, there is no question that the novel, especially given the naïve, conventional, and often mawkish poetry found within the novel, is nonetheless stylistically unexpected, challenging, and, in its context, even startling. It was the subject of Fons Rademakers' well-regarded 1976 film of the same name and it has been required reading for many Dutch high school students, and, on more advanced levels, it is celebrated by some for its formal novelistic advances, as if, for example in Beekman's view, its intricate and multiply displaced authorial structure were an exercise in Bakhtin's ‘heteroglossia’, or carnival of multiply valid authorial perspectives. Willem Elsschot dubbed Multatuli ‘the true Prometheus’ for these circles, who adhere to the novel almost as if it were a ‘religious duty’. In many Dutch literary circles, knowledge of this work is de rigueur. Max Havelaar and the question of the novelĪfter 150 years, what are we to make of Eduard Douwes Dekker's (Multatuli's) Max Havelaar specifically as a novel? What does it, as a novel, still have to teach us about the practice of the novel?Īs a historical phenomenon, its impact is well known.
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