Destiny Domesticated: The Rebirth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Technology

5. The Art of Suffering

71 FIVE THE ART OF SUFFERING Man is a being that has to be anesthetized and blinded. When his eyes truly open, he sees no reason to live anymore. For those who do not believe in an afterlife and live only because of the inborn fear of death, which itself refers to as little as the appendix, but merely exists, all that matters is this: to get through it as well as one possibly can. —W. F. Hermans The Sadist Universe If there is one author in Dutch literature after World War II whose work was deeply inspired by the Greek tragedies, it would be Willem Frederik Hermans, who is considered to be one of the greatest Dutch authors of the second half of the twentieth century.1 Not, however, because he wrote many books in the form of a classical tragedy. The majority of his work consists of short stories and voluminous novels. The only work that resembles the classical tragedies to some degree is Periander, which was commissioned in 1974 by the VPRO, one of the Dutch broadcasting companies, and was broadcast a year later as a television play. Hermans based this tragedy on the writings of Herodotus and Diogenenes Laërtius, whose work he follows quite faithfully. The piece is about the tyrant Periander , who ruled over Corinth from 625 until 585 BC. Periander murders his wife because she became pregnant by another man, and then he violates her body (“He puts his buns in a cold oven”). With these actions, he 72 DESTINY DOMESTICATED creates an irreconcilable distance between himself and his sons Lycophron and Cypselus, and in doing so he unintentionally brings about the fulfillment of the prediction, made by the oracle, that his sons will not rule over Corinth. While Periander contains a host of anachronistic hints regarding current political events, in which Hermans predominantly expresses his cynical outlook on democracy,2 the theme clearly aligns with that of classical tragedies. Periander misinterprets his circumstances (hamartia), assumes he has conquered fate (atē), and thus becomes the victim of his own overconfidence (hubris). In his tyrannical blindness, Periander does not realize to what degree he is a tool of fate. While the classical content and form of Periander sets the book apart from other works by Hermans, the theme addressed in it is wholly in line with the rest of his oeuvre. Fate and tragedy are the main ingredients of almost all of Hermans’s stories and novels. Time and again, “heroes” are presented in his work who are severely struck by fate, and who, in their ardent attempts to avoid their fate, only end up in more trouble in the end. The title of his collection of stories Malice and Misunderstanding (Moedwil en misverstand, 1948) says it all, really. This latter characteristic, Hermans himself has argued, sets his work apart from that of many other Dutch writers who have used fate as an important theme in their work: Fate in Dutch novels, such as those by Couperus or Van Schendel , is merely a cheap trick to hide the fact that the author is incapable of creating energetic characters that act on their own, that attempt to intervene. This is why they let Fate do all the work—did you know that? But in the real tragedies of Fate, Fate acts through the intentions of the heroes. (Janssen 1983, 2) Hermans’s stories and novels provide a nice illustration of what, in the previous chapter, I called the universalizing tendencies of tragedy. The characters in the world of Hermans’s novels are, unlike the ones in classical tragedies, generally not gods or exceptional individuals, but ordinary people, who have the bad luck to run into a tragic situation. Many of his early novels, for instance, take place during the war. For example , the main character in I Am Always Right (Ik heb altijd gelijk, 1951) returns from the “police actions”3 in Indonesia disillusioned by what he has experienced there, and the novels Tears of the Locust, (De tranen der acacia’s, 1949), The Dark Room of Damocles (De donkere kamer van Damocles, 1958) and Memories of a Guardian Angel (Herinneringen van The Art of Suffering 73 een engelbewaarder, 1971) all take place against the background of World War II. In other novels, “smaller sufferings” are discussed. For instance, some of his other—partially autobiographical—novels deal with characters whose scientific ambitions have...