by Ian Buruma
But in the Dutch East Indies in 1900 I suspect that only a sensitive novelist, passing through, would have been able to pick up the smell of decay, or at any rate to put the smell into words. Louis Couperus was such a novelist. And his The Hidden Force, written during a year-long stay in the East Indies, is one of the masterpieces to come from the colonial experience. It is still regarded as a great book in the Netherlands. Couperus was famous in Britain and the United States as well during his lifetime: fifteen books were translated; Katherine Mansfield and Oscar Wilde were among his admirers. But he has been largely forgotten outside Holland.
The Hidden Force is a story of decay, fear and disillusion. The writer’s vision of Dutch colonialism is that of a solid Dutch house, slowly crumbling in hostile, alien soil. The Dutch characters, even van Oudijck, the chief local administrator, or resident, initially so “practical, cool-headed, decisive (due to the long habit of authority),” are defeated by the hidden forces of the land they rule. The nature of these hidden, or silent, forces is indistinct. It is not quite black magic, associated with Javanese mysticism, although that plays a part. Couperus, a romantic of his time, certainly believed in the supernatural: “I believe that benevolent and hostile forces float around us, right through our ordinary, everyday existence; I believe that the Oriental, no matter where he comes from, can command more power over these forces than the Westerner who is absorbed by his sobriety, business and making money.”
One character in the novel who commands such power (but power over little else) is van Oudijck’s native opponent, the regent Sunario. He is the heir to a long line of local sultans. The Dutch administration kept these nobles on as vassal rulers with colorful ceremonial trappings and some administrative duties, such as tax-collecting. Van Oudijck, an “ethical” administrator, respected Sunario’s father, a Javanese aristocrat of the old school, but sees Sunario as “a degenerate Javanese, an unhinged Javanese fop,” an “enigmatic Wayang puppet,” gambling and indulging in native hocus-pocus. Sunario, for his part, views the Dutchman as a crude, base, foreign infidel, who has no business upsetting the sacred bonds and privileges of ancient aristocratic rule.
Couperus, in this book at least, is not an apologist for colonial rule. Quite the contrary. His descriptions of van Oudijck’s priggish love of order, hard facts and hard work, and the same man’s patronizing view of natives and contempt for half-castes, so typical of Dutch colonial administrators, are full of mocking irony. Van Oudijck’s disdain for the Eurasians is not always personal. His first wife had Javanese blood, and he loves his two children, even though his daughter, Doddy, looks and speaks like a typical Indo-European. It is the idea of the “Indo” that van Oudijck cannot abide—the idea of something less than pure. Van Helderen, a Creole born in the Indies, warns the Dutch wife of a civil servant that the native population, “oppressed by the disdain of its overlord,” is likely to revolt at some stage. He sounds oddly prophetic. She, Eva Eldersma, a bored, artistic Dutch woman, trapped in the colonial life, had sensed something ominous in the air. She thinks it is the strangeness of the landscape, the climate, the people, whom she doesn’t understand. And van Helderen says to her, “You, as an artist, feel the danger approaching, vaguely, like a cloud in the sky, in the tropical night; I see the danger as something very real, something arising—for Holland—if not from America and Japan, then from the soil of this country itself.”
There is no doubt that Couperus felt the danger on his travels through Java. And, remember, this was written when Dutch power appeared unassailable. But Couperus was not a prophet, so a vague sense of unease, of something being out of kilter, must have been palpable. There must have been a feeling, among at least some of the Dutch, of walking on treacherous ground, which could suck you in, however sturdy your big Dutch boots might be. To describe this feeling as guilt would be wrong and anachronistic. It might have been closer to a sense that the Europeans had bitten off more than they could chew, or a nagging awareness of the hollowness of their bluff.
Van Oudijck resists such feelings until near the end of the book, when he too is defeated by the silent forces of the East, forces manipulated, perhaps, by his opponent, the puppetlike Sunario. The struggle between the two men is a struggle between two types of power: one is supposedly rational, open, bureaucratic; the other is magic, shadowy, mysterious. The hidden force of Sunario is associated with the night, with moonlight, while the power of the resident is exercised mainly in daylight. The resident’s ceremonial sunshade, or pajong, is often described as a “furled sun.”
One is reminded of the descriptions of Trinidad in V. S. Naipaul’s The Overcrowded Barracoon. In “Power?” Naipaul tells how black plantation slaves would turn the world upside down at night. Then, in the dark, half-forgotten remnants of African magic would transform their abject existence as slaves into a glorious parallel world of kings and queens. Naipaul describes this as a pathetic fantasy, and Couperus writes about the hidden force as something quite real. But both writers, like Conrad, are sensitive to the horror, that lies behind such concepts.
The conflict between van Oudijck and Sunario comes to a head when the behavior of Sunario’s brother becomes impossible. He gambles and drinks and, instead of efficiently carrying on his tax-collecting and other duties, steals money from the treasury to pay his debts. The resident decides to take the unprecedented step of dismissing him, which will mean a frightful loss of face for an ancient noble family. The regent’s mother, a princess, is so outraged that she throws herself at the resident’s feet and offers to be his slave if he can only forgive her son. But van Oudijck stands firm. He cannot afford to compromise. Principle is principle. A decision, once taken, must not be revoked. For he “was a man with a clear, logically deduced, simple, masculine sense of duty, a man of a plain and simple life. He would never know that under the simple life, there are all those forces which together make the omnipotent hidden force. He would have laughed at the idea that there are nations that have a greater control over that force than the Western nations have.”
Then horrible things start to happen. The resident’s young wife, Leonie, as promiscuous as she is narcissistic, finds herself being spat on with blood-red sirih juice, apparently from nowhere, as she stands naked in her bath. (Couperus’s description of slimy splatters dribbling down her breasts, her “lower belly” and her buttocks shocked his Dutch readers profoundly; in the original English translation such passages were bowdlerized.) Malevolent spirits stalk the resident’s mansion. Stones sail through the rooms. Sinister figures in white turbans appear and disappear, like ghosts. Glasses shatter; whiskey turns yellow. The resident’s family leaves the haunted mansion in terror. Even his servants flee from the house. But the resident stays put, working on his papers, ignoring the noises, the broken glass, the soiled beds, the hammering overhead. He has these phenomena investigated, “punctiliously, as if he were investigating a criminal case, and nothing came to light.”
The resident and the regent come to a kind of agreement in the end—what agreement, the reader never knows—and the torments stop. But, like Dutch supremacy itself, the resident’s authority begins to disintegrate at the moment of its peak. And, again as was the case with the Dutch colonialists, the subversion, the fatal loss of nerve, occurs inside the ruler’s own heart.
Van Oudijck had ignored his wife’s sexual adventures, even though everyone else knew. He had been blind to her affairs with his half-caste son—her stepson—and with a handsome Eurasian boy called Addy, even though regular hate mail pointed these things out to him. He had not been aware of the jealousies that soured the air in his residency. But now, suddenly, after he had resisted the hidden forces through sheer force of will, the tropical poison begins to sap his spirit too. For the first time in his life the resident feels the pangs of hatred and jealousy, and he becomes superstitious too, “believing in a hidden force that lurked he knew not where, in the Indies, in the soil of the Indies, in a profound mystery, somewhere, a force that wished him ill beca
use he was a European, a ruler, a foreigner on the mysterious, sacred soil.” The moonlit Javanese night had exacted her revenge.
The Hidden Force opens an interesting and fresh angle on the idea of Orientalism. For Couperus employed all the symbols that became the clichés of East and West, which Edward Said, in Orientalism, has identified with colonial apologetics: the East representing the passive female principle (the moon), and the West the vitality of the sun; the West being modern, rational, logical, industrious, creative, idealistic, and the East mysterious, mystical, torpid, sensual, irrational. And so on. But, far from using these images of Occident and Orient to justify colonialism, Couperus shows the futility of European rule. For the hidden force of the East will vanquish the West, with all its rational pretensions.
More than that, it is desirable that it should do so. Van Oudijck’s spiritual defeat is also a kind of parable of enlightenment. To be sure, he loses the attributes that made him into the perfect Dutch administrator. Where he had been stern and decisive before, he “now had the inclination to hush things up, to gloss things over … to muffle with half-measures anything that was too sharp.” His vitality has gone. His skin turns sallow. He shows all the danger signs of giving in to the torpor of the East, of “going native.” This happens, quite literally, at the end of the book, when Eva Eldersma, the artistic Dutch lady, goes to say good-bye to him before leaving for Europe—she, too, has been defeated; she will never come back. She finds van Oudijck living in a native village, or kampong, in “a typical Indies mess.” He has found a kind of happiness there, living with a native woman and her extended family. He has lost his principles, but he has gained an insight, for his principles no longer blind him to reality. He has accepted the Indies for what they are.
The European dread of going native, which Couperus describes so beautifully, was a fear on two fronts: political and sexual. Both are of course linked. We laugh now at the image of Englishmen or Dutchmen in the jungle or the bush, dressing up for formal dinners in the tropical heat. But there was a real purpose to this, for the stiff suit was one of the necessary caste marks to impress their subjects, as well as themselves, of the Europeans’ natural right to rule. Letting go of European proprieties, or “principles,” was a step toward letting go of power. In colonial households (Eva Eldersma’s, for instance), “It was always a struggle not to surrender to lassitude, to let the grounds go wild …” When Eva’s husband is too hot and tired to dress for dinner in a black jacket and stiff collar, she “thought that terrible, unspeakably dreadful.”
No wonder the Europeans felt horribly humiliated when they were forced to bow, dressed in rags, to Japanese guards in the World War II concentration camps. The Japanese knew perfectly well what they were doing. Like the black slaves in Trinidad, they turned everything upside down, except that this was for real. As the Dutch writer Rudy Kousbroek, himself a former prisoner of the Japanese, has pointed out, the most common expression among the Dutch survivors was “We were treated like coolies”—that is to say, much like the way the Dutch treated many of their colonial subjects.
Then there was the sex. People forget what a sexual, even sexy, enterprise colonialism was—and I don’t mean just metaphorically, in the sense of the virile West penetrating the passive, feminine East. No, colonial life was quite literally drenched in sex. White men would enter the kampongs and take their pleasure with native girls for a few coins, or even for nothing if the men were cheap and caddish enough. Europeans enjoyed the droit de seigneur in the kampong, and anyway, native women and half-castes were supposed to be unusually highly sexed. They still had this reputation when Eurasians, called “Indos,” moved to Holland in the 1940s and ’50s, usually to settle in The Hague, where I grew up. Girls of Indo or Indonesian extraction at my school were all supposed to be “hot.”
Casual tropical sex is personified in The Hidden Force by Leonie, the resident’s wife, and her Indo lover, Addy de Luce. Both live for seduction. Neither of them has anything but sex on his or her indolent mind. They are born voluptuaries. Leonie loves Addy. Every woman and girl loves him, with “his comely, slender sensuality and the glow of his tempter’s eyes in the shadowy brown of his young Moorish face, the curve of his lips meant only for kissing, with the young down of his moustache, the feline strength and litheness of his Don Juan limbs.”
The European fear of letting go, of being “corrupted,” of going native, was to a large extent, I suspect, the northern puritan’s fear of his (or her) own sexuality. If Couperus had shared this fear, his book would have been another Victorian morality tale. But he is not a puritan. He doesn’t judge his characters, even the voracious harebrain Leonie, harshly. Indeed, one feels that he himself would have fancied Addy.
A dandy, a homosexual and a romantic, Couperus understood the sensuality of colonial life perfectly. He was attracted to the sun—in the Mediterranean, as well as in the East—for just that reason. He cultivated the image of torrid indolence. His rooms in Europe would be heated to a tropical temperature, as though he were an orchid, and he pretended to spend most of his time dreaming. In truth, of course, like Noël Coward, who affected a similar pose, he worked very hard. But with his carefully tended, overrefined sensibility, he should have been more in sympathy with Sunario, the “degenerative Javanese,” than with van Oudijck.
Couperus’s readings were legendary. He would complain if the flowers onstage weren’t exactly right. He did not read his prose so much as declaim it, in his high-pitched theatrical voice, like a male Sarah Bernhardt. My grandmother once attended one of these performances in a small Dutch town. Sixty years later she could still remember how Couperus not only had the flower arrangement changed after the intermission, but also changed his socks and tie to ones of a slightly different shade of gray.
And yet Couperus, however rarefied in his tastes, did not try to identify himself with the Javanese. He grew up in the Dutch East Indies, where his father was a colonial official, but remained completely European. He describes Sunario from the same ironic distance as he does van Oudijck. If Couperus felt close to any group in particular, it was with those who were neither one thing nor the other: the Creoles and Indos. Both van Oudijck and Sunario are pure in their ways—the principled, full-blooded Dutchman, or Totok, and the refined, pure-blooded Javanese—and that, in Couperus’s eyes, was precisely what was wrong with them. For Couperus celebrated the ambiguity he himself personified: a Dutchman grown up in the Indies; a homosexual married to a devoted mother/wife; a master of the Dutch language, but an exotic outsider in Holland—“an orchid amongst onions,” as one of his obituarists called him.
The only characters in The Hidden Force who are entirely at ease with themselves, despite their European pretensions, are the Indos: Addy and his extended family, and van Oudijck’s half-caste daughter Doddy. They appear to have the best of both worlds. But I suspect this is a reflection more of Couperus’s sympathies than of real life. For in fact the Eurasians probably had the worst of both worlds. Indos who were acknowledged by their Western fathers were legally Europeans, but they were subject to subtle forms of discrimination in a society obsessed by race and color. Many Creoles hardly spoke Dutch; others, like van Helderen, who prophesied the native rebellion, spoke it almost too precisely. Like van Oudijck, most Totoks respected the Javanese as a civilized race—perhaps more civilized in their way than the Europeans—but despised the Indos. The Indos were commonly regarded by the Dutch as lazy and stupid, as well as oversexed. People made fun of their efforts to speak proper Dutch. Even Couperus has some sport with this—something that is lost in translation. The Indos overcompensated by disdaining the natives, as though this would make the Dutch accept them as equals. In fact, of course, it just made them seem more despicable.
In Het Oostindisch Kampsyndroom, Rudy Kousbroek, who has written brilliantly about this extraordinary social geography, described his native Dutch East Indies thus: “Our tropical paradise was a madhouse, whose people looked down on one another in ways that no ou
tsider could ever fathom. It was a factory of inferiority complexes, which produced all manner of contorted behaviour that still has not entirely disappeared.”
The fusion between Dutch and East Indian never took, culturally or politically, except in some individual instances of people highly educated in both cultures. Yet it is that blend, that ambiguity, if you like, that state of having the best of both worlds, that many Dutch writers born in the East, including Couperus and Kousbroek, have yearned for. This can result in mawkish regret. But the best of these writers came to see that their dream was bound to fail, as long as one side had its boot on the neck of the other. It would not work, no matter how well-meaning or idealistic the ruler might be. Of course, many rulers were neither. Van Oudijck was both, which is why he couldn’t understand why his native subjects hated him: “There was no logic in it. Logically, he should be loved, not hated, however strict and authoritarian he might be considered. Indeed, did he not temper his strictness with the jovial laugh under his thick moustache, with a friendly, genial warning and exhortation?”
His insight into the tragedy of European colonialism made Couperus a great writer. And his sympathy for the hybrid, the impure, the ambiguous, gave him a peculiarly modern voice. It is an extraordinary thing that the art of this Dutch dandy, writing in the flowery language of fin-de-siècle decadence, should still sound so fresh. We should be grateful. For, now that the dreams of ethnic purity are making a comeback, his voice is more urgent than ever.