De geschiedenis van het eindresultaat : literaire traditie, experiment en creatieve inventie in het werk van Willem Frederik Hermans

De geschiedenis van het eindresultaat. Literaire traditie, experiment en creatieve inventie in het werk van Willem Frederik Hermans makes the insights from the methodologies of textual scholarship productive for the interpretation of the literary works of Willem Frederik Hermans (1921-1995). Based on a description and analysis of the creative process behind Hermans’ texts, the study presents new reading strategies of that work. The first part of the study describes an early phase of Hermans’ writing career. The young Hermans was not only a writer fond of experimenting, but also an avid reader. Notebooks, correspondence with friends and numerous essays in post-war newspapers and magazines show how Hermans immersed himself in the work of international authors. In addition, Hermans had a keen interest in music and especially film. Hermans’ writing appears to be a process of continuous refinement, with the aim of ultimately making the initially intuitively written literary text as sophisticated as possible. In the second part of the thesis, I show how Hermans, with his novel Ik heb altijd gelijk (I Am Always Right), explicitly relates to the novels Voyage au bout de la nuit and Mort à crédit by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, which he held in high regard. Based on Hermans’ essays, notebooks and a draft typescript of Ik heb altijd gelijk, I propose a reading strategy that radically deviates from the conventional reception history of the novel. In a narrative form that is only traditional at first glance, Ik heb altijd gelijk turns out to be firmly imbedded in the literary anti-tradition of the grotesque. The final part of the thesis presents De donkere kamer van Damokles (The Darkroom of Damocles) as a novel rooted in a melodramatic narrative tradition. It not only drew on the tradition of literary melodrama, but also on the tradition of French and American film noir, which originated in melodrama. A reading strategy inspired by melodrama makes Hermans’ famous novel accessible in a new way. De donkere kamer can be read as a nihilistic novel in which the narrator takes centre stage, a novel in which Hermans plays with the conventions, themes and motives of literary melodrama and film noir. De geschiedenis van het eindresultaat makes the aesthetic effect of Hermans’ work visible. The study shows how his work is rooted in a strong awareness of literary tradition, and how it can be understood as a grotesque and melodramatic oeuvre.