Book contents
Chapter 5 - Judgment, Justice and other Collaborations
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 January 2021
Summary
If one is able to entertain the possibility that knowledge is “a social product, a matter of dialogue between different versions of the world”, it is incumbent upon a reader who takes literature seriously to engage in that dialogue, to examine a given construct of our understanding of “our” realities, past and present, and how they are reflected and molded by our modes of representation. If the body of texts produced by a community can be said to constitute an ongoing dialogue about certain cultural practices, then an interesting question arises whenever a flurry of new texts and discussions appears or older discussions appear again in a different form or a new context: what kinds of events or shifts in interest on the part of a community provide the occasion for such a convergence of activity? In those situations where the activity involves radical reformulations of common cultural practice or the breaking of old silences or social strictures, the question is more complex: How has the topic in question made its way from the margins of discourse to the center?
This study is an attempt to consider a practical form of this question about the interaction between what has been said and what can be said concerning the texts which take World War II as their setting, and (as I have shown) do so with particular attention to the memory of children of the war.
In some sense, it is incorrect to view the shifts away from the simple cultural truisms of “goed” and “fout” as completely discontinuous events. In the case of Dutch fiction of the 1940s and 1950s, it is possible to identify certain individual strands and voices which dissent from the conventional wisdom of the time or formulate a more complex reality in opposition to this wisdom. I will mention two of the major ones briefly in this chapter; they are largely exceptions to the rule. A subtler formulation of the question might well inquire about what sort of cultural “permission” would allow for the appearance of topics which were previously not discussed. Does this sudden freedom to speak about something one has been silent about (or repressed or avoided) arise from a constituency which coalesces at a given time, or does the appearance of a single dissenting voice provide the “seed” around which some ongoing cultural debate suddenly seems to crystallize?
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- A Family OccupationChildren of the War and the Memory of World War II in Dutch Literature of the 1980s, pp. 120 - 148Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2009