Literature and the Performance of Post-Religious Memory in the Netherlands: Gerard Reve, Jan Wolkers and Maarten 't Hart

Abstract

This thesis analyses how literature and writers served as shared reference points in the public negotiation of secularization and religious transformation in the Netherlands in the 1960s and 1970s. It unravels the ways in which literature has served as a medium of cultural memory in the construction of post-religious identities and analyses the complex relations between literary texts, (authorial) performance and material culture. The thesis focuses on three cases: Gerard Reve (1923-2006), Jan Wolkers (1925-2007) and Maarten ‘t Hart (1944-). Each case study traces the development of the author’s artistic and public reputation from his debut up to the present day. The study of Gerard Reve shows how his highly controversial and idiosyncratic approach to Catholicism was at one and the same time an ironic display of the contingency of this tradition while also offering a new and affective form of religious experience. The study of Jan Wolkers and Maarten ‘t Hart, both with a Protestant background, show them to represent two variants of the secular narrative of liberation. Wolkers represents the ideal secular trajectory away from what was experienced as a traumatic religious past, progressing from an explicit post-Protestant identity to an image of artistic and sexual liberation. In contrast, ‘t Hart stands for the failure to ‘process’ the religious past. The repeated remembrance of his Protestant youth in his work and public performances, and his obsessive refutations of Protestant doctrine transformed him into an example of ‘mnemonic stasis’, representing the persistence of the religious past in Dutch culture.