Discord Consensus

The author indicates she has tried to move away from this wishful​ness
with Sleuteloog. It is understandable how and why Haasse describes her
debut Oeroeg as ‘wishful’: looking back, she perhaps wants to underline
and define a clear critical development, and therefore has played down
Oeroeg’s critical complexity. Nevertheless, I relate to Oeroeg in a more
optimistic manner and argue that Haasse’s critical postcolonial understanding
is already visible in her firstling, Oeroeg. 10 In her debut Haasse
highlights the wishful vision of the ‘I’, a naïve narrator, thus demonstrating
her own postcolonial awareness in 1948.
Kees Snoek helpfully reminds us that the author Haasse and
the narrator of Oeroeg (the nameless I-​figure) are not the same. 11 He
discusses the I-​figure’s wishful narrative, and says the independent
development of the character Oeroeg is clearly recognisable, even
though the narrator himself is often naïve and ignorant. At the end
of the narrative, Oeroeg has become an actively involved nationalist
and a trained doctor –​notwithstanding colonial discrimination. The
main theme of Oeroeg is estrangement, Snoek says: the Dutch narrator
suffers from ‘statische visie [. . .] onvermogen om in te zien, laat
staan te accepteren, dat Indië een fundamentele verandering ondergaat’
[‘static vision [. . .] an inability to see or, more so, to accept, that
the Indies are fundamentally changing’]. 12
In the context of Haasse’s own remark about ‘wishful dreams’, it is
striking that Oeroeg’s reception in the Netherlands, in 1948, is somehow
dreamlike itself: it mirrors the static and wishful vision of Oeroeg’s narrator.
Dutch reviewers relate in a personal manner to the I-​figure’s ‘static
vision’, as he tells his story during the independence wars in Indonesia –​
still ongoing at the time of Oeroeg’s publication. They notably never
relate to the Indonesian boy, Oeroeg:
[. . .] dit boekje, dat men met een gevoel van weemoed sluit na het
lezen van de laatste zin, een vraag die vele Nederlanders, verstoten
uit het land dat zij nog steeds innig liefhebben zich gesteld
zullen hebben: Ben ik voorgoed een vreemde in het land van mijn
geboorte, op de grond, vanwaar ik niet verplant wil zijn? 13
[. . .] one closes this booklet with a sense of melancholia after reading
its last sentence, a question many Dutch people must have
asked, expelled from the land they still deeply love: Am I forever
to be a stranger in the country of my birth, to the soil from which
I am loath to be uprooted?
and:
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DISCORD AND CONSENSUS IN THE LOW COUNTRIES, 1700–​2000