Discord Consensus

Fig. 4.15 Monolingualism, Gejo, De Leeuw van Vlaanderen
(Antwerp: Soethoudt & Co, 1983). © Gejo/​Soethoudt 1983
The lion, in his dream, decides to speak human language: ‘voor het
vlot verloop van dit verhaal, spreek ik voortaan hun taal!’ (‘for the sake
of a smooth progress of this story, I will from now on speak their language!’)
(and ‘their’ language means Flemish). 27 The lion, however, is not
bilingual. He deliberately decides to speak ‘hun taal’ when communicating
with the locals, but when he has to appear in court in the highland,
he understands, in his own words, ‘geen letter van die taal’ (‘not a
word of that language’). And that the Queen sighs in Spanish is a telling
detail, alluding to the mother tongue of the Belgian queen.
But Gejo even comes up with one further language variant: when
the lion makes his entry into the town, the people in front of the town
gate are looking on in amazement, and one voice speaks clearly in an
Antwerp dialect: ‘Mé hiel Aantwaarpe mo ni mè ma’ (Figure 4.16). 28 In
this comic, the language conflict is expressed by visual means (it is not
‘told’, but ‘shown’ in a mimetic way).
Conclusion
What happened in the course of the various adaptation processes?
Whereas De Moor and Knoop maintain the plot of Conscience’s novel
(even if in abridged form), the comic adaptations of Biddeloo, Gejo and
Matton take completely new directions. They do not confine themselves
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DISCORD AND CONSENSUS IN THE LOW COUNTRIES, 1700–​2000