By the time he died of TB in 1928 at the age of thirty-two, Paul van Ostaijen had developed into the most inventive avant-garde poet in Flanders and has since been recognised as the most influential of its Modernist critics. He arrived at this only after experimenting with a number of styles and approaches. His creative prose work was part of this and is generally less well known than the poetry. It consists of some ten short stories, a similar number of récits and prose poems and a makeweight film script.


While the shorter work has its merits, the stories are generally the more consistent and interesting. They constitute a sustained attack on the self-interested logic of authoritarian capitalism. At the time of writing many of the stories, Van Ostaijen was mixing in Berlin Dadaist circles and shared the savagely satirical ethos of its participants. There is an element of burlesque there as well, as in the baroque defence of perverse positions practised by, for example, John Donne and his circle. Or, to take a nearly contemporary example, by such creations of ‘Saki’ Munro as Reginald and Clovis; if lacking their polish, Van Ostaijen shares their resistance to social hypocrisy. Many of the stories are merely vehicles for monologues in the Munro manner, direct speech being more flexible, varied and lively than a diet of simple narration. In these Van Ostaijen delights in pseudo-learned and especially psychological jargon.


Van Ostaijen’s targets are many, but he most often creeps up on them by way of narratives concerning sex or militarism — perhaps in the track of Freud’s reflections on the congruence or eros and thanatos. Certainly Freud is the prophet of this sick world, as is only fitting for one who was suspected then of being the utter charlatan some would say he has since been proved. Van Ostaijen has the uncomfortable faculty of being right more often than not, which is why he is still rewarding to read so many decades on. A key story here is ‘The Lost House Key’, in which an entire city is infected with syphilis and changes its norms of propriety to fit in with the fact. One is reminded of Baudelaire’s earlier dismissal of the hyprocrisy of what he called ‘syphilisation’. From this single hint, Van Ostaijen has developed his story.


Though the social criticism is bitter, it is entertainingly — even playfully — so. Take as an example what might as easily pass as ‘Reginald on the Arts’: It has been said that Roman emperors starved the wild animals before sending them into the arena. Art critics resemble Roman emperors quite a bit. They argue, for example, that for certain artists hunger is an essential creative factor. Perhaps they are right. Artists, however, couldn’t possibly admit that they are right. What would become of the world (the artist) if they had to admit that critics are right? The bourgeoisie has, by way of the critics (or who knows, perhaps by animal instinct), inherited the teaching of the Roman emperors. That’s why many artists starve. Because society wants to preserve their creative powers. It is therefore wrong to believe that society does not worry about artists. On the contrary. It even goes so far as to accept the sad necessity of a negative role in order to make room for the creative force to develop. [p.50-1]


In militarism’s case there is rplenty of room for political satire. It is very much in line with Van Ostaijen’s tongue in cheek logic, using a nail to drive out a nail, that the nationalistic Right is portrayed as using the methods of the internationalist Left in order to triumph over them. In «Patriotism Inc» patriots on both sides co-operate in forming an international company to whip up war hysteria against each other. In «The General», its protagonist describes how he buys a controlling interest in the shares of oil companies in the enemy’s interior. By attacking government owned companies on the frontier he wrecks the economy and, though the loser of the military conflict, wins the war. So much for the global economy! Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

The dream stands in a directly ambivalent relationship to concrete thinking. The arabesque has no point of view regarding thought. The dream remains hostile to it. The dream is a wish-fulfilment, says Freud. You can go further and say that the dream is an unconscious reaction against the historic, material, conscious aspect of our normal thinking. The dream is the experiencing of the subconscious in such a grotesque manner that it becomes a critique of normal thinking.’ [p 6-7]

You see a man in the street; he is not yet old, around fifty. He seems ordinary. And he is. For what you now see, and with amazement, you should have seen earlier, you should have seen just now. It is always present.

That is, how in this man’s still ordinary gait lives the old man’s walk. You see the ordinary gait now like a heavy inkline, but beneath it the other walk lies like a line of pale ink, and you know that time will darken this line when the other lightens. Like a caterpillar in its cocoon, so the resilient you walk harbors the old one. And nothing prevents the caterpillar from breaking though the cocoon, when the time comes. [p. 142, tr. E.M. Beekman]