Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde

Patrick Rooijackers

‘Toe-neiging’
De ander in het scheppend proza van Frans Coenen

Abstract -- The naturalist author Frans Coenen (1866-1936), usually regarded as one of the gloomiest and most pessimistic writers of Dutch literature, rather suddenly kept silent as a novelist for almost thirty years, until in 1936 his novel Onpersoonlijke herinneringen appeared. One mostly explains this silence by pointing to the autobiographical background of his writings; he had succeeded in writing his misery out of his system. This article tries to refine this point of view by showing that Coenens writings from 1890 to 1907 gradually move from the ‘self’ towards the ‘other’, from evoking a feeling of isolation towards acknowledging a metaphysically orientated concept of ‘Unity’.

TNTL 121-1 (maart 2005), 25-38