CAUSAS Y CONSECUENCIAS

Constantijn Huygens’ lengthy poem Oogentroost (literally: Eyes-comfort)

took the blindness of one of his best friends as a theme.Regarding this

theme, his poem did not present a coherent and consistently developed

image since the poem was connected to a complicated intertextual web.349

Regarding that web, a simple look at the Bible Concordant will suffice,

as Jürgen Pieters argued, to see how blindness can be read in opposite ways. On the one hand, it is a matter of sin: the blind will not and cannot see. On the other hand, blindness may indicate deep and superior insight, because the blind can spiritually see what those who are blinded by reality

cannot.350 _{It is here that blindness corresponds with allegory. It connotes}

seeing differently. As may be have become clear in chapter 6, I am more

interested in the literal, as it connotes baroque materiality or texture.351 _In

348 For a both fruitful and insightful dealing with the Dutch baroque in terms of Deleuze’s dramatization, see Marrigje Paijmans, Dichter bij de waarheid.

349 This intertextual web in Huygens’ Oogentroost was the object of research for a group of scholars led by Jürgen Pieters. On the project see: http://www.nederlandseliteratuur.ugent.be/ onderzoek/Ooghentroost

350 My translation. See Jürgen Pieters, ‘In denkbeeldige tegenwoordigheid’.

351 In a recent debate on the responses to Coetzee’s novel Disgrace the distinction between the literal and the figural appeared to be pivotal. In J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading, Derek

this context, a third form of blindness emerges: that of the dream in which our eyes do not see, but images present themselves nevertheless.

Such a dreamlike situation is evident in a famous poem by Constantijn

Huygens, taken from Heilighe Daghen (Holy Days, 1645), entitled Sunday:

Is it Sabbath, my Soul, or Sunday? None of the two. The Sabbath is gone with its obligations:

And the sun that I see, shone yesterday as it does today. But the one I do not see does not shine as it seems. 5 Sun, that I do not see but through my sins,

Son of God, who on this day comes to tread on earth, Proud as a Bridegroom entering the main road, I see a Sunday without end, through your Wounds. 10 So if it is Sunday now as well, one may call it God’s Sonday,

Yes, and God’s Sootheday too. But let me curse us, For whichever of the three I turn to I find us in guilt.

God Sun, God Son, God Soothe, how long does your patience last? 15 How long will you suffer, Lord, your Sonday, Sootheday, Sunday,

Ungraciously being spilled, spoiled, misspelled in Sinday?352

Luckily enough, the English words sun, son, and sin allow for a translation

of Huygens’ experiment with language. I had more trouble finding an

Attridge strongly defended a mode of literal reading, since most responses to Disgrace were, so he argues, allegorical. It was as if everything particular that happened in the novel was to be read as a reflection on the more general or deeper state of affairs in South Africa. This allegorical obsession framed the potential of the novel by a presupposed ‘other’ meaning. We should strive, so Attridge argued, to read things more at face value in order to sense what the novel is actually doing. In his response to this analysis Ernst van Alphen goes a long way in following Attridge but in the end points rightly to the dichotomy that Attridge uses to make his point (see van Alphen, ‘Affective Operations of Art and Literature’). There is no language without meaning, and even literal meaning is, indeed, meaning.

352 In the original: ‘Is ’t Sabbath dag, mijn Ziel, of Sondagh? geen van tween. / De Sabbath is voorbij met sijne dienstbaerheden: / En de sonn die ick sie scheen gisteren als heden. / Maer die ick niet en sie en schijnt niet soo se scheen. / Son, die ick niet en sie als door mijn’ sonden heen, / Soon Gods, die desen dagh het aerdrijck weer betreedden, / Fier als een Bruijdegom ter loop-baen ingereden, / ’Ksie Sondagh sonder end, door dijne Wonden heen. / ’tZij dan oock Sondagh nu, men magh’t Gods Soon-dagh noemen, / Ia, en Gods Soen-dagh toe. Maer laet ick ons verdoemen, / Waer ick van drijen gae ick vind ons inde Schuld. / God Son, God Soon, God Soen, hoe langh duert dijn geduld? / Hoe langhe lijdt ghij, Heer, dijn’ Soondagh, Soendagh, Sondagh, / Ondanckbaerlick verspilt, verspeelt, verspelt in Sond-dagh’. For the text, see: http://www.let. leidenuniv.nl/Dutch/Huygens/HeiligeDagen.html. For another translation by P.J. Large see: http://www.hull.ac.uk/php/abspjl/Dutch/Huygens/Willig.html

equivalent for the word zoen, from verzoenen, indicating Redemption day, but meaning, literally, to reconcile. I translated it as soothe, which connotes

the archaic sooth (truth or fact), and which means ‘soften’ or ‘mitigate’.

Accordingly, the four versions of Huygens’s day correspond in English with sunday, sonday, sinday, and sootheday.

The most common reading of or response to this poem has been an

allegorical one, aimed at defining the poem’s real or ultimate meaning, as

is illustrated, for instance, by the website of the Royal Library.353 _{Indeed, the}

poem itself almost enforces this allegorical route. Much like in Huygens’

Oogentroost, a visual dynamic is installed in line 3 with the ‘I see’. This

seeing is defined first empirically or realistically. The sun that the ‘I’ could

see yesterday is the same as the sun that he can see today. But after that, almost naturally, the allegorical reading is provoked by line 4, where sight is blocked, or where an appeal is made to that which one cannot see.

Now, the allegorical impulse is about defining what lies beyond what

‘seems’ to be the case. Note, however, that in this case the ‘I’ need not see

behind, but through the clouds of his sins, like he must later see in and

through the wounds of Jesus. This ‘through’ opens up a rather different

meaning and a different way of relating to the world, for it replaces space

with texture. In my reading, Huygens’ poem is an exploration of close-

ness, of a direct confrontation that is not an issue of everyday affairs but

a dramatic one, involving all the senses in a situation in which something is acted out.

Heightened awareness is installed with the very first line, where the ‘I’

wonders what this Sunday is. The world of everyday reality, with its own

historical pathways and parties, has not disappeared but is intensified in

relation to the ontological issue of something that is happening, here and now. On the face of it, the sun shines today as it did yesterday. Yet, there is

a shift in texture, from line 5 onward. It is not behind his sins that the ‘I’ has

to see, as if there is a truer reality behind things. The sun shines through the sins of the ‘I’ and in this shining through an actor appears: Jesus, turning sun into son, and turning the situation into a here-and-now, ‘on this day’. The intensity or heightened awareness of what is happening shifts the time-scale in relation to the question of how what is happening will result

in something and come to mean something. Time is intensified, binding

353 See: http://www.kb.nl/dichters/huygens/huygens-06.html. See also Frank J. Warnke, ‘Sacred Play: Baroque Poetic Play’. For a less allegorical, and more contextual interpretation, see the introduction by L. Strengholt in Constantijn Huygens, Heilighe daghen, or Rita Verbrugge, ‘Huygens’ Pilgrimage Through the Calendar Year’.

moment and eternity, turning the moment into something ‘without end’, which is emphasized in the following line by the concentration of the ‘now’. The dramatic nature of the situation is highlighted in line 11, where the ‘I’ turns to the three possibilities, one by one, and where he is implicated by

the three, through which ‘I find us in guilt’.

At the same time there is a fluid transition here from the dramatic situ-

ation to a theatrical one. Moving forward, the lyrical ‘I’ leaves the realm of heightened awareness, for he starts to wonder how long this situation of triple misuse will last. With this conclusion the drama of the situation is lifted and we enter a theatrical framing. We are no longer implicated in

what we see, but look at something from a reflexive distance. The eye has

left the telescope, the dream is lifted, the dramatic situation is now framed theatrically. This is captured in line 12 with an address to God which, at the same time, introduces the theatrical actors that are lyrically invoked: ‘God Sun, God Son, God Soothe’.

Earlier, I quoted Maaike Bleeker’s definition of the theatrical as ‘a matter

of becoming aware of how we are implicated within that what we see and

how we see it’.354 _{The key term here is ‘implicated’, or, to put it in material}

terms, ‘entangled in’, ‘woven into’. Theatricality and dramatization differ

in that the former entails a distribution between those who act and those

who view, under a visually dominant frame that defines and splits a space.

The latter indicates something being acted out on some sort of podium on

which all actors are involved, sensually linked in a situation that defines

the texture of time and history. On such a podium, the moment of attention is a moment when looking, seeing, and sensing position human subjects as dramatically implicated in a world the texture of which they can feel, in an

intensified awareness, both intensifying time and expanding it, without

knowing as yet what it all means or what it will lead to. That moment comes

to be fluidly interwoven with a theatrical moment of reflection, where

problems of the past are related to problems of the future, in a temporality that is cut up into past, present, and future, and that is measured in lengths, as when the lyrical ‘I’ asks: ‘How long’ to go? As such, Constantijn Huygens’

Sunday is exemplary of the mutual implication of theatrum mundi and

mundus dramaticus.

In this case, the entanglement of the two metaphors gave rise to a dream-

like situation. In the next and final chapter I will be focusing on principal

differences between the two in terms of their potentials to produce or safeguard a distinct world, with a distinct organization.

7. Public theater, collective drama and

the new – Van den Enden and Huygens

7.1.

Theatrum mundi,public acting and the plane of collective