The Forbidden Kingdom (15 page)

As Macao lay behind me and slowly slipped away into the distance, I felt a melancholy courage growing in me:
all right, I was going to become like other people, but from now on my actions would no longer be inhabited by the thought that I was a lost soul, but would be strengthened by the conviction that I had nothing left to lose and that the peaceful, decaying past could not absorb me to help me escape my own life.

I was going back. But I would not stay on a ship for long and would head into the interior of this country, of which I had so far experienced nothing but a journey through an arid steppe, a few half-dazed, half-drunken days in a deserted city, then coastlines, low and rocky, crumbly and even, but always receding, then ports where the exchange of secretions between Europe and Asia takes place and the people are nothing but fermenting agents that accelerate the process.

First I would make for the place I had most shunned, since it is so cruel to the penniless and the weak that people are simply allowed to die in the street. First to Shanghai. From there, at right angles away from the coast, across the plains, to where the mountains rise from the distant, hazy rice paddies, with the poppy fields lying among them like red lakes.

If any happiness was to be found anywhere on earth, it must be there. There the oldest wisdom, the most exalted nature and the purest pleasure were to be found. Blissful in the present, armoured by the many
scars from the past, I would be able to confront all the ghosts and demons, without merging with them, offering them hospitality, without myself changing one hair, a single cell.

I, who at first was so weak and did not set foot even on its outermost edge, will penetrate this land that has always remained pristine, that does not repel, but
tolerates
, that allows itself seemingly to be conquered and destroys all barbarians and foreigners in its languid, slowly suffocating grip and under the pressure of its mass.

To be one of the for ever unconscious millions—what joy—or if that is unattainable, someone who knows every thing, for whom everything is behind him and who nevertheless goes on living.

The Dutch writer Jan Jacob Slauerhoff (1898–1936) was born in Leeuwarden, the provincial capital of Friesland in the northern part of the Netherlands. He trained as a doctor, though he never followed a conventional career path. Slau, as he was known to his friends, combined medical practice with writing in what was to be a short and intensely nomadic life. He left behind the small world of the Netherlands to travel, first in Europe and later in the Far East, working as a ship’s doctor on the China-Java-Japan route. These wanderings gave rise to one of the most famous lines of Dutch poetry—
Alleen in mijn gedichten kan ik wonen
(Only in my poems can I dwell) from the poem
Woninglooze
(
Homeless
). This nomadic sensibility was highly unusual for the time in which Slauerhoff was writing; it both harks back to nineteenth-century Romanticism and anticipates today’s extreme mobility.

In Dutch literary history of the last thirty years, Jan Jacob Slauerhoff tends to feature most strongly as a poet—the Netherlands’ own
poète maudit
, in fact. This is
no facile comparison—it comes from the writer himself whose self-identification with Tristan Corbière is evident from both his critical writings and letters. Slauerhoff’s biographer Wim Hazeu discusses his poetic personality in relation to Verlaine, Rimbaud and Laforgue as well as Corbière. At the same time, Slauerhoff is most frequently described as a Romantic poet because of his themes of loss, longing, doomed love, dreamlike landscapes, and of roaming the seas. Fellow Dutch poet Hendrik Marsman emphasized in his review of the cycle of poems
Eldorado
in 1928 that though Slauerhoff’s preoccupations were “as Romantic as hell”, his sensibility and his poetic
diction
were modern.

Slauerhoff was already well established as a poet when he published his first prose works—two collections of short stories,
Het lente-eiland en andere verhalen
(
The Isle of Spring and Other Stories
) and
Schuim en asch
(
Foam and Ashes
)—in 1930.
The Forbidden Kingdom
followed in 1932; it appeared in nine instalments in the literary magazine
Forum
and immediately afterwards in book form. It is one of the most vividly written and experimental novels in the Dutch language. Set in both the sixteenth and twentieth centuries, rather like Virginia Woolf’s
Orlando
, its journey through time is accompanied by its central character’s transformation. But whereas Orlando is transformed from man to woman in the course of the
centuries, Slauerhoff’s character is a twentieth-century ship’s radio operator who “becomes” the
sixteenth-century
Portuguese poet Camões. In its disregard for the norms of realist fiction,
The Forbidden Kingdom
establishes itself as a modernist novel.

The narrative techniques used by Slauerhoff had never been used before in Dutch literature, and some reviewers certainly found them challenging. Slauerhoff does not allow himself to be confined by his readers’ expectations; instead he unsettles them at every turn. Ultimately he fails to deliver the historical writing
promised
by his prologue to
The Forbidden Kingdom
, which
narrates
the founding of the Portuguese colony of Macao in the sixteenth century. Or rather, he interrupts it with other narratives. Take the first chapter, for instance—it is also set in the sixteenth century, though the location is the Portuguese homeland. The narrative switches back and forth between Camões as storyteller and a third-person narrator as it relates the poet’s banishment from Portugal because of his love for the Infant’s betrothed. Readers are never given the opportunity to settle into a
comfortable
relationship with the text, though the Camões story does eventually merge with the story of the founding of the colony, since Camões’s place of exile turns out to be Macao. But Chapter Six introduces a new story and simultaneously breaks the time frame—it is set in
the twentieth century, told in the first person by a new character. The reader is asked to believe—or perhaps to make-believe—that the radio operator somehow “tunes into” Camões, while the sixteenth-century character in turn “colonizes” the twentieth-century character.

Slauerhoff’s experiment with narrated time appears at first to involve two separate unrelated narratives, but in fact moves towards contact across time between the main characters of each narrative. The double time frame, and the way it is given expression through the characters, raises questions both about the perception of time and about the way time is traditionally
represented
in the realist novel. These preoccupations can be seen as a broader cultural phenomenon which had its origins in Einstein’s theories. Slauerhoff is known to have read and discussed J.W. Dunne’s
An Experiment with Time
(1927). What is interesting about Dunne’s book is not his theory, which comes across as pseudo-science, but the indication it gives of a popular interest in exploring ideas relating to time and space. In it Dunne develops a theoretical model which “explains” how in dreams one can see the future as well as the past, because the dreamer is “in a field of existence entirely different from that of ordinary waking life” (
An Experiment with Time
, p. 164). The two main characters of
The Forbidden Kingdom
, Camões and the nameless ship’s radio operator,
dream each other, and experience visions which are not subject to linear time.

In Slauerhoff’s sequel to
The Forbidden Kingdom—Het leven op aarde
(
Life on Earth
, 1934)—the twentieth-century character who resembles the protagonist of
The Forbidden Kingdom
not only has a name, but he also carries out the planned journey into China with which our novel ends. This man’s name is Cameron, and after his death Slauerhoff’s papers revealed that he had originally planned three Cameron novels. Although Cameron’s counterpart remains nameless in
The Forbidden Kingdom,
in what follows I will use this name, especially when
talking
about the composite or hybrid character Camões/Cameron.

The moments of contact between the two main
characters
represent a kind of Modernist version of
time-travel
—one that, in keeping with Dunne’s theory, takes place in the mind. The unnatural or magical quality of the moments of contact emphasizes the time gap which has to be bridged by some special means. A more
traditional
time-travel novel, such as H.G. Wells’s
The Time Machine
(1898) to which Dunne also refers, not wishing to violate the sense of a coherent realistic fictional world, resorts to science to invent special machines to make it possible to visit another time. This way the overall time frame is preserved, since the other time is inserted into
the dominant frame. Slauerhoff’s character Cameron escapes clock-time altogether and briefly inhabits a dimension where, like Walter Benjamin’s angel of
history
, he can see through the centuries that have gone before. Camões, on the other hand, is facing in the other direction, toward the future.

One important difference between a story of
time-travel
and the “journey” the radio operator makes through time is that in
The Forbidden Kingdom
the past is not seen through the eyes of the present. The twentieth-century character is not imported unchanged into another time in order to view and comment on it;
confrontation
between past and present is not an explicit theme of the narrative. Rather, the novel performs the impossible communication between past and present by subtle and mysterious means—“clues” as to what will happen build up to a climax. The anticipated, but
impossible
dissolution of linear time does actually take place. The first clue to the existence of a parallel character to Camões comes in a recurrent dream during Camões’s sea journey to Macao, narrated in Chapter Four:

If the reader is at first puzzled by the reference to words being hurled into space, the cumulative references to anachronistic elements of the dream, such as wood being replaced by steel in the ship’s construction and the strange close-fitting clothes worn by those on board, soon make it clear that Camões’s dream represents some kind of vision of the future.

The functioning of the “clues” depends on the reader developing a sense of their reliability, which happens at moments of recognition later on in the novel—what is sensed by Camões in one chapter, is realized by the radio operator in another, and
vice versa
. Slauerhoff achieves this by the repetition of a particular situation, and of certain key words. So, for example, in Chapter Six, narrated by the radio operator, we read:
Radio? How long ago was it since I had sat in a narrow cabin with headphones on and my hand on the key?
Distinct echoes of Camões’s dream.

At the heart of the novel is a dangerous journey into the interior of the forbidden kingdom of China, which in the sixteenth century had not yet been successfully penetrated by Europeans. When Camões, half dead from exposure to the relentless sun in the desert, finds himself by a large stone to mark the route, he has the sensation that someone else will take his place even though he himself may be lost. In the following chapter, Cameron’s ship is attacked by bandits who abandon the crew in the desert. Cameron finds the stone, clings to it, feels mysteriously revived and survives the ordeal.

The circumstances leading to the temporary
integration
of the characters, which is also a temporal integration, are laden with symbols. The radio operator enters a tomb in the desert in search of shade and cool. The tomb is a multiple symbol—as an enclosed,
protective
space it represents a pre-natal state which in turn could indicate a kind of rebirth. The radio operator is protected from the world enclosed in the tomb with its “womb shape”. To the reader, a tomb initially indicates death, but must now be seen as suggesting a beginning as well as an end. Of course, if the character remains in the tomb, he will never be found and will die there, but his instinct for survival expels him into the hostile conditions of the desert again. The tomb is more than a symbol of death and birth—like the stones that mark
out the road (to survival), it is itself a survival from the past, a piece of history, a refuge in the present. It too escapes clock-time. But if the dimension of eternal time has been accessed in this way, it is space that plays the crucial part; it is only when the physical place is identical for the two characters that time opens up.

The difference between this magic box and Dr Who’s police box, for example, is that the latter, like Wells’s time machine, actually travels to the new time zone, whereas Slauerhoff’s remains immobile. The travelling has apparently occurred in the characters’ minds, but there is one problem confronting the reader. When the main character returns half crazed and in rags from the desert, he is carrying gold coins from old Macao,
wearing
ancient clothes, and only understands Portuguese, though he speaks English. The setting may be the
twentieth
century, but the character is a hybrid—the radio operator has been colonized by Camões. The man finds a hotel, and while his body lies on the bed, his mind travels easily through the centuries. The experience is depicted as akin to passing down a mine shaft with the sedimented past in view, including a brief reference to the opening scene of the novel. This is a prelude to the final coming together of Camões and Cameron. This time the stone edifice to which Cameron is taken back in time is the cathedral of Macao, a ruin in the
twentieth century, and the scene of a fierce battle in the fifteenth. The hero of the fight turns out to be Camões, unexpectedly returned from China, but the reader also knows from the hybrid character’s own account that Camões/Cameron was anything but a hero. In fact, he was so traumatized by his extreme experiences that he was hardly aware of what he was doing.

The Forbidden Kingdom
is much more than a
modernist
experiment with time and narrative; it is a novel of adventure, of the pioneer spirit of those early European expeditions to discover new territory and new ways of generating wealth for those who sent them on their journey. It is also a novel about the outcast, whether poet or sailor, a man exiled from the familiar world in which he grew up. He is nomadic, he yearns for happiness, he falls for a beautiful and unattainable woman, who may be drawn to him, but whose circumstances forbid closeness: a modern romantic who experiences intense feeling and suffering. Yet the novel also invites reflection on the colonial enterprise and the violence it involved. While the immediate focus in Slauerhoff’s novel is on the alienation of the individual in a hostile world, its depiction of colonialism and its negative view of
established
European culture give it a political undertone.

The two main characters find themselves on the other side of the world from where they were born—exiles not
just from their country of birth, but also from European civilization. However, while Camões and the ship’s radio operator have a great deal in common as victims, their experiences and above all their attitudes to the forbidden kingdom of China set them apart from one another. In Macao, Camões is a victim of the social norms both of the homeland and of the colony: deprived of his freedom, he is tortured by his fellow countrymen and forced to join the fated embassy to Beijing. Instead of finding refuge among the colonialists, Camões is treated brutally by them. Although he is physically weak, and not an obvious threat, the mentality of the Portuguese in Macao is one of suspicion towards all outsiders. They are afraid that he possesses knowledge which they do not have. This is also why they torture the Dominican friars. During the extreme conditions of the excursion into China with the failed embassy to Beijing, Camões loses all sense of his Portuguese identity. Perhaps there is a residual identity—that of a universal figure, the poet. Slauerhoff’s portrayal of Camões is particularly striking to a twentieth-century reader who knows that Camões has, in the intervening centuries, become Portugal’s national poet, a symbol of Portugal and its culture. In the world of Slauerhoff’s text, the poet is shown as alienated from the Portuguese culture into which he was born, and also from the Portuguese
colonial culture to which he is banished—a far cry from the symbolic Camões.