“Making flowers”: the first English translation of a short story by Dutch modernist Carry van Bruggen

Abstract

Hoezeer "objectiviteit" een pretentie en een fictie is hopen we aan te toonen.In 1919, the Dutch writer Carry Van Bruggen (1881-1932 published Prometheus, a philosophical essay in which she declared, "We hope to demonstrate how much of a pretence and a fiction 'objectivity' is." 1 Prometheus proposed a philosophy of life that lauded the process of social "oneness" or unity through the acceptance of difference and individuality, rather than the authoritarian social uniformity of fixed identities. Van Bruggen, who was born to an Orthodox Jewish family in the Dutch town of Smilde, developed her philosophy of oneness over the course of an important but long-obscured intellectual and artistic career. After her first novel De verlatene (The Abandoned) appeared in 1910, she wrote prolifically for the next 17 years, publishing nine more works of fiction and non-fiction. Her last novel, Eva (1927), 2 is considered her finest and in 2002 earned her a place in the Canon van de Nederlandse letterkunde [Canon of Dutch Literature]. 3 Aspects of Van Bruggen's feminist thought and aesthetics resemble Virginia Woolf's, including: her critique of dominant models of epistemology and subjectivity; a desire to write women into history and literature while evincing skepticism toward the women's movement; an intimate focus on the intensities of female relationships and domestic life; and her fiction's narrative flow determined by multiple shifting perspectives. None of her writing has yet been translated into English in its entirety. Here I discuss Van Bruggen's modernist mode of experimental aesthetics before offering my translation of the 1921 short story "Making Flowers" ["Bloemen maken"], a piece whose formal and thematic concerns illustrate the author's work as a writer, essayist, and thinker. Van Bruggen's diverse contributions to European modernism merit her inclusion within the expanding feminist modernist canon.Throughout her writings, Van Bruggen attempts to represent and reconfigure female subjectivity, her experiences of anti-Semitism in the Dutch community, and provincialism in relation to class structures and the social milieu. Her 1925 book Hedendaags fetisijsme [Contemporary Fetishism] sets forth a theory of sociolinguistics celebrating the rebel-figure who critiques accepted epistemologies as well as received societal conventions. Hedendaags fetisijsme rejects the singular humanist subject defined by positivistic concepts of "Free Will, Immortality, Objectivity and Causality," which, she argues, are "four sides of the same Delusion, of the I-delusion" ["Vrije Wil, Onsterfelijkheid, Objectiviteit en Causaliteit […] vertonen zich hier als vier zijden van dezelfde Waan, van de Ik-waan"]. 4