This article is based on this Dutch article of Martijn Benders: Tijd vrijkopen om een kunstwerk te maken
Until 2012, the grants from the Dutch Foundation for Literature provided writers with an income. But then came the brilliant amendment: now you could use these grants to “buy time” to work on a book. As if you could casually walk up to your boss and announce, “Hey boss, I’ll be off for half a year to write that long-awaited book, see you later!” No boss would look at you without thinking you were suffering from some mild form of delusions of grandeur. The idea that this system was ever devised without anyone from the commercial sector involved is the understatement of the century.
Who, then, are the lucky ones for whom these grants are intended? Academics, perhaps? I imagine it’s not the unemployed who line up annually for the grants at the Foundation’s counter. It would be downright cynical to sling people back and forth between unemployment benefits and work grants, like a pendulum that can never come to rest. But that is exactly what happens. And rest assured, this system costs the government quite a sum – every six months, the bureaucratic machinery starts up again with officials and forms for the next round of evaluation. Bureaucracy sustains itself, that much is certain.
Now to the next point: better to let 50 people scrape by at the poverty line than give 30 people a decent income. Why? The more people receiving a pittance, the more important you, as a foundation, appear, or something like that. Because nothing exudes more altruism than handing out alms to a begging writer class, which, thanks to structural poverty, remains ever-humble and grateful. Perhaps that is the core of the Samaritan ideal that reigns at the Dutch Foundation for Literature: to sanctify authorship through the appropriate suffering of poverty.
Buying time— a provision not intended for free people, evidently. But what is the provision for? To turn anyone who considers themselves a poet into an important novelist. After all, writing poetry books takes much less time, as the clairvoyant officials at the Foundation know all too well, and so you can only get a livable grant if you write novels. Wait a minute… who’s really speaking here? Who is it again that has such a distaste for poetry collections because they make no money?
It’s truly astounding how the Foundation, with all its bureaucratic cut-and-paste work, tries to transform the country’s poets into novelists. As if poetry were merely a footnote in the grand literary game, a trifle not to be taken too seriously. Because writing a poetry collection – according to the Foundation’s strict logic – is akin to a little holiday project: something you can knock out with a cup of tea and an hour of spare time. No, if you want to receive a full grant, you’ll have to trade in your poetic soul for the art of the novel. Because prose takes time. And in the eyes of the omniscient officials at the Foundation, time is the only thing that really matters.
And perhaps that’s the essence of the buy-time policy: time, yes, but only for those who serve the economic system properly. The Foundation promotes a romantic notion of authorship as a noble form of suffering – but only if that suffering pays off in marketable products.
Not just books, no, we’re talking about hefty, highly subsidized tomes placed on shelves with lofty ambitions, hoping to become the next bestseller. And behind this façade of literary welfare lurk the Big Publishing Houses, like shadowy puppeteers, who have wrapped their tentacles around the Foundation and use it to fund their stable of writers.
The Foundation no longer has a governing board – that quickly proved to be too big an obstacle for publisher infiltration. No, a Supervisory Board has taken over, but you won’t find any writers there. What you will find? Exactly, a representative from those same publishing houses. How surprising. So the Foundation finds itself tightly anchored within a system carefully guarded by the industry, with a laser-sharp focus on profit, market share, and the steady depletion of the literary soul.
What was once an initiative to give writers a chance to find their voice has now become a place where poetry is relegated to the sidelines, and the true artist’s authorship is swapped for the role of the productive worker – a literary factory laborer, in service to the big market.
It wouldn’t be so terrible if it achieved anything more than providing “a million more” to a few big flies. I mean, real writers will keep writing anyway, that’s true; they’ll just die a decade earlier from the stress this system generates.
By the way, did you know that in the 1960s, Geert van Oorschot started a literary magazine with the guiding principle of combating the communist threat? Apparently, there was such an enormous communist danger in the Netherlands back then, a threat so great that it was on the verge of claiming all the writers.
You’d think the 1960s were remembered for free love, progressive idealism, and the rise of social revolutions. But evidently, there was also a lurking fear that communism was spreading like an invisible flame through the literary world.
I try to imagine it: you’re living in the ’60s, and you start a literary magazine with the motto “the fight against the communist threat.” Wasn’t that also the guiding principle twenty years prior when a mustachioed man was being financed from America? The Bush dynasty, the Fords, and yes, also IBM. Now that Elon Musk is saying he’s going to abolish the Central Bank, exciting times are ahead. As if the current times weren’t already “exciting” enough – yesterday I saw this reader poll on SBS6:
There are certain forces that, if you give them an inch, will take the whole hand, unfortunately. And no, that’s not “the red scare,” for heaven’s sake. You need to look more towards the men in tall hats, who are willing to sponsor a dictator because a better world is threatening to emerge. A world in which you no longer need to buy time to create a work of art.
Martinus Benders, 14-11-2024
