The Hidden Force

"In a way this is a bit like Passage to India, although it was written earlier, at the very beginning of the 20th century. It’s a very early example of a novelist who saw the futility of colonialism, and how a small number of Europeans – in this case the Dutch rulers of the Dutch East Indies – thought they knew what they were doing. Like Forster, he’s not being polemical. But he does describe, very sympathetically, the illusion the Europeans had that they would control these countries forever. Even then they didn’t have as much control as they thought. The story is about the wife of a Dutch colonial civil servant who has an adulterous affair, and she’s punished in a sort of supernatural way by visitations. Sexually it’s an extraordinarily explicit book, certainly for its time. There is a whole depth to the culture of the Dutch East Indies which the Europeans barely understood if at all, and that was undermining their sense of omnipotence everyday. This is associated with certain supernatural occurences, which Couperus uses as a metaphor for a whole world that the West simply didn’t see or know existed. That’s the hidden force. It’s about the illusion of Western omnipotence. Yes it has, but what Couperus saw was that no amount of bullying will in the end lead to mastering countries which one doesn’t understand. It’s interesting to think how many literary masterpieces Western European colonial rule of Asia has produced. There’s not that many, because very few were so clear sighted. Forster and Couperus were, without having a political agenda. They just saw more clearly and more profoundly than most people did at the time."