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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:Writing the company: from VOC 'Daghregister' to Sleigh's 'Eilande'
Author:Twidle, Hedley
Year:2013
Periodical:South African Historical Journal (ISSN 0258-2473)
Volume:65
Issue:1
Pages:125-152
Language:English
Geographic terms:South Africa
The Cape
Subjects:historical novels
colonial history
archives
documents
About person:Daniel Sleigh (1938-)ISNI
External link:https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02582473.2013.763399
Abstract:This piece explores recent literary re-creations of the early Dutch East India Company (VOC) years at the Cape of Good Hope, concentrating on Dan Sleigh's 'Eilande' to examine how an archivist turned novelist uses the textual 'islands' provided by official documentation to create a huge prose work that is remarkable for placing the seventeenth-century settlement in its properly global colonial context. Surely this region's most exhaustive rendering of the genre known problematically as 'the historical novel', it ranges from Germany and Holland via St Helena and the Cape to Madagascar, Mauritius and Batavia. And if for Brink 'the lacunae in the archives are most usefully filled through magical realism, metaphor and fantasy', (Coetzee and Nuttall, 'Negotiating the Past', 3), the author suggests that Sleigh's work forms an opposite pole, offering an example of a much slower, lonelier genesis and a more cautious recovery of historical specificity. The author discerns the possibilities and constraints of these very different fictional modes as they engage a vast, trans-continental archive. 'Writing the Company', then, refers not only to contemporary literary re-presentations of the VOC period, but also to the massive project of trans-oceanic correspondence through which this early 'multinational' constituted itself: a mass of journals, company reports and judicial records that constitute a vast textual exchange not only with the Heeren XVII (Lords Seventeen) in Amsterdam and the Council of India in Batavia, but also between the buitenposte (outposts) of the VOC at the Cape, and the forgotten posvolk who inhabited them. Notes, ref., sum. [Journal abstract]
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