Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

In August 1990, the recently retired Dutch ethnologist Johannes Jacobus Voskuil had a dream: he lay in his coffin and was carried to his grave while a song he had heard hundreds of times — Sidney Bechet’s rendition of “Nobody Knows When You’re Down and Out” — played in the background. He heard the crunch of gravel under the pallbearers’ feet. After a while, the soft swaying over others’ shoulders stopped, and he felt himself being lowered to the ground. As faint murmurs arose, and the footfalls died away, he lifted the lid of his coffin and sat up to watch the attendees depart. Those at the tail of the funeral train he didn’t know; those at the head were now too far away to recognize. Lying back, letting the lid settle over him again, he remained awake, “overwhelmed by a feeling of limitless sorrow.”  A month later, Voskuil began work on Meneer Beerta (Mister Beerta) an autobiographical novel chronicling eight years in the life of his alter ego, Maarten Koning, at the Bureau for Dialectology, Folklore, and Onomastics in Amsterdam. By July 1991 he had moved onto a sequel, Vuile Handen (Dirty Hands). He would continue writing at an average pace of around four pages a day, until by 1995 he had finished the longest novel written in Dutch, and one of the longest novels ever written, entitled Het Bureau (The Office or The Institute) which appeared in seven volumes from 1996 to 2000. On its surface, the premise is anything but promising: a not-quite-young man in need of work looks up a former professor, who offers him a job as a researcher for an Atlas for Folk Culture, investigating such topics as beliefs about the kabouter, a sort of leprechaun or gnome. Maarten accepts the post against the spirited protests of his wife Nicolien, because he must have a job, and because he feels that, of the two of them, he will better tolerate steady employment. For five thousand pages, he goes to work every day, produces an exhaustive record of petty squabbles, malingerings, and the vicissitudes of his field of volkskunde — commonly translated as folkloristics or ethnology, though neither term fully encompasses the breadth of the Dutch, especially given the transformations volkskunde underwent in Voskuil’s time. Well over half of the novel consists of dialogue: transcriptions of committee meetings, domestic arguments, conversations with barbers or shopkeepers, and a decades-long exchange with a psychologically disturbed friend named Frans Veen. As transformations overwhelm his workplace, the former Bureau for Dialect, Folklore, and Onomastics, known from 1979 onward as the A.P. Beerta Institute, Maarten chooses to take early retirement, only to find that the backdrop of his life has disappeared, and he is “adrift like a balloon in the sky.”  He returns to the office periodically, to finish a few lectures and essays; his colleagues greet him first with tolerance, then indifference, then hostility; finally, his desk is taken away and his papers piled up in the corner. He never believed in his work, and had described himself and his coworkers as “belonging to a reservoir of superfluous intellects society no longer needs, who must be given some pointless task to keep them off the street.” What had kept him going for thirty years, he believed, was solidarity, but he now realizes that it was a mirage. “Despite his skepticism, and against his better judgment, he had wanted to believe, deep in his heart, in his people, as like Gideon’s band of three hundred. Only now, with the slow passage of time, did he realize he had knowingly deceived himself.” There is no sex and no romance, there is scant adventure only apathetically described, there are no noble heroes, no dastardly villains, no deathbed penitence or hidden treasure. Yet Het Bureau has gained a hold on the Dutch imagination comparable to the fever caused elsewhere by Harry Potter or Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy. It has sold hundreds of thousands of copies, is perpetually out at the libraries, has inspired a radio play and a graphic novel adaptation; for a time the Meertens Instituut, the real-life counterpart of Maarten Koning’s office in the novel, offered guided tours, and there was even an exhibition at which institute employees mentioned in the book stood at their desks, ready to converse with fans. There have been reports of Dutch office workers nicknaming their colleagues after those they most resemble in the novel. More than one person, chronically ill, sought special permission from Voskuil’s publisher to see proofs of the novels later volumes before release, in order to die in peace, knowing how Maarten’s story ended.  In my own experience, mention of the book among the Dutch gives rise to an almost conspiratorial sort of amity like that which once brought together fans of The Wire in the United States, but with an added note of gratitude, because the Netherlands is a country that outsiders rarely bother to learn much about. The untraveled and uncultured can trot out stereotypes about snooty Frenchmen, lusty Latins, stolid Russians, and orderly Germans, but how many under fifty have any sense of the proverbial frankness and frugality that inspired the terms “Dutch uncle” and “going Dutch”? Neither in Europe nor in the United States have I had the sense that Dutch culture matters much to anyone: Rembrandt, sure, or the diary of Anne Frank, or Cees Nooteboom or Gerald Reve for the really well-read, but these references run out soon, and pale in comparison to the significance of Amsterdam as a budget airline destination for the cannabis-and-sex-tourists who have made much of its historic center almost uninhabitable. For these reasons, and perhaps because of the relatively scant attention received by Gerd Busse’s heroic translation of the entirety of Het Bureau into German, critics have debated whether there is something specifically and irreducibly Dutch about Voskuil that would impede his success in other languages. This is nonsense. Het Bureau is a masterpiece almost unique in its accessibility, dense with