‘Wie is toch deze verrassende Krijgelmans?’ Ivo Michiels, C.C. Krijgelmans en het Vlaamse romanexperiment

Samenvatting

According to literary history, Ivo Michiels’s Book Alpha, published in 1963, is the first experimental Flemish novel. The present contribution puts this view in perspective by focusing on the close relationship between Ivo Michiels and C.C. Krijgelmans, who also developed a new way of writing in that period. Starting from the work of Pierre Bourdieu, this article studies their relationship during the 1960s from four angles. The first two relate to the context and concern the institutional links between the writers, plus the connections perceived by the critical reception. The other two are textual and refer both to the secondary texts the authors use to position themselves in the literary field, and to their primary literary works, studied by means of ‘unnatural narratology’. Taken together, these four aspects provide an explanation for the canonization of Michiels and the eclipse of Krijgelmans in literary historiography.