Vijf jaar na zijn overlijden werd de Vlaamse schrijver Hugo Claus in 2013 uitgebreid en in majeur herdacht. In intellectuele en culturele kringen wordt hij onmiskenbaar nog altijd op handen gedragen. Dat heeft uiteraard te maken met zijn grote artistieke verdiensten, maar ook, zo blijkt, omdat Claus’ rijke erfenis ‘geoperationaliseerd’ kan worden in de strijd tegen het Vlaams-nationalisme in het algemeen en tegen het electorale succes van de N-VA in het bijzonder. Het is zonder meer zo dat Claus zich in interviews en in zijn literaire werk een bijzonder lucide criticus heeft getoond van het discours van de Vlaamse beweging. Toch blijft het recente gedweep met Claus als de grote anti-Vlaams-nationalist blind voor enkele belangrijke nuances. Dit artikel wil de verhouding tussen Claus en de Vlaamse Beweging op essayistische wijze kritisch belichten. Het streeft geen volledigheid na, maar test enkele probleemstellingen door een selectie van bekende en minder bekende teksten van Claus te analyseren en in verband te brengen met de biografische achtergrond van de auteur. Hierbij vormt Claus’ ambivalente verhouding tot het werk van Hendrik Conscience de rode draad.________The ‘Sorrow (of Belgium)’ applies to the entire nation. About Hugo Claus and the Flemish MovementIn 2013, five years after his death the Flemish author Hugo Claus was commemorated extensively and on a major scale. Clearly, he is still much admired in intellectual and cultural circles. This is obviously related to his great artistic merits, but also it appears, because Claus’s rich heritage can be ‘operationalised’ in the struggle against Flemish Nationalism in general, and the electoral success of the N-VA in particular. It is undeniable that during interviews and in his literary work Clause proved to be a particularly lucid critic of the discourse of the Flemish movement. However, the recent passion for Claus as the great anti-Flemish Nationalist ignores some important nuances. This article in the form of an essay is intended to take a critical look at the relationship between Claus and the Flemish Movement. It does not attempt to be complete, but only tests out some premises by analysing some well known and lesser known texts by Claus and by putting them into the context of the biographical background of the author. The leitmotiv hereby is Claus’s ambivalent attitude to the writings of Hendrik Conscience.

Juggling with big words': Register variation in Hugo Claus's De verwondering (1962) The prose of Hugo Claus has been the subject of broad scholarly interest, regardingamongst other thingsintertextuality and allegories. The presence of various, contrasting language registers has been briefly touched upon, but hasmainly because of the lack of an appropriate research method never been studied in greater detail. This preliminary article analyses some excerpts of De verwondering (1962), the first novel in which Claus experiments with register variation, based on the stylistic methodology developed by Leech and Short (2007). The analyses demonstrate that this methodology is highly applicable to analyse not just 'the style' of a text, but also to 'zoom in' on various registers. In doing so, numerous aspects that help constitute (but at the same time undermine) a certain interpretation come more profoundly to the fore, showing that the study of register variation is promising, especially regarding novels in which different varieties of the same language appear.