Finding Oneself in Older Age

This paper explores the emplacement of older age through an existentialist phenomenological reading of the novel De grote zaal by Jacoba van Velde. Published in 1953, the book explores the loneliness, absurdity, and existential anxiety of later life unfolding in a care institution. It tells the story of the 74-year-old widow Geertruide van der Veen who relocates to a nursing home for older women after suffering a stroke. As Geertruide’s sense of being out of place intensifies, she develops a mortal fear of the “big ward,” the area reserved for the terminally ill and dying. Moving through the nursing home, Geertruide finds herself in shifting spatial-affective-existential situations in ways that challenge the common separation of these “dimensions” of experience. To analyze the intimate connection between place, feeling, and existential meaning, I turn to the Heideggerian concept of Befindlichkeit. In Being and Time, Heidegger challenges the view of feelings as contained by individual minds; instead, he envisages them as spatially distributed and saturated with existential meaning. To be befindlich, that is, to find oneself in the world is to be always already immersed in meanings and relationships. Reading through the lens of Befindlichkeit, I interpret De grote zaal as an opening toward an understanding of older age as an existential situation. My analysis focuses on three prominent feeling-places that feature in the novel: fearing—the big ward; sharing—the common areas; and grieving—the outside. In each case, I show how Geertruide engages with her environment in ways that transcend common distinctions between “inside” and “outside,” passivity and activity as well as affective and spatial experience. I then reflect on the implications of this perspective for the emplacement of older age and the debate on nursing home residents’ existential homelessness.