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Subject: IN/BOOK: Footsteps & House of Glass Review
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INDONESIA-P
Java jive.
JAVA JIVE Footsteps by Pramoedya Ananta Toer translated by Max Lane
(William Morrow, 474 pp., $23)
House of Glass by Pramoedya Ananta Toer translated by Max Lane
(William Morrow, 352 pp., $25)
The displacement of political engagement toward literature in
authoritarian countries--those with undeveloped, stultified or
forcibly shrunken civil societies--is a commonplace. There is nothing
like banning parties, eviscerating representative institutions,
muzzling the press, incarcerating dissenters, appointing soldiers to
ministries of justice and education, and ideologizing popular culture
for turning the imaginative writer into a power. Solzhenitsyn and
Havel, Ngugi and Solinka, even the fugitive Rushdie, the reticent
Mahfuz, or the exported Fugard, make generals, presidents, ayatollahs
and party chiefs nervous in a way that their colleagues in less
constrained settings seldom attain. There is usually a price for this,
and it is often, as the fate of Ken Saro-Wiwa recently reminded us, a
heavy one. But that, too, seems to contribute to the public force of
the writer.
When this happens, when a novelist or a playwright or a poet takes on
political significance as a player in the game-- as someone whom the
authorities have somehow to deal with, to bring into line, to isolate,
to appease, or to silence--critical judgment is forced in
uncomfortable directions. Such writers become emblematic, signs as
such. Their lives are rivals to their work, which may come, as a
result, to seem almost an ancillary matter, the occasion of their
significance rather than the substance of it. Pramoedya Ananta Toer,
Indonesia' s most famous writer and the country's perpetual candidate
for the Nobel Prize (his 1983 curriculum vitae already lists him as a
"nominee, " whatever that means, and there is something of an
international lobby promoting his cause), is surely a case in point.
His career has been as political as it has been literary, a matter as
much of insurgencies and prisons as of novels, translations, essays in
criticism and short stories.
Not that there hasn't been a prodigious flow of those. His first major
works, two novels and a collection of short stories, were written
while he was locked up by the Dutch between 1947 and 1949, during
Indonesia's war for independence. During the Sukarno period, a time of
rising ideological passion that ended with the failed coup, the
destruction of the Indonesian Communist Party and the popular
massacres of 1965, he produced no less than eight novels, three
collections of short stories, three historical-cum-literary studies
(Socialist Realism and Indonesian Literature, The Intellectual
Community in the Third World, The Chinese in Indonesia) and fifteen
translations (Steinbeck, Tolstoi, Sholokhov, Gorki, Pascal). After
Suharto came to power, he was again imprisoned, this time for fourteen
years, and passed the time assembling--the verb is exact--the enormous
four-volume historical novel sometimes called The Buru Quartet, after
the penal colony in which it was composed, on which his fame will
surely rest. For fifty years, Pramoedya (the appropriate form of
reference for him), who is now 71, has been committed to his trade.
The theme of all his work--aside from the translations and the
critical work, which seem to have been mostly ideological
gestures--has been the same: the moral dislocations brought into being
by the rise, the triumph and (to his mind) the betrayal of Indonesian
nationalism. Since his participation, in his early 20s, in the radical
and romantic literary movement, the so-called "Generation of '45,"
that revolted against the combination of literary conventionalism and
spiritual earnestness that had grown up in the closing days of
colonial rule, Pramoedya has been the chronicler of what he once
referred to as the "victim[s] of patriotism and inadequate
leadership." His stories are stories of the rages and the desolations
of an aborted revolution.
Pramoedya's life has followed the same course, as though he were
composing his oeuvre and his career as a single effort, to the point
where his works seem intensely autobiographical, even when, as in the
tetralogy, they are set in a period other than his own, about
predicaments other than his own, with characters at some distance from
his own. Born in eastern Java in 1925, the son of a schoolteacher who
left a comfortable position in a Dutch "native" school to become an
ill-paid headmaster in a nationalist "free" school and a mother from a
strongly Islamic family, he left home in his teens during the
occupation of Indonesia by the Japanese, working for a time for Domei,
their press agency, in Jakarta. When the revolution broke out in
August, 1945, he joined a youthful guerrilla group which harassed the
British re-occupation forces around the capital.
Rather than accept incorporation into the rationalized army of the
Sukarno-Hatta Republic--the formation of which set professional Dutch
and Japanese soldiers against populist irregulars intent on keeping
the cause pure and the struggle unremitting--Pramoedya wandered about
revolutionary Java, a scene of intimate treacheries and private
retributions, for some months. By the time the Dutch launched the
first of their two military campaigns to retake the country, he had
gone reluctantly to work for the new government's radio station, "The
Voice of Free Indonesia," and he was arrested, tortured, imprisoned
and, apparently a hard case, released only at the very end of Dutch
rule in late 1949.
During the Sukarno regime, Pramoedya drifted steadily leftward as the
regime itself did, sharing first in its popularity and then in its
fate. Whether or not he was ever formally a member of the Indonesian
Communist Party, he became increasingly identified with it in the
public mind, and apparently in his own mind, as its power grew. He
journeyed to Beijing and returned an enthusiast. He became the
cultural editor of an influential left-wing newspaper, an editorial
adviser to the Czech cultural journal Orient, and editor for
Indonesian literature for The Great Soviet Encyclopedia. Most
fatefully, he emerged in 1958 as the leading figure in lekra, or the
Institute of People's Culture, the Party apparatus which, in the early
1960s, came to dominate literary and artistic life in Indonesia.
There is much debate about what Pramoedya did or did not do in this
period. He has been accused of, and has denied, an involvement in book
burning; but it is a matter of record that, amid the increasing
hysteria of the Party's massive, near-miss surge toward power (lekra
alone claimed a half million members), he called for "smashing," "
crushing," "devouring" and "eliminating" non-communist writers,
inveighed against the translation of Doctor Zhivago into Indonesian,
and generally engaged in what one Indonesian news magazine recently
called "terror mental." When, in 1963, twenty-three of Indonesia's
leading writers and painters, most of them former compatriots of his
in the battle of "the Generation of '45" against late colonial
gentility, published a manifesto--a rather anodyne document, actually
("we do not regard any one sector of culture as superior to any other.
All [should] work together . . . to the best of their
ability")--Pramoedya led a fierce assault against them. This resulted
in the suppression of their work, their journals, and, in 1964, the
official prohibition by Sukarno of their movement altogether.
"Uniformity," as A. Teuuw, the Dutch historian of modern Indonesian
literature, mordantly remarks, "had been achieved."
Pramoedya was riding high. He was, for the moment, Indonesia's
Zhdanov. But only for the moment: the reversal of fortune, when it
came, was swift and total. After the failure of the coup and the
accession of Suharto in October 1965, he was dragged from his house
amid a hail of stones and the cries of an angry mob. His library and
his papers were burned; he was passed through a number of prison camps
and again tortured; and finally, along with perhaps 10,000 other
"special cases, " and still untried in a public court, he was
transported to Buru, a small island in the Moluccas. It was not until
the end of 1979 that he was released, and then into city arrest in
Jakarta.
The first decade or so in this south sea gulag was extraordinarily
brutal; many prisoners perished from beatings and starvation. Yet the
last two or three years, though grim enough, saw something of a
relaxation. Freed suddenly from manual labor, provided with writing
materials, and permitted a small study in his barracks, Pramoedya
turned from reciting his tale piecemeal to other prisoners to
writing, at what seems to have been a feverish pace (the whole is
dated "spoken 1973, written 1975"), the 1,500-page tetralogy, of which
Footsteps- -a better rendering would have been Footprints-- is the
third volume and House of Glass the fourth. The first two, This Earth
of Mankind and Child of All Nations, appeared in English in 1982 and
1993.
Western critics have been generally at a loss to convey the peculiarly
didactic and reiterative quality of Pramoedya's writing in general,
and of the tetralogy in particular--its relentless succession of
desperately earnest conversations between typified characters in
schematized scenes. So they have reached, in worried confusion, for
all sorts of Western analogues: Solzhenitsyn, Steinbeck, James
Baldwin, Dashiell Hammett, Dickens, Conrad, Nadine Gordimer, Camus,
Dostoyevsky, and (the only one with very much to be said for it) a
television miniseries. It is, in fact, a narrative, or a series of
narratives, that consists almost entirely of talking heads explaining
and re-explaining themselves to one another over a thirty-year period
of political upheaval, almost all of which takes place offstage as
summarily reported event--all of which fits oral patterns of
literature and the memory devices that sustain them a good deal better
than it does the plots and subplots of the realistic novel. The told
tale, later transcribed, moves in a different way than a tale that has
been constructed from the start as a written text. For the reader used
to crises and conclusions, to peripeties of character, and to the
seaward flow of cause and consequence, it may seem hardly to move at
all.
What Pramoedya has produced in The Buru Quartet is not, or anyway not
primarily, a saga, though it traces the career of a Dutch-educated
Javanese aristocrat, oppositional journalist, and pioneer nationalist
(a figure based on an actual personage, never that well-known and now
largely forgotten) from the end of the nineteenth century through the
First World War. It is not a psychological portrait, though the
protagonist's self-questionings and self-justifications are as endless
as they are arch and formulaic. Nor is it even a moral tale, though
the good guys and the bad guys are very clearly marked. It is a
sociological tableau: a drawn, re-drawn and re-drawn-again depiction
of a multi- religious, multi-linguistic, multi-racial, multi-cultural
society that, challenged to change its nature, merely rearranges its
parts.
Pramoedya's hero is called Minke, which, as he says, may or may not
mean "monkey," and therefore may or may not suggest the Ramayana,
Hanuman, and the simian army that recaptures Sita from the demon king
and restores the realm to Rama. The name is given him by a racist
schoolmaster, but its Javanese resonances, upon which the novel
continuously plays, are rather more complex. Minke is Indonesian
nationalism personified. What happens to him happened to it, and to
Pramoedya.
The first volume, This Earth of Mankind, is set in turn-of-the-century
Surabaya, Indonesia's Hamburg or Marseilles, a polyglot, disorderly
passage port where the exiled, the radical and the imaginatively
violent tend to wash up. The book immediately plunges Minke--he is in
his teens, "the age of a corn plant," and has come there from his
village to study in a Dutch school and make himself modern--into an
extraordinary swirl of human types. There is his "Indo," that is,
Eurasian, schoolmate ("He was taller than me. In his body ran some
Native blood. Who knows how many drops or clots"), a violent thug who
will become his pursuer throughout his life. ("He thought he knew my
weakness. I had no European blood in my body.") There is the immensely
wealthy "Pure Blood" Dutch businessman, into whose household, "a
castle of puzzles," the thug introduces Minke. There is the
businessman's elegant and accomplished Javanese concubine ("Should I
offer my hand as to a European woman, or should I treat her as Native
woman and ignore her?") who, despised alike by Dutch and indigenes,
becomes his protectoress and confidante. (She will return in the final
volume after his death, looking for him like a lost son.) There is the
beautiful "Mixed Blood" daughter of these two, "white skinned,
refined, European face, hair and eyes of a Native," whom he marries
and who soon declines and dies in Holland, where he has been forbidden
by the colonial government to follow her. There is her brother ("He
looked European, except he had brown skin") who is later suspected of
murdering the father.
And so it goes. Through the subsequent three volumes, the types pile
up, talking their way through allegorized history. A Chinese brothel
keeper; a peg-leg French doctor; various sorts of Dutchmen variously
placed; and various sorts of Javanese, including his father, a native
district chief in the colonial bureaucracy, full of propriety and
caution; his steadfast mother, with whom he seems to be always
exchanging apologies; his village-educated nationalist cronies, brave,
unspoiled and dog-loyal. We get a literary Haji, a Eurasian, a former
sailor and recent convert to Islam, who publishes anonymously a novel
exposing life on a sugar plantation and departs for Jeddah. We get a
Chinese agitator for the Kuomintang who is killed by the secret
societies, a wealthy Arab cloth trader with Turkish-educated sons,
and, at one giddy point, the Governor General of the East Indies, a
hardened soldier who holds palace soirees on preparing natives for the
modern age. And, last but not least, we get the petty bourgeois
colonial policeman, a Catholic Christian "Native" from the northern
Celebes who studied in France and dreams helplessly of returning
there. He brings about Minke's arrest and transportation, and it is in
his voice, a ventriloquized version of Minke's own, that the last
volume is told.
After the expiration of his delicate Eurasian beauty, Minke marries a
ferocious Chinese nationalist, born in Shanghai and raised in a
Catholic convent. ("[The] cultural barriers between us . . . had been
magically made to vanish. . . . [We] had come out of the same factory
called the modern age.") When she too soon wastes away and dies, he
marries an exotic, dark-skinned Princess from the extreme Melanesian
east of Indonesia. ("She was tall and slender and her skin was an
attractive ebony color. . . . Perhaps she had Portuguese blood.")
Along the way he manages as well to get himself seduced by the pretty
French wife of his repulsive Eurasian lawyer. ("Whose child was now
growing in Mir's womb? . . . Who would it look like? Me, Mir, or
Hendrik? Would it be Native, Eurasian, or White?") "The Indies," he
says, the Indies Pramoedya has placed him in, "is just an untamed
jungle and I am just one of its million monkeys."
Minke's attempt--a quixotic, confused, or, since history finally is on
his side, merely premature attempt--to tame the jungle and replace its
million monkeys with a modern, self-propelling, organized national
community is the subject of Footsteps, the axial novel in the series
and the one that is most transparently based on Pramoedya's own
struggles. Set in Batavia, the colonial capital ("Not as busy as
Surabaya. And so clean") during the first two decades of the century,
when the nationalist movement emerged for the first time as a visible
public force, the book traces, though again largely through set-piece
conversations, his meteoric career as a journalist, agitator,
organizer, conspirator and ideologue. Beginning in exultant promise
("Into the universe of Betawi I go--into the universe of the twentieth
century. . . . I am here . . . to do great things . . . to free
[humanity] from the unnecessary ties of custom, blood--even from the
land . . ."), it concludes, barely a dozen years later, in treachery,
defeat and exile. "All that I have built has been destroyed . . . [I
have been] pierced from the front and stabbed ... from behind....I
will be leaving Java....Things will go hard for me now. I have always
been hard with the world."
In the end, with the crushing of radical nationalism after the First
World War, and their leaders--Sukarno, Hatta, Sjahrir--sent off to
their own Devil's Islands, the monkeys remain an undisciplined,
chattering throng, powerless and divided. His newspaper long closed by
the authorities, his nationalist organization passed into careerist,
collaborationist hands, his wife disappeared as though she had never
existed, Minke is released from prison and returned to Java. Unbowed,
he refuses to sign a document promising abstention from
politics--"[Do] you want me to sign my own death sentence without
there having been any trial, just as I was sentenced to exile without
any trial?" Apparently poisoned by yet another brutal Eurasian, he
soon dies, "leaving behind in this world only the imprints of his
footsteps."
Minke's story may be over, but Pramoedya continues to leave
footprints. He has been under city arrest in Jakarta, forbidden to
travel or to make public appearances. His books are banned in
Indonesia. Students have been jailed for attempting to distribute
them, though they usually circulate for a while before disappearing,
and in neighboring Malaysia they are required reading in the schools.
His international audience is immense: his publishers claim a million
people in twenty languages. Pramoedya savages the Suharto government
at every opportunity. "It is I who should give them amnesty," he told
reporters from The Economist when they came round recently to see if
he was mellowing. He has just edited the memoirs--they were also
immediately banned--of a Chinese minister in Sukarno's last cabinet,
who refers to "The Smiling General" as "blunt" and "cruel."
But all that, by now, is standard on the Jakarta scene: Hanuman at
work. It was the decision by a committee in Manila last summer to give
him the Ramon Magsaysay Prize that thrust Pramoedya back into his old
role of cultural lightning rod--that made him, his career and his work
the focus once again of a deep and divisive public debate. Ramon
Magsaysay, the reformist president of the Philippines in the
mid-1950s, put down the communist-led Huk rebellion, warred on
corruption, and sought to improve the condition of the Philippine
poor. He remains in many circles in Southeast Asia an exemplary,
almost sainted figure, especially in the light of what followed him.
After his death a foundation was set up, in large part with American
money, to award a prize in his name to Asian journalists, writers and
artists who represented the ideals--democracy, freedom and peaceful
progress--for which he is held to have stood. And the notion of the
people in Manila that Pramoedya, the ex-commissar, was such a figure,
broke upon the Indonesian intellectual community like a return of the
repressed.
Twenty-six of the country's most prominent artists and writers,
erstwhile opponents of Sukarno and objects of Pramoedya's lekra
assaults, immediately protested. About as many, most of them also
ex-targets of his, and all of them critics of Suharto, protested the
protest. A former winner of the prize--a passionate anti-Sukarno and
anti-Communist journalist who won it nearly forty years ago, when
times were different--returned it to Manila. A leading poet, who
remembered mass meetings at which he and his friends had been cast
into outer darkness as counter-revolutionaries, suggested that
Pramoedya might deserve the Lenin Prize, the Nobel Prize, the
Pulitzer Prize, or even the Literary Prize of the Jakarta Arts Council
that the poet himself had won, but not a prize named for Magsaysay,
and that the Foundation had thrown mud upon its own principles.
A former anti-Sukarno youth leader, now a sociologist, agreed that
Pramoedya's sins should not be forgotten, but insisted that he
deserved the prize as Indonesia's finest writer; and in recognizing
that fact, and accepting it, those who had fought the culture of
denunciation that Pramoedya once represented could demonstrate that it
had been truly overcome. Another such youth leader and later editor of
the country's leading news magazine, now himself in the courts
struggling to overturn a ban put on his magazine by the Suharto
government, said that "Pramoedya has already been imprisoned for
thirteen years in a prison colony without trial, and has been unable
to speak in public for thirty years. Isn't that too much? Isn't that
enough?"
Apparently it was neither: Pramoedya was forbidden to go to Manila to
collect his prize. His wife picked it up for him. Meanwhile the writer
sits in Jakarta, writing (most recently, one hears, a thoroughly
intransigent, in-your-face diary of his Buru years) and trying to
outwait history and Suharto. The general is three years older than the
writer, and he seems to be gearing up to run for another five- year
term in 1998. The country has changed enormously since both began
their careers a half century ago, but the structure of feeling
changes, apparently, more slowly than the production system or the
transport network. A voice of and from the past, Pramoedya still seems
capable of disturbing the present, however separated he has become
from its workings. "The writer continues to develop," he once wrote,
"but not his writing."
By Clifford Geertz Clifford Geertz is the author most recently of
After the Fact: Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist
(Harvard University Press).
___
Geertz, Clifford, Java jive.., New Republic, 04-22-1996, pp 31.