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PRAMOEDYA: THE PRICE OF
SOCIAL MODERNITY
Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s Buru Quartet (comprising This
Earth of Mankind, Child of All Nations, Footsteps
and House of Glass) was composed during a fourteen year
detention in a work camp for political prisoners on the Indonesia
island of Buru. The novels have been translated into English by Max
Lane, who — the Penguin edition indicates — had to leave the
Australian embassy in Jakarta in 1981 for having translated
Pramoedya. The narrative began as orally composed stories told by
Pramoedya to his fellow-prisoners when he had no access to his
papers or to writing materials. They were eventually transcribed
over the period from 1975 to the late 1980s. That a writer so
dedicated to the cause of the idea of nation should be imprisoned by
an incarnation of that nation, and his books banned by successive
nationalist regimes, constitutes one of the abiding ironies of
postcolonial nationhood in Southeast Asia.
The quartet offers a complex and ambitious dramatisation of the
impact of, and resistance to, Dutch colonial rule in the East Indies
over a period ranging from the 1880s to the 1920s. As a sequence, it
provides acute historical analysis in the form of a fictional
chronicle. It also represents an instance of what I propose to
describe as a specific kind of post-modernist writing, while
conceding that ‘post-modernist’ as a term is even more problematic
than ‘modernist’, especially when applied to writing outside Europe
or the West. It is used here in the specific and dual sense of
writing which assimilates — while remaining distinct from and
subsequent to — modernist practices.
Pramoedya’s novels may have had their origins in oral
story-telling, but the narrative they constitute is marked by a
distinctive self-reflexivity which aligns them firmly with the
conscious and writerly manipulation of narrative point-of-view. The
manner in which distance in attitude and tone is modulated — between
implied author and implied reader, and between author, reader and
the fictional narrator — would not be possible without the
implication of a written text, patterned to point up contrasts that
would be difficult to sustain in oral narrative.
The Buru Quartet is narrated from the
point-of-view of two dramatically opposed protagonists. This
technique has antecedents in the multiple narrative perspectives
exploited by novelists such as James, Ford Madox Ford, Conrad, and
Virginia Woolf. In this context, the notion of ‘antecedents’ is
meant to suggest a technical lineage and a set of elective
affinities, rather than direct influence. In an interview published
in Michigan Today (1999), Pramoedya singled out Steinbeck and
Saroyan as his admired authors, adding that he learnt English by
reading Steinbeck.
The first three novels adopt a first-person mode which
familiarises the reader to the life and early career of an
individual of exceptional qualities, called Minke, whose character
is partially based on an [OK] historical person who pioneered
journalism in the Dutch Indies. He is portrayed as growing — and
then outgrowing — the potentially modernising influence of a Dutch
colonial education, a process of intellectual maturation initiated
by a woman, Nyai Ontosoroh, the mother of his first wife, and an
individual whose acumen transcends her own ethnic and gendered
subordination in Javanese society, as the mistress of a Dutch
businessman. Pramoedya indicates in his interview for Michigan Today
that this woman was modelled on his own mother.
The claim confirms what the early part of the quartet
dramatises: the heroic role played by the intuitive and alert woman
of exceptional quality, who will show the incipient male leader the
path that can lead to his political destiny. Ironically, therefore,
the colonies give scope for a more untrammelled politicisation of
the impulse to freedom from oppression than found, for example, in
D.H. Lawrence’s fictional women, or in Virginia Woolf’s wounded call
in Three Guineas, which advises the women of England to
withhold support for British participation in the impending World
War because their real enemy was not Germany but patriarchy.
Pramoedya’s narrative creates characters who articulate a very
precise awareness of their own position in relation to colonial
history. They also provide a concrete instance of the general claim
made in the first part of my argument that modernism came to Asia as
part of colonial influence. In Pramoedya’s case, it shows itself
primarily in terms of narrative technique. His narrative focuses on
a familiar historical irony: that the incipient leadership from the
colonised parts of Asia learned to demand political freedom from the
European nations who denied them that freedom but taught them to
recognise its worth. It also provides incidental confirmation for
the general plausibility of the hypothesis proposed by Fredric
Jameson, that colonial writing is characterised by fictions which
allegorise the nation. This is an accurate description of a tendency
in works like the Buru Quartet. Jameson’s argument has been
challenged by Aijaz Ahmad (1986), but it finds incidental support
from Pramoedya, who affirmed, in an interview given to the Los
Angeles Times (1999): ‘I believe that my books, such as the Buru
Quartet, are part of the process of nation-building’.
Minke becomes a focal point for the growth of nationalist opposition
to colonial rule. He first learns to modernise his approach to his
own society and its outmoded conventions of thought, belief and
practice. He then learns to politicise resistance to colonialism,
which happens to be the agent of his transformation. The novel
treats his will to modernity with a cautious and increasingly
post-modern scepticism. The political drive animated through Minke
is problematised by virtue of its European derivativeness. In a
double irony repeated throughout the colonial world, the modern
patriot learns to ask for self-rule from the European nation who
denies him access to the freedom it cherishes for itself. To find
parallels or antecedents to this phenomenon within European
modernism we have to go to a writer like W.B. Yeats, whose
commitment to Irish Revivalism — and his later disenchantment with
it — remind us that Ireland was England’s first (and remains its
last) overseas colony.
The fourth and final part of the quartet, House of
Glass (1988), refracts and partially subverts the foregoing
narrative by shifting the narrative persona from Minke to a
self-serving police commissioner, Pangemanann, who plots against
Minke at the behest of his Dutch masters, and brings about his
downfall. The novel’s self-reflexivity extends to the relation
between Minke and Pangemanann, who embody divergent viewpoints on
Javanese history, in such a way that the fourth novel sharply
undercuts what Minke has come to represent through the first three
novels.
Pramoedya may be said to engage in a dialogic
meditation on the problems besetting the advent of a modernity
mediated to his society by Dutch colonialism. His analysis is rooted
to the specific social formations of Javanese history, confirming
the plausibility of the claim introduced above through Taylor, that
modernity is cultural rather than acultural in its formations. The
Quartet begins by foregrounding Minke; by the end it has
foregrounded the problems that beset his kind of optimism. As
suggested by John David Morley in The New York Times Book Review,
‘Manoeuvred into the background by the plot, he [Minke] is not the
book’s true subject — nor is it really the historical awakening of
Indonesia. Rather, the author’s chief concern here is with the
corrupting influence of colonialism, represented by Pangemanann’
(online).
The specific irony around which Pramoedya develops the
relation between the hunter and the hunted is that Pangemanann is
apparently sincere in his admiration for the man he destroys: ‘I
would now have to spy on and take actions against this man whom I
respected and honoured so much’ (House of Glass, 8). This
tortured character sets up a kind of one-sided, Conrad-like,
secret-sharer complex with his victim (a regard unreciprocated by
Minke). This technical device gives Pramoedya the opportunity to
examine the underside of the double-edged modernity inculcated by
colonialism in the Javanese. Pangemanann is articulate not only
about his admiration for Minke, but also about his disgust at his
own commitment to the ruination of this potentially heroic figure.
Pangemanann says of himself: ‘They would never know how he had to
bow down, with his tortured conscience, becoming, against his will,
a man without principles’ (46).
He is endowed with an analytic frame of mind that is
merciless in exposing his own inner corruption. He is living proof
that modernity is not the only thing learnt from Europe by the
Javanese. His introspections provide the novelist with a vehicle for
a sustained analysis of the complex relation between colonialism and
the tainted or incomplete modernity it engenders. Pangemanann
becomes the mouthpiece for the expression of an embittered irony:
The great teachers beautifully taught about the
enlightenment of the world that would be brought by the Renaissance,
the Aufklarüng, about the awakening of humanism, about the
overthrow of one class by another that was begun with the French
Revolution when the feudal class was removed by the bourgeoisie.
They called on the people to side with the progressive march of
history. And meanwhile, I was sinking into the disgusting colonial
mud. (46–47)
On the one hand, colonial modernity stands for the
capacity to foster reason, the rule of law, a love of liberty, and a
respect for organisation and order in governance; on the other hand,
it has the disabling capacity to foster disjunctions between
righteous principles and their duplicitous implementation. Pramoedya
thus sets up an antithetical relation between modernism as a mode of
historically self-conscious narrative and modernisation as the mixed
blessing of historical necessity. In the downfall of Minke, he ends
the quartet on a note of pessimism that is bleak without being
hopeless.
The dual narrative strategy adopted for the Quartet
as a whole dramatises several types of complicity: between
indigenous nationalism and the elite colonial education system;
between women as the agents of modernity and as the victims of
patriarchy, ethnocentrism, and colonialism; between colonial rule as
the enabler and the disabler of social revolution; between the
colonised intellectual as enlightened analyst of his society, and
its self-serving, self-loathing subverter. The sequence leaves the
reader with a deeply ambiguous sense of what modernity has entailed
for Javanese society, and by extension, for other colonial societies
on the cusp of similar changes.
Pramoedya conveys, in no uncertain terms, the
inevitability and desirability of modernity, but he is also
insistent on its cost to traditional modes of life in Java. A
post-modernist technique is deployed to present a view of peoples
before they have learnt to recognise themselves as modern nations.
In this proleptic and minatory perspective, the complex relations
between agency, power, and victimisation are shown as ominously
poised between progress and misrule. A narrative technique derived
from modernism is applied with great skill and force to open the
anxiety that modernity might be a flawed but necessary blessing. Or,
to put it differently, the novelist acknowledges and blesses
modernity as a flawed necessity.
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