EN3262 Pramoedya: Extract from essay

[Extract from] Literary Modernism in Asia: Pramoedya and Kolatkar

Rajeev S. Patke

Abstract

The essay examines the fortunes of literary modernism outside Europe in terms of its relation to the work of two writers from Asia: the novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer from Indonesia, and the poet Arun Kolatkar from India. It uses examples from their work to argue that the tension between artistic modernism and societal modernization characteristic of European culture in the early part of the twentieth century is reproduced—or, more precisely, transfigured—in postcolonial contexts during the latter half of the twentieth century, in ways that go beyond the initial correspondence or indebtedness to European modernism.

I Modernism versus Modernity

Modernism is a large, loose, and baggy monster of a term, which struggles to encompass a diverse set of creative practices and cultural assumptions with European origins and a field of reference that has since become unevenly global. I propose to use the example of two writers from outside Europe in order to examine the tension between artistic modernism and societal modernization characteristic of European culture in the early part of the twentieth century. I will argue that this tension is reproduced—or, more precisely, transfigured—in postcolonial contexts during the latter half of the twentieth century in ways that go beyond the initial correspondence or indebtedness to European forebears.

My argument is based on the widely recognized distinction between modernism as a phenomenon which found its most concentrated expression in European and American art during the early decades of the twentieth century, and modernity or modernization as the historical realization of the European Enlightenment project of instrumental rationality, with progress as its goal, and the technological rationalization of nature and human institutions as its means.

Modernism as a cultural referent suffers from the effect of several ironies. Its efficacy as a descriptive term remains overshadowed by the fact that it is a retrospective nomination, described vividly by Stan Smith as “a movement constituted backwards, like Beckett’s series of doggy obituaries, the new dog endlessly buried for the sake of dogs to come” (Smith 240). The notion of “modern” implies a link with the “new”, the “contemporary”, and “the avant-garde”. Yet, as Raymond Williams noted laconically, “What was ‘modern’, what was indeed ‘avant-garde’, is now relatively old” (Williams 52). Thus “modern” is balanced equivocally between a denotation that is historically specific and a connotation that evokes perpetual novelty. More seriously, theorists of diverse ideological persuasions, ranging from American New Criticism to the European intellectual Left (as exemplified by Lukács and Adorno), have identified aesthetic autonomy as one of the principal traits unifying most forms of modernism. However, as noted by Peter Bürger in the 1970s, the post-Romantic modernist myth of the autonomy of art inhibits analysis of its aesthetics as “the normative instrumentality of an institution in bourgeois society” (Bürger lii). This repression becomes particularly noticeable when modernism is transplanted outside Europe, where its role as an aesthetic principle cannot avoid engagement with the very different social formations and political ideologies it encounters in postcolonial societies and nations, as I hope to illustrate later.

The autonomy imputed to modernism is misleading in yet another respect: as a movement affecting the arts, modernism is often treated as if it were largely unrelated to the older and concurrent phenomenon of European colonialism. Yet, as many commentators have reiterated, modernist art provides ample evidence for a significant relation between its aesthetic strategies and the impact of colonialism on the cultures of the colonizing nations.

In Europe, the relation between modernism and modernization either generated what Perry Anderson calls “cultural despair” (28), which can be illustrated from a diverse range of writers from Weber to Ortega, Eliot to Tate, and Leavis to Marcuse, or it subsidized various forms of utopian optimism, from Marinetti to Le Corbusier, Buckminster Fuller to Marshall McLuhan. When modernism is transposed outside Europe, the antithesis between despair and utopianism is reproduced in intensified form, and accompanied by several additional ironies.

II Modernism and Colonialism

The first irony to the perpetuation of modernist practices outside Europe and the USA is that both the agonistic and the emancipative aspects of modernism were mediated to cultures and societies outside Europe through colonialism, whose institutions were always equivocal between exploiting and educating their colonies. While modernist writing and art were either ambivalent or critical towards the spirit of colonialism, their influence could not have spread to regions outside the West without colonialist institutions and mind-sets. This means that the spirit of radical individualism and experiment that is central to modernism traveled to the colonies and the newly-independent nations of the mid-twentieth century belatedly, either as imitation, or as the local and belated re-enactment of the dialectic between modernity and modernism whose characteristic preoccupations had first developed in the context of European societies and cultures. The transposition raises a question that affects every theory of modernity: is it to be treated as an undifferentiated and global phenomenon, or are its various asynchronous manifestations culture-specific? That is, does modernization follow the logic of its development regardless of cultural difference, or does it undergo modifications relative to cultural difference?

In a recent essay on “Two Theories of Modernity” (2001), Charles Taylor recommends cultural—as opposed to the more widely prevalent acultural—explanations of modernity. The acultural approach supports the assumption “that modernity comes from a single, universally applicable operation”, and thus “imposes a falsely uniform pattern on the multiple encounters of non-Western cultures with the exigencies of science, technology, and industrialization” (Taylor 180). In contrast, Taylor argues, a cultural explanation is better able to recognize that “transitions to what we might recognize as modernity, taking place in different civilizations, will produce different results that reflect their divergent starting points” (182). The differences are not merely a matter of belated derivativeness. Modernism, as Anderson notes, was “a complex set of aesthetic practices”, and “the product of a historically unstable form of society and an undecided epoch” (Anderson 53). When reproduced outside the West, its strategies have had to respond and adapt to instabilities of a different nature from those confronted by writers like Conrad, Eliot, Valéry, Joyce, Mann, Pound, or Faulkner.

European modernism is equivocal in its attitude to three major issues: colonialism, gender, and the political Right. The anomaly in respect to gender has several consequences for any narrative of modernism. Bonnie Scott, in Refiguring Modernism (1995), draws attention to how “the men of modernism, from Pound through Forster, did not have a framework that could include or contain Woolf, West, and Barnes” (Scott 179). As for the reactionary politics of modernism, Pericles Lewis (2000) notes, “The political paradox of modernism was that literary experiment sometimes participated in the turn to authoritarian nationalism of a d’Annunzio, but just as often led to the cosmopolitan revaluation of national identity implicit in the multilingual punning of Finnegan’s Wake” (211). When modernist practices are imitated or adapted outside Europe, such equivocations acquire a very different cultural resonance, which supports Charles Taylor’s recommendation that modernism is better accounted for as a plurality of culture-specific phenomena.

The second irony to modernism is that while its European manifestations (as in Conrad or Eliot) exposed a dark underside to the Enlightenment will to progress, the historically belated assimilation of colonized societies into the project of modernity did not permit their writers a corresponding degree of skepticism about the Utopian elements of that project, either in terms of postcolonial nationhood, or the asymmetrical development of capitalist globalization. My two examples–the novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer, from Indonesia, and the poet Arun Kolatkar, from India–will show that the will to modernity gets ingested in the colonies in ways that are either conscious–as in the case of Pramoedya–or involuntary, as in the case of Kolatkar. Curiously enough, the assimilation of modernist techniques reverses that relation: in Pramoedya, it is largely unconscious; in Kolatkar, very self-conscious.

The third irony to modernism is that while its European manifestations—from Gauguin to Picasso, or Lawrence to Eliot—drew upon the otherness of the non-European in transforming its self-image, non-European modernisms could hardly do the same. Instead, they have often ended up discovering or inventing oppositional alterities from within their own cultures. As remarked by John Jarvis in Transgressing the Modern: Explorations in the Western Experience of Otherness (1999), “The other … retains the capacity not just to inspire fear, but to tempt and fascinate. Disgust and desire can be very close…” (1). My examples will attempt to show how the dialectical play between disgust and fascination in modernist writing outside Europe generates typologies which differ markedly from the role played by the non-European Other in European modernism.

The converse generates a fourth irony. If Europe was busy imaging itself indirectly through its many Others, the colonized were busy trying to gain assimilation into Eurocentric modes, and one of the ways this could be done, as noted by Simon Gikandi (1992), was for “colonized writers to use forms and figures borrowed from European modernism as a point of entry into certain aspects of Western culture…” (15-16). Even if many European modernists may have nursed reservations about colonialism, the influence of modernism outside Europe thus became complicit with a very different agenda, which inadvertently fed the growth of Europe’s continued cultural dominance in a post-imperial era.

Having described modernism as a complex notion riddled with ironies, I propose to examine the implications of the general claims sketched above for two specific and culturally dissimilar writers from Asia. I propose to argue that in the narratives of Pramoedya, we encounter a tension between modernism as a form of narrative technique and modernization as a form of socio-historical necessity. In Kolatkar’s case, a surreal poetics grapples with an internalized disenchantment with tradition that is empowered by a habit of skepticism derived from post-Enlightenment rationality. Kolatkar comes from the kind of Sanskritic culture invoked by a modernist like T.S. Eliot. Ironically, it takes an outsider like Eliot to make a value of that which evinces distaste and satire from an insider like Kolatkar. The rapt and needy Orientalism of Eliot turned from his time and place to the Brahmanical pieties of Indic culture for succor and “Shantih”. In reverse analogy, Kolatkar berates the internal colonization practiced on Indian society by its Brahmanical belief systems. Eliot’s distraught disbelief drew grateful sustenance from Indic religions; Kolatkar derives his sardonic and subversive attitude from European models of post-Enlightenment skepticism. The two examples will suggest the more general conclusion that the predicaments of modernism outside Europe become radical transpositions of the ambivalent relation between modernity and modernism in Europe.

II 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 on the Indonesian island of Buru during a fourteen year detention in a work camp for political prisoners. 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 dramatization 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 familiarizes the reader to the life and early career of an individual of exceptional qualities, called Minke, whose character is partially based on a historical person who pioneered journalism in the Dutch Indies. He is portrayed as growing—and then outgrowing—the potentially modernizing 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 (1999) that this woman was modeled on his own mother.

The claim confirms what the early part of the quartet dramatizes: 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 untrammeled politicization 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 (1938), 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 colonized parts of Asia learned to demand political freedom from the European nations who denied them that freedom but taught them to recognize its worth. It also provides incidental confirmation for the general plausibility of the hypothesis proposed by Fredric Jameson (1986), that colonial writing is characterized by fictions which allegorize the nation, is an accurate description of a tendency in works like the Buru Quartet. Jameson’s argument has been challenged by Aijaz Ahmad (1986), but gets 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 modernize his approach to his own society and its outmoded conventions of thought, belief and practice. He then learns to politicize 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 skepticism. The political drive animated through Minke is problematized 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 antecedent 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 adapted from time to time and from place to place in cultural rather than acultural terms. 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, “Maneuvered 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”.

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 honored 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” (House of Glass, 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. (House of Glass, 46-7)

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 organization 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 modernization 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 dramatizes 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 colonized 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 recognize themselves as modern nations. In this proleptic and minatory perspective, the complex relations between agency, power, and victimization 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.

III Kolatkar and the uneasy pleasures of modernity: [Part 3 of the paper is omitted]

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