BUMI MANUSIA AND ANAK SEMUA BANGSA
A THESIS
PRESENTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF CORNELL UNIVERSITY
IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS
BY
Originally from New Jersey, Alex Bardsley took his bachelor’s degree in East Asian Studies at Wesleyan University in 1984. He studied Chinese language and Japanese history at George Washington University in 1986; international relations of East Asia and Southeast Asia at the American University in 1991; and Chinese language and economics at the Department of Agriculture Graduate School, in Washington, DC, before coming to Cornell to study Southeast Asia. He has yet to travel further west than Hawaii.
Biographical Sketch 3
Dedication 4
Acknowledgments 5
Chapter One: Introduction 1
Chapter Two: Maps and Motion 10
Chapter Three: Struggle and Slippage 42
Chapter Four: Conclusion 68
“...[Q]uite unconsciously, the nineteenth-century colonial state (and the policies its mindset encouraged) dialectically engendered the grammar of the nationalisms that eventually arose to combat it. Indeed, one might go so far as to say that the state imagined its local adversaries, as in an ominous prophetic dream, well before they came into historical existence” (Imagined Communities, p.xiv).
“They are both in either’s pow’rs. But this swift business I must uneasy make, lest too light winning
Make the prize light.” (The Tempest, I, ii, 451-3).
* * * Narrating confrontation and complicity
Desire’s dependence on frustration and deferral is a commonplace. Similarly, there is no plot without conflict, no romance without obstacle, no struggle without adversary, no dialectic without antithesis. Less commonly, I think, are these
oppositions read as complicities. The exigencies of confrontation encourage a Manichaean tidiness: antagonists are imagined and represented as pure, each
naturally self-identical, not parasitically dependent on one another. In the aftermath, conflict and its embarrassing intimacies are selectively remembered—by the winners who dictate history—to validate the outcome and absolve the dirty-handed. If the losers and winners are joined, the intimacies are recast as “reassuringly fraternal,”1 and the conflict represented as a trial “we” have passed.2 If, as in colonial wars of independence, the losers leave, the confrontation is celebrated as the defining event of the winners’ collective narrative, and memories of the intimate, generative role of the losers are suppressed.
Such a narrative does not provide a satisfactory account of the processes that give rise to new social formations and perpetuate old ones. To the extent that social formations, whether they occur as relations such as class or institutions such as the state, are portrayed as the subjects of history, the role of the persons who inhabit and animate them is likely to dwindle to an agency-less anonymity. The simple fact of
1See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (revised ed., New York: Verso, 1991), pp.199ff. 2In an essay, “Maaf, atas nama pengalaman [My apologies in the name of experience],” Indonesian
writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer disorders the project of securing the past by making the final battle of the Mahabharata a figure for the massacres of 1965-66: “a bath in the blood of their own brothers” that is repeatable, and not safely past, if culture is understood as destiny (Kabar Seberang 23, 1992, pp.1-9; my translation appears in Indonesia 61, April 1996).
coexistence in a single society, albeit stratified or otherwise fractured, implies numerous complicities that overrun categorical distinctions and institutional boundaries, potentially shifting, blurring or reinscribing them. So while various collectivities may be said to generate corporate memories and interests that can be passed down—through the medium of their members or personnel—from
generation to generation,3 it is individuals who imagine them and bring them into being, and individuals who survive their passing. The many, mostly unrecorded roles that individual agents play, however, are soon beyond recall;4 and the particular fears, desires and aspirations that motivate them become oddly hard to imagine.
This is not due to lack of imagination, as the post-independence fabrication of genealogies that “disinherit” the colonizer attests. But as the solidarity of past
struggle further congeals into identity with the departure or absorption of the losers, “we, the winners” becomes self-referential. Narratives are then composed to reflect identity back to itself. The retrospective mode in which they are composed is teleological: “we” are the inevitable and final cause of “our” history,5 and certain things have to be forgotten, not just to clean up “our” self-image, but to exclude the possibility of other outcomes, which might challenge “our” right to exist. To
remember a non-identical past would expose the uniqueness which is identity’s justification to unsettling contingency.
Each latter-day post-colonial nation, though not simply self-invented, is nevertheless something quite new. Its character cannot be captured by terms like “hybrid” or “syncretic,” if they imply “the coming together of foundational,
authentic essences, which inevitably lead back to ideas of purity and pollution....”6 It is the “illegitimate offspring”7 not of two categorically distinct entities, but of the many complicities that make up the colonial process. Nor is the participation of the
3“[L]ike its sister institutions, the state not only has its own memory but harbors self-preserving and
self-aggrandizing impulses, which at any given moment are ‘expressed’ through its living members but which cannot be reduced to their passing personal ambitions” (Anderson, “Old State, New Society,” Language and Power, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990, p.95.)
4Ruth McVey notes in a different context:
“Generally, studies dealing with economic transformation are peopled with abstractions...whose struggles determine the outcome. In the presence of these titans the endeavors of mere humans seem the dithering of ants; we may forget they are behind the abstractions” (“The Materialization of the Southeast Asian Entrepreneur,” Southeast Asian Capitalists, Ithaca: SEAP, 1992, p.8).
5Or as Sartre put it, “Progress, that long steep path which leads to me” (cited in A.L. Becker, ed.,
Writing on the Tongue, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1989, p.11n).
6Laurie Sears, “The Contingency of Autonomous History,” Autonomous Histories, Partial Truths: Essays
in Honor of John R.W. Smail (Madison: University of Wisconsin Center for Southeast Asian Studies, 1993), p.9.
7See Pramoedya, “Sikap dan Peran Kaum Intelektual di Dunia Ketiga,” Peranan Intelektual (Kuala
Lumpur: Insan, 1987), p.19; also Ahmad Sahal, “Terjerat dalam Rumah Kaca: Masih Meyakinkankah Nationalisme?” kalam 3 (1994), p.5.
colonized in the colonial process just a matter of collaboration, though collaboration there must be, to the extent that colonial institutions require local personnel.8
Opposition is also part of the process, as well as an outcome. If many of the possessions of the new nation look like straight-forward inheritances, nicely
exemplified by the family resemblance of the post-colonial state to its colonial sire, it is the play of conflict and cooperation between individuals that first gives rise to
locally unprecedented aspirations among the colonized.
What generates a degree of commonality in their aspirations is the same thing that defines “colonized” and gives the category “an implacable political force”:9 the power of the colonizer, expressed primarily through the instrument of the state (and its personnel). The more uniformly power is applied, the more uniform the response of its subjects is likely to be. Power, moreover, becomes self-policing on the part of its subjects, through everyday fear and a naturalized sense of the order of things.10 Because self-policing takes place within individual consciousness, however, it is hard for the state to oversee. In anxious over-compensation, the colonizing power may not only reveal itself, but unintentionally provoke an antagonism among its subjects the referent of which is power itself. The many particular instances of resistance under colonial rule thus share an ultimate target.
Unless power does reveal itself, though, the target is not readily visible. Power operates most effectively when concealed—through judicious use of intermediaries, for example—and from the perspective of the colonized, each part of the general conflict appears at first unrelated. The appropriation of the generalized perspective of the colonizer is a function of precisely the complicities that a narrative of
confrontation elides. It starts with the involvement of a few subjects in the
educational and political institutions of the colonizer, continues with their exposure to modern technologies of communication and transportation, and develops with their engagement in ever more inclusive dealings within colonial society. Through the experience of participating in activities whose frame of reference expands beyond the local to match the jurisdiction of the state, the colonized come to imagine
themselves as anonymous parts of a body, and the politically-imposed category takes on the characteristics of a social entity, potentially antagonistic to the state that
frames it.
The process is one of changing consciousness, and it is a story that is hard to tell in retrospect. To do so requires the deferral of knowledge through a perspective
8As Pramoedya notes, quoting Chiang Kai-shek, no people can be colonized by another without its
own assistance (“Sikap dan Peran,” p.17).
9Cf. Terry Eagleton, “Nationalism: Irony and Commitment,” Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature,
Field Day pamphlet no.13 (Lawrence Hill, Derry: Field Day Theatre Company, 1988), p.5.
10The two work together in what Pramoedya calls “the culture of tepo seliro,” a Javanese expression he
renders as “knowing one’s place,” but also more figuratively as “self-censorship” (“Sastra, Sensor dan Negara: Seberapa Jauhkah Bahaya Novel?” Suara Independen, no.04/I, September 1995).
that is blind to present “truths” in order to recapture past ones. It demands an account of change in individual consciousness, and of the social interaction through which the changes occur. It posits a subject that is not tidily self-identical, but will indeed surpass itself into something else.
* * * Changing consciousness in the first-person
Indonesian writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s four-volume Karya Buru11 imaginatively captures the complicities forgotten in “post-partum” narratives of confrontation. The first three books of the quartet take the form of a European-style
Bildungsroman,12 concerning the education, development, achievements and
romances of a youth who is the younger self of the narrator; but the third book is as much a sequel to the first two as a continuation of them.13 The narrative
simultaneously follows another storyline, in which the protagonist of the
Bildungsroman is a part of a community that functions as a collective protagonist in a story of confrontation (it is a shift in community and setting that distinguishes Jejak Langkah from the first two volumes). The youth’s aspirations and frustrations are intertwined, figurally and concretely, with those of the collective protagonist. Only gradually, though, does he come to see the various intrusions into his life and career that offend his sense of justice, as part of a pattern; and the similarities between his condition and those of his fellows, as evidence of a common condition, determined by an encompassing system.
In the quartet’s first two volumes (on which this thesis will focus), the two stories are told in tandem. The first is that of a small “community,” centered around Nyai Ontosoroh—encompassing her family and their friends, the business she runs and its dependents—in their confrontation with Dutch, and European, colonialism. The second is the story of a young man called Minke who joins Nyai’s family, and for whom the story of confrontation is part of the experience that informs and motivates his later activism. Minke’s “apprenticeship” continues in the third volume, while at the same time he becomes the apparent center of a wider struggle that constitutes a new sequence in the story of confrontation. The fourth volume, however, is narrated by Minke’s previously veiled nemesis, Pangemanann; Minke’s own story is
effectively already over, but the story of confrontation goes on, this time
accompanied by Pangemanann’s own anti-Bildungsroman narrative.14 At the end of
11Bumi Manusia, Anak Semua Bangsa, Jejak Langkah and Rumah Kaca [The Human Earth, Child of All
Nations, Footsteps, and Glasshouse] (hereafter BM, ASB, JL and RK).
12This is not to say that the work as a whole fits the classical 18th-19th century European genre; it is in
part, however, a late 20th century Indonesian play on it.
13The narrator of the fourth volume, having read the first three, notes a rift [keretakan] between Jejak
Langkah and the first two books (RK, p.176).
14Pangemanann, the narrator of Rumah Kaca, is a bureaucrat in the colonial government, whose duties
include “removing the initiator or Sang Pemula from any National Awakening [menyingkirkan
Rumah Kaca, Nyai reappears to claim her place as the figurative center of the cycle, promising the continuation of the story of confrontation beyond the last words of the text.
An argument can be made that the story of apprenticeship is, in the first two volumes, secondary to the story of the community its protagonist joins.15 Indeed, Minke is not the center of the community, although he draws other characters into it. But Minke’s off-center participation serves two purposes. First, it keeps each story from being subsumed by the other, to demonstrate, as the outline of the quartet sketched above suggests, that individuals and the communities of which they are part have independent narrative trajectories. Second, it serves as an analogue of the perspective that the text, through Minke’s first-person narration, designs for its readers: peripheral yet involved, engaged while observing. In addition to these considerations, Minke’s own story, and the method of its narration, are central to the concerns of the work in its representation of changing consciousness.
The text implies several layers of narration, as Minke reflects on events, makes notes, reworks them into fictional form and revises the manuscripts. The layered voices shift the perspective between the narrative past and present—a shifting that works more smoothly in Indonesian than it would with English verbal tenses.16 In the narrative present, when the distance between Minke as protagonist and his narratorial voice closes, the story escapes the determinism of the past tense, and is free to direct the reader’s attention to things not in proportion to their causal
importance in the sequence of events, but to their significance to the character as he perceives it at the time. This narrative mode emphasizes the protagonist’s changing consciousness, and his own agency in the context of his unfolding story.
The more distant narratorial voices—sometimes suggesting knowledge and perspectives from the protagonist’s future, sometimes addressing an implied reader —work in a number of ways. They bracket off accounts of events of which the protagonist is unaware at the time,17 signal pauses in the storyline during which
inisiator atau Sang Pemula dari suatu Kebangkitan National]” (RK, p.99). His personal story is a negative exemplary tale. Its readers are expected to act differently from Pangemanann or draw different conclusions than he does from what he learns.
15As in Malraux’s L’Espoir according to Suleiman’s reading, in which “Manuel’s apprenticeship is
subordinated to the story of confrontation” (Susan Rubin Suleiman, Authoritarian Fictions, New York: Colombia University Press, 1983, p.111).
16Long passages in the quartet could be rendered in the present tense in English quite effectively; but
it is difficult to capture the sliding between past and present senses, or to reproduce those passages that can be read meaningfully in both senses at once.
17Thus generating the “complex gloss on the word ‘meanwhile’” that is characteristic of the novel(istic)
sense of time (Anderson, Imagined Communities, p.25); without an omniscient narratorial voice,
Pramoedya cannot frame simultaneity from “above,” and must do so from “afterwards.” And he does it with seemingly clumsy explicitness. While the narratorial voices close to the protagonist work as intermediaries that conceal Pramoedya’s authority, the more distant ones call attention to the machinery of the text, and to the author manipulating it.
background information is presented, and provide moments of critical distance. More importantly, though, they mark by contrast the protagonist’s limited field of vision. The trajectory of Minke’s story concerns what he does not see, know or understand: it is an account of how his perspective shifts and his perception
expands. Concealed aspects of his environment are revealed gradually (to the reader as well), and slowly he acquires the knowledge he needs to make sense of his
condition and take charge of his future.
The delay is strategic. Arguably, the novel generally is a didactic genre,18 and what Prospero proposes for his daughter’s romance in the Tempest citation that begins this chapter applies pedagogically as well: to be taken to heart, learning must be worked for. The work of reading has its pleasurable side, in literary devices that stimulate the senses of suspense, curiosity, and even romantic longing, which all mesh with the didactic project to keep readers engaged in their reading. It also has a discomforting side, in Brechtian moves that distance readers’ sympathies in order to stimulate a more critical, active reading. Pramoedya deploys a variety of these devices, and also demonstrates them in the narrative of Minke’s own education and informal learning. The text, then, manipulates its readers’ responses alternately to reflect, and reflect on, the protagonist’s experience and the processes by which his consciousness changes. It traces not only what he learns, but how.
Minke’s first-person narration frames a perspective in his social context rather than above it, and often in the course of events as well as after them. It chronicles the changing perceptions of a character who is at once exemplary (as one of “the few”) and particular, in his solitary experience. The process by which he comes to a more generalized and critical consciousness of his condition is recovered by imaginatively deferring full knowledge of that condition: a knowledge that is in the end
spectacularly denied to him, and which remains—for Pangemanann, Nyai (who is left holding the texts) and the reader—a matter of (textual) interpretation. The process, cut off by Minke’s untimely death, is left open-ended.
The first-person narration also presents Minke’s engagement with other characters intimately. A great deal of the action in the first two volumes occurs as dialogue. Minke becomes involved with, and learns from, all sorts of people, and the play of conflict and cooperation carries through different kinds of relationships. In exchanges complicated by good will and hostility, misunderstanding and
misdirection, Minke does not just receive knowledge from others: through the slippage between intention and interpretation, he learns unintended lessons, and applies the methods, languages and ideas of his teachers to unanticipated ends. The complicitous struggle with other independent agents, whose positions and
perspective differ from his own, determines what particular needs are his,19 while
18So Suleiman argues (Authoritarian Fictions, pp.18-9).
19“[T]he expression and formulation of needs is always a dialogical affair...needs and desires are
always in some sense received back from an ‘other’” (Eagleton, “Nationalism: Irony and
making what he learns from others, especially from their examples, his own. Minke acquires a sense of kepribadian,20 of his own sovereign subjectivity, and ultimately recognizes that it is denied by his politically subject status. To realize self-mastery will require negating that status.
Minke’s awareness of his condition as a colonial subject evolves through interaction with characters of diverse backgrounds and vocations. His encounters with Chinese radicals, Japanese prostitutes, French painters, Menadonese detectives and Eurasian journalists, add up to an experience that calls for interpretation. The explanation for their common presence and differential status is not an identity but a context—colonialism. And how can he imagine “colonialism”?
Minke comes from an aristocratic Javanese family, the males of which are expected to hold office as intermediaries between the Dutch regime and its local subjects. This kind of collaboration leads to further complicities: Minke is one of the first Javanese to acquire (courtesy of the state) what is, for the time and place, a
higher education. He learns to read Dutch, which gains him access to the products of European print-capitalism, particularly novels and newspapers.21 These conjure up, as Anderson has shown, the “idea of a sociological organism moving calendrically through homogenous, empty time.”22 The organism’s members are not imagined to be associated by particularistic ties, but through their general participation in an encompassing body—an imagining without which it is hard to think of “the Dutch”
en masse ruling “the Natives” as such. Minke, moreover, does not just read Dutch-language newspapers, he writes for them, addressing an anonymous audience that does not even know he is Native:23 he knowingly passes for European or Eurasian to participate precariously through print in a community from which his politically subject status otherwise excludes him.
Minke also has, thanks to his own relative wealth and ambiguously (educated aristocrat, but Native) high social status, access to the modern technologies of
communication and transportation that convey colonial wealth and power—both literally and as sign. When riding trains or sending and receiving telegrams, Minke is aware that both networks extend all over Java and around the world, and that they are constantly operated and used by numberless people of whom he knows nothing
Commitment,” pp.9-10).
20Kepribadian is, like kekuasaan, one of those protean Indonesian words that stretch to cover a host of
English terms. More than identity, it is in an important sense reflexive, and suggests English expressions that begin with “self-”—selfhood, self-control, self-knowledge, and (especially
idiomatically) self-possession, for example—but I think it is most usefully rendered as “self-mastery,” in the sense of a personal sovereignty.
21Though by the turn of the century, Malay-language translations of European novels were being
published with increasing frequency, with translations also appearing in serial form in Malay-language newspapers.
22Imagined Communities, p.26.
23Pribumi [Native] is capitalized throughout the quartet, because it is a name, not a common noun.
else. Each train station or telegraph office is functionally similar, almost
interchangeable with any other, wherever it is located. The contrast between the two —sending a cable instantly to a place one has traveled hours away from by train— offers an experiential analogue to the sense of simultaneity evoked by reading novels and newspapers. More than printed media, however, trains and the telegraph point to the state that runs or regulates them, for such territorially extensive systems imply similarly extensive organizations for their coordination.
The “social organism” is introduced to Minke through the instruments and artifacts that previously brought it into being elsewhere. (The same novels and newspapers tell him that there are numerous autonomous nations around the world that fit the same model.) The colonial state, however, comes into view by different means. Initially, its intrusions into Minke’s life seem to be particular, isolated incidents, although there are intimations of a broader pattern. But once Minke becomes involved in Nyai’s battle to defend her family and property from legal attack, Minke starts to see that they are up against the colonialist strata in Indies society,24 backed by the power of the state—a state whose scale and corporate interests he still only vaguely discerns. Up through the Pyrrhic victory over
colonialism’s “heroic” representative25 that concludes Anak Semua Bangsa, however, Nyai’s and Minke’s allies continue to be associated with them by particularistic ties of obligation. Only in the third volume can Minke begin to conceive of a colony-wide collectivity, its identity defined and induced by its subject relation to the colonial state.26 Who else could wrestle with Leviathan?
The collectivity Minke imagines cannot become the protagonist in a story of confrontation—or a subject of history—before a change of consciousness on the part of its members. Of these Minke is first. Telling his story through the first-person, Pramoedya is able to recreate the shifting of perspective and perception that are central to the process of changing consciousness. He is also able to represent the
24Not “the Dutch,” but those classes in whose interests the colonial system operates. As Minke’s
teacher Magda Peters describes it (in school):
“Itulah stelsel atau tatakuasa untuk mengukuhi kekuasaan atas negeri dan bangsa-bangsa jajahan. Seorang yang menyetujui stelsel itu adalah orang kolonial. Bukan saja menyetujui, juga membenarkan, melaksanakan dan membelanya. Termasuk di dalamnya adalah juga mereka yang bertujuan, bercita-cita, bermaksud, berterimakasih pada stelsel kolonial” (BM, p.206).
[It is a system or power structure for sustaining power over colonized countries and peoples. A person who agrees with the system is a colonialist. Not just agrees with, also justifies, carries out and defends it. Included among them are also those who share the objects, ideals and aims of, and are grateful to, the colonial system.]
25Nyai and company are unable to stop her late master’s legitimate Dutch son from a previous
marriage, naval engineer Maurits Mellema, from legally seizing her property and business as his inheritance. In a final confrontational scene, however, they win a moral victory by shaming him into fleeing the Boerderij after he comes to evict them.
26The state does not just imagine its local adversaries, it then calls them into being.
agency of an individual in his social context, with all the complicitous interaction that that context implies. He recovers the play of conflict and cooperation that engenders locally unprecedented aspirations on that individual’s part. He reveals how, by appropriating the models and examples of others and making them his own, Minke becomes a type of person who, though not simply self-invented, represents
something quite new.
* * *
This thesis focuses on Minke, a protagonist and the narrator of Bumi Manusia
and Anak Semua Bangsa. It examines how the processes by which Minke’s
consciousness changes are depicted, particularly through his subjective point of view and first-person narration. It therefore does not directly address the elements of the novels that do not involve Minke as a principal character—elements which are at least as important to the work as a whole.27 Instead it concentrates on two aspects of his environment that complicitously direct the development of his character. The first of these, and the topic of the next chapter, is the enveloping but veiled presence of colonialism, and how its agents and instruments impinge on Minke’s life in ways that induce in him an increasing, and increasingly antagonistic, awareness of how power circulates in the colony to the disadvantage of its subjects. The second, and the topic of the third chapter, is the presence of a number of interlocutors who contribute to Minke’s evolving understanding of community and himself.
Throughout attention is given to the means by which the author represents these processes and to the ways the text invites certain kinds of responses from its readers to advance these particular themes.
27As is the case with many novels, one fine example being Melville’s Moby Dick, in which the main
storyline is, like the skeleton of a whale, its least valuable part.
“Akhirnya aku kembali ke dunia desa. Lebih jauh lagi: dunia cakal-bakal desa. Bukan turun ke bawah. Ke sejarah, Mas, ke dasar.”28
[In the end I returned to the world of the village. Further still: the world of the “first-person” of the village.29 It is not going down to the lower level.30 To history, Mas, to the ground.]
* * * Mapping the colony
Plotting the course of Minke’s fictional career in the four-volume Karya Buru
against Pramoedya’s biography of Tirto Adhi Soerjo in Sang Pemula31 shows up one particularly striking decision on Pramoedya’s part. Minke spends his adolescence in Surabaya, where the first two volumes of the quartet are set, only traveling to Batavia to enroll in STOVIA32 in 1901. Tirto, by contrast, started STOVIA at about the age of 14—
six or seven years earlier, and younger (SP, p.12). With this particular authorial choice Pramoedya steps away from the conventions and constraints of biography, and also from the biographer’s and historian’s perspective, which resembles structurally that of the omniscient narrator in fiction. In the same motion,
Pramoedya leads his readers away from, or defers (for two volumes) their arrival at, the center of the stage on which his drama plays out.33 By not following the historical
28Pramoedya, Nyanyi Sunyi Seorang Bisu (Kuala Lumpur: Wira Karya, 1995), p.39.
29On cakal-bakal, the founder or founders of a village and sometimes its guardian spirits, see Clifford
Geertz, Religion of Java (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), p.26n.
30”Turun ke bawah” or “turba” was Soekarno’s version of Mao’s xia fang: a populist initiative, or at
least an exhortation to the Indonesian élite, to get closer to the masses in the early 1960s (Peter Hauswedell, “Soekarno: Radical or Conservative?”, Indonesia 15 (April 1973), pp.135-6).
31Pramoedya, Sang Pemula (Jakarta: Hasta Mitra, 1985), (hereafter “SP”).
32School tot Opleiding van Inlandsche Artsen: School for the Education of Native Doctors. 33The move also takes his story “downstream,” to market:
“Dan jadilah kenyataan baru, kenyataan sastra, kenyataan hilir, yang asalnya adalah kenyataan hulu yang itu juga, kenyataan historis” (“Maaf,” p.3).
[And so there comes to be a new reality, a literary reality, a downstream reality, whose origin is an upstream reality, that is, a historical reality.]
One play here is to mix the grand language of heroic history-writing with developmentalist jargon, as in “upstream” industries and sectors of the economy. A downstream producer is one that is closer to the final consumer: in Pramoedya’s case, his reading public, who will buy and read novels more readily than historical studies (see his comments in Optimis, July 24, 1981, p.20).
Historically, hulu and hilir carried similar connotations long before industrialization, as forest products from back-country regions were transported to riverine and coastal entrepôts for trade overseas. The terms also indicate direction, where the compass and modern mapping technologies are not in use. More figuratively, to move “upstream” is to retreat to the hinterland, to become isolated and backward, to leave the progressive society of the trading ports and “fall into the power of the
model too closely, Pramoedya gains in Minke’s narration a perspective impossible from the Dutch administrative center in Batavia—or from the historian’s desk in the colonial archives.
The two principal narrators of Pramoedya’s Karya Buru are far from
omniscient. Yet the young student in Surabaya can see some things that the secret policeman, Pangemanann, with all his surveillance apparatus, can not.34 The view from the center of power suffers from its own blind spots. It is analogous to the perspective of modern, political maps whose parts are colored evenly in baby’s-blanket pink, blue, or yellow, declaring the consistent and even application of authority in each exclusive jurisdiction, as the blanket’s color announces the baby’s (at that age, still somewhat fictitious) gender. It is a crow’s-eye view, and as the crow flies, topography is irrelevant. If differences in elevation or population are unmarked on the political map, the perspective from the modern political center is similarly flattening.35 The flat map represents a particularly ambitious project on Java, where
satria of the interior” (“Maaf,” p.2)—to move against the flow of history. In this figurative sense, to write history in fiction is to make history current, forward-looking, and opened outward.
34Claire Davidson points out that it is “Pangemanann’s job to know everything” (“Rumah Kaca:
Pramoedya Ananta Toer and Indonesia’s ‘hidden history,’” Inside Indonesia, no.16 (October 1988), pp.30-1, emphasis in the original), and expands interestingly on Pangemanann’s reference to Flaubert in the text (RK, pp.177-8) as an instance of Pramoedya’s “playful layering of authorial voices.” The playfulness may go further:
“Flaubert famously declared that ‘l’auteur, dans son oeuvre, doit être comme Dieu dans l’univers, présent partout et visible nulle part’ (the author in his work should be like God in His universe, everywhere present but nowhere visible). But God is not the only such unseen over-seer.... What matters is that the faceless gaze becomes an ideal of the power of regulation.... The panopticism of the [omnisciently-narrated] novel thus coincides with what Mikhail Bakhtin has called its ‘monologism’: the working of an implied master-voice whose accents have already unified the world in a single interpretative center” (D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988, pp.24-5, insertion mine). The beauty of the Flaubertian, rather than Foucauldian, glasshouse is that it refers to the book in our hands more than the surveillance apparatus of the state. As Rudolf Mrázek notes: “Pramoedya’s warning, prominent in his latest historical novels—regarding how fine the line is separating solidarity from sentimental compassion, understanding from watching, studying from policing—seems to be hitting historians of modern and contemporary Indonesia particularly hard” (“Glass House, Takashi Shiraishi, and Indonesian Studies in Motion,” Indonesia 53 (April 1992), p.171). On the other hand, one of the delights of Pramoedya’s Glasshouse is that, in a turnabout worthy of the curtain thief of Madiun (see Onghokham, “The Inscrutable and the Paranoid: An Investigation into the Sources of the
Brotodiningrat Affair,” Southeast Asian Transitions, ed. Ruth McVey, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), he reveals the face that gazes as belonging to an official of the state, exposing that particular shiny black box as another sort of glass house: an office building occupied by self-interested, all-too-human personnel. Agreeably it was a Dutch minister of colonies who in 1847 described the administration as being in a glass house (J.C. Baud, cited, via Fasseur, in Frances Gouda, “The Gendered Rhetoric of Colonialism, Indonesia 55 (April 1993), p.21n.). This suggests at once an anxiety about power’s visibility to its subjects, and the way the state is also organized to oversee its own functionaries.
extremes of terrain long militated against the premodern expansion and centralization of political authority.
What the political map often does include are channels of communication and transportation—highways, railroads, waterways, though not telegraph lines.36 These are not the sinews of power but its blood vessels: the means of circulation, without access to which control of the means of coercion (or of production) lose much of their value.37 They modify distance by reducing the time it takes to communicate or travel across it.
To trace changes in the ratio of time to distance, we might consider a crow's-eye view of three roughly equidistant towns: say, Blora, Bojonegoro and Ngawi. On a windless day, the crow can fly from any one to another in the same length of time. Things are different on the ground, however. A spur of the Kapur mountains
appears to lengthen the trip on foot between Blora and either of the other two towns. Access to a boat, on the other hand, will speed the traveler down the Solo river from
36Mrázek remarks, “Shiraishi describes the modern map emerging—the sharp lines of the railways
and telegraph networks...” (Mrázek, “ Indonesian Studies in Motion,” p.171). The political map is a particular genre of modern map that incorporates only certain of the many kinds of information available for mapping. Undersea and international cables appear on political maps, but not the land network (which can be found on other types of maps). Even more interesting is the way mountain ranges continue to appear on political maps as figurative rows of haystacks into the first decade of this century, though in the case of the Netherlands Indies the same organization, Topographische Inrichting, also published detailed topographical maps in which elevation is indicated by parallel hachures. By 1923, the mountains disappear altogether (see Kaart van Java en Madoera, 1900; Overzichtskaart van Java en Madoera, 1912; and General Map of the Netherlands East Indies, 1923).
37The importance of transportation to production is nicely illustrated by Ter Haar’s tale of the camels
and donkeys imported to carry indigo, sugar and rice from the Vorstenlanden to Semarang before the railway was built (ASB, pp.282-3). From Jean Marais’s evidence, the Acehnese knew its importance to military forces:
“Hubungan lalulintas Kompeni selalu jadi sasaran empuk: jembatan, jalanan, kawat tilgrap, keretapi dan relnya...” (BM, p.52).
[The Company’s lines of communication were always an easy target: bridges, roads, telegraph lines, trains and traintracks....]
Cities also appear on the political map, representing concentrations of wealth and labor at the junctions of the “circulatory” system. As Minke reflects on arriving at Gambir station:
“Apa saja yang diangkuti keretapi di sini? Tentu sama saja dengan keretapi Surabaya sana: kemakmuran dan kebahagiaan dari desa-desa, dieksport. Dan import juga: barang-barang pelupa, kemakmuran dan kebahagiaan yang sudah tergadai. Kau harus tetap ingat pada ciri-ciri kota besar jaman modern ini: dia berdiri atas ceceran lalulintas kemakmuran dan kebahagiaan” (JL, p.7).
Ngawi to Bojonegoro, and given adequate propulsion, back upstream as well.38 The main roads pass through Cepu, which is slightly off-center, shortening the distance between Blora and Bojonegoro relative to Ngawi, especially for wheeled traffic.39 A major railway passes through Cepu and Bojonegoro, speeding transport to and from the latter.40 A tram line between Blora and Cepu, not yet present on the 1900 map, appears by 1912, but in early 1942 Pramoedya himself was making the journey (some sixty kilometers round-trip) by bicycle, trading in tobacco—a daily trek impracticable on foot.41 Each new technology of circulation, from shoes to steamships to satellites, affects the calculus of time and distance, and of wealth and power.
Before the coming of the telegraph, the circuits of communication and transport are identical. Newspapers, mail and government messages move from place to place along the same routes as goods and people. But with the introduction of the telegraph, communication between all three of these central Javanese towns becomes almost instantaneous. They are then equally accessible to each other, and to any other connected point, including Batavia. The difference in the ease with which authority is applied at the center and at the periphery is greatly reduced, and the project outlined by the flat, political map approaches realization.
The crow’s-eye view reflects an assumption of access to the channels of
communication and transportation. It implies the authority to take trains (first class), to use and to monitor postal and cable communications, even to hire every taxi in Batavia to attend a funeral (JL, p.455; SP, p.65). But as this view occludes or omits many features of the terrain through which roads and railways wind, it also ignores
38Along with the Brantas, the Solo river is one of only two on Java “suitable for long distance
communication” (Merle Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993, p.15).
39For a description of the ride, by “colt” and bus, between Ngawi, Cepu and Blora in 1978, see Barbara
Hatley, “Blora Revisited,” Indonesia 30 (October 1980), pp.3-4.
40Fictionally, however, Minke implies that the only train he could normally take from “B.” (as in
Bojonegoro) to “my own city, T.” (as in Tjepu—or possibly Tuban, see RK, p.193) is a slow train (BM, p.113).
41Bahrum Rangkuti, Pramoedya Ananta Toer dan Karja Seninja (Djakarta: Gunung Agung, 1963), p.13;
Koh Young Hun, “Pemikiran Pramoedya Ananta Toer dalam Novel-Novel Mutakhirnya” (Ph. D. thesis, Universiti Malaya, 1993), pp.31-2. But Japanese soldiers seized both Pramoedya’s bicycle and his father’s in the first week of occupation (Pramoedya, “Perburuan 1950 and Keluarga Gerilya 1950,” trans. Benedict Anderson, Indonesia 36 (October 1983), p.30), so it is unclear to me whether these trips took place before the seizures, despite them, or only in fiction. Agreeably, Pramoedya bought his first pair of shoes a year earlier (for which he acquired the money by paddy-trading), before leaving for Surabaya to attend radio trade school:
“Dari padi itu saya beli ‘sepatu bata’ dan berangkat ke Surabaya untuk sekolah yang secepat mungkin bisa selesai, supaya bisa cepat kerja. Itu saya umur 15, dan untuk pertama kali pakai sepatu” (Suara Independen 3, August 1995, p.8).
the social topography that determines access to them.42 It conceals the unequal derivation of the authority whose application it projects so smoothly.
On the ground in Surabaya, the protagonist of Bumi Manusia and Anak Semua Bangsa does not fully share this perspective. Minke’s field of vision is subjectively limited to his immediate surroundings, making it hard to see the forest for the trees. With the unusual privilege of a European education, however, he has access to the technologies of communication and transportation through which the European state (and the capitalist economy) operate, and also to the printed media, novels and
newspapers,43 through which European society imagines itself. With this access he too can imaginatively participate in a world from which he is excluded by his Native, subject status. His exclusion implies another, outsider’s perspective. As he moves within colonial society, the two perspectives play off one another to map, by a sort of bifocal triangulation, the steeply stratified social topography of the Indies—a human earth of “secret mountains” and “new continents”—revealing the disparity between it and the flat map of the colonial project.
Even a mobile subjectivity, however, has its blind spots. Detail and difference leap into view, but generality has to be grasped by imagination and induction. The even application of authority across the map produces no point of contrast to render it visible. Minke first senses power when it is asserted—like a breeze bringing the air to one’s attention—in contradiction of his own will. When the state demonstrates its ability to reach Minke in Wonokromo or Semarang, and transport him in custody over long distances, the broad geographical constitution of its authority becomes apparent. The second revealing point of contrast arises when authority is applied discriminatorily—unevenly—to different categories of people. Here Minke must experience and observe a series of occurrences before he can perceive a pattern. It is the pattern of discrimination that establishes the ongoing temporal constitution of state authority, while showing Minke that, although from his subjective point of view he experiences discrimination as something directed against him personally, it is not.
* * * Minke’s motivation
Before setting narrative time in motion in Bumi Manusia, Pramoedya provides Minke with motivation both as character and story-teller. First he demonstrates how
42This is perhaps most true of imperial maps, where the crow’s eye may also be an orientalist one:
“What Renan and Sacy tried to do was to reduce the Orient to a kind of human flatness, which exposed its characteristics easily to scrutiny and removed from it its complicating humanity” (Edward Said, Orientalism, New York: Vintage Books, 1979, p.150).
43Tirto was, as Shiraishi comments, “a product of the age of the train and newspapers” (“Reading
Minke’s formal education at the Dutch-language elite high school44 works to dampen rather than develop his powers of judgment: Minke’s “comprehensive” education turns out to be a matter of believing what he is told. The delicate irony of this confirms Minke’s naïveté,45 leading his readers to expect a narrative course towards more worldly knowledge, and setting up the motivation for a Bildungsroman journey of discovery. That Minke will not remain ignorant and conforming is immediately promised by his observation that “science and knowledge” have already made him “rather different” from the general run of his own people. With Minke’s social
identity presented as uncertain, his readers anticipate movement toward some sort of resolution. Minke explains, further, that it is “precisely his experience as a Javanese of European learning that moves him to enjoy making notes” (BM, p.2), thus
propelling his narration as well as the narrative.
Minke’s next step is to wonder at the mass reproduction by print, not of words, but pictures. “Everything, and from all over the world,” he now can witness for himself. Every new invention in Minke’s narrative marks a point on the timeline of Progress,46 echoing the sense of simultaneity conveyed by the mass-produced products of the press through which he first learns of them. Minke does not yet realize that what one might call the “envisioned viewer” of these pictures, as of the political map, is European in power, wealth and status. Though he can imagine himself as a member of an anonymous reading public, he is not politically the equal of the consumers for whom Dutch- and European-language reading material is produced. Still, while looking at pictures of new inventions, Minke visualizes the map from the crow’s-eye view:
“The train—a cart without horse or cow or ox—already my people have witnessed it for a dozen-odd years. And still there is amazement in their hearts today. The trip from Batavia to Surabaya can be made in three days. They predict it will take only a day and a night. Just a night and a day! A long line of carriages as big as houses, full of coal and people, pulled along by the force of water alone! If I had ever got to meet Stephenson in my life I would have presented him with a wreath of flowers, all orchids. A web of railroad tracks already crisscrosses my island, Java. Billows of smoke color the sky of my homeland with black
44HBS: Hoogere Burger School, which Tirto Adhi Soerjo never attended.
45Minke’s naïveté is both disarming enough to engage our sympathies for the protagonist, and
ob(li)vious enough to provoke a critical response to the narrator. Pramoedya plays, sometimes roughly, on his readers’ compassion and skepticism to involve us more intimately and actively with the text—arousing at the same time a feeling akin to his own gemes for us (cf. Anderson, “Reading ‘Revenge’ by Pramoedya Ananta Toer,” in Becker, ed., Writing on the Tongue, pp.33n, 57, 62-4).
46Inventions are ticks in world time in Pangemanann’s narrative as well, but they are only that, and
lines, fading into nothingness. The world feels as if there were no more distance—it has been made to vanish by wire... ”47
The modern age is at hand, and it promises happiness for all humanity, Minke’s teacher tells him. The pace of progress challenges his youth, asking whether he will contribute, or even just keep up.
What will move this starry-eyed young man? Another picture, also
“reproduced tens of thousands of times a day,” this one of a girl, beautiful, far away, and of high social station:
“The maiden beloved of the gods was the same age as me: eighteen. We were both born the same year: 1880. One figure shaped like a stick, the other three bulbous like miscast marbles. The day and month were the same too: August 31. If anything was different, it was just hour and gender. My parents never recorded the hour of my birth. I didn’t know the hour of hers either. Gender difference? I was male and she was female. Trying to match hours that were uncertain anyway was mind-boggling. At any rate, when my island was blanketed with night’s darkness her country was irradiated by the sun. When her land was embraced by the blackness of night, mine shone under the sun of the tropics.”48
47The original runs:
“Keretapi—kereta tanpa kuda, tanpa sapi, tanpa kerbau—belasan tahun telah disaksikan sebangsaku. Dan masih juga ada keheranan dalam hati mereka sampai sekarang! Betawi-Surabaya telah dapat ditempuh dalam tiga hari. Diramalkan akan cuma seharmal! Hanya seharmal! Deretan panjang gerbong sebesar rumah, penuh arang dan orang pula, ditarik oleh kekuatan air semata! Kalau Stevenson [sic] pernah aku temui dalam hidupku akan kupersembahkan padanya karangan bunga, sepenuhnya dari anggrek. Jaringan jalan keretapi telah membelah-belah pulauku, Jawa. Kepulan asapnya mewarnai langit tanah airku dengan garis hitam, semakin pudar untuk hilang dalam ketiadaan. Dunia rasanya tiada berjarak lagi—telah dihilangkan oleh kawat...” (BM, p.3).
The distance-killing wire reappears less innocently towards the end of Bumi Manusia:
“Ilmu pengetahuan semakin banyak melahirkan keajaiban. Dongengan leluhur sampai malu tersipu. Tak perlu lagi orang bertapa bertahun untuk dapat bicara dengan seseorang di seberang lautan. Orang Jerman telah memasang kawat laut dari Inggris sampai India! Dan kawat semacam itu membiak berjuluran ke seluruh permukaan bumi. Seluruh dunia kini dapat mengawasi tingkah-laku seseorang. Dan orang dapat mengawasi tingkah-laku seluruh dunia” (p.316).
[Scientific knowledge brought into being ever more wonders. The legends of my ancestors were shamed into silence. No longer did one have to meditate for years to be able to speak with someone across the sea. Some Germans had stretched a sea-cable from England to India! And wires of this sort were proliferating from here to there all across the face of the earth. Now the whole world could observe the actions of a single person. And he could watch the activity of the whole world.]
48“Dara kekasih para dewa ini seumur denganku: delapanbelas. Kami berdua dilahirkan pada tahun
The anticipations of a European fairy-tale are probably not that alien to Java: already Minke’s readers long for a resolution that reads “happily ever after.”49 But Minke’s reason intrudes (“even if I had the patience of all humanity I still would never meet her”), and so does his schoolmate Robert Suurhof, starting the narrative clock:50
“He caught me hunched down over my picture of the Maiden, beloved of the gods. He burst into laughter, and my eyes teared in silent embarrassment. His shout was even ruder:
‘Yo, it’s Mr. Philogynist, the greedy-eyed crocodile! What moon are you longing for now?’”51
The “highness” of the maiden’s social station is echoed in Minke’s double-entendre description of Suurhof: “he was taller/higher [lebih tinggi] than I.” The passage continues, “in his body flowed Native blood, who knows how many drops or clots.” Still, the distance between Minke and the maiden is never expressed as racial
difference, even after Minke reveals who she is:52
“And now all of Java was celebrating, maybe the whole of the Netherlands Indies. The Tricolor waved gaily everywhere: the very same maiden, the Goddess of Beauty, beloved of the gods, was ascending the throne. Now she was my queen. I was her subject. Just
salah cetak. Hari dan bulannya juga sama: 31 Agustus. Kalau ada perbedaan hanya jam dan kelamin. Orangtuaku tak pernah mencatat jam kelahiranku. Jam kelahirannya pun tidak aku ketahui. Perbedaan kelamin? Aku pria dia wanita. Mencocokkan jam yang tidak menentu itu juga memusingkan. Setidak-tidaknya bila pulauku diselimuti kegelapan malam negerinya dipancari surya. Bila negerinya dipeluk oleh kehitaman malam pulauku gemerlapan di bawah surya khatulistiwa” (BM, p.4-5).
Anderson cites part of this passage to illustrate a “sense of parallelism or simultaneity” that he argues arrived late in Asia (Imagined Communities, p.188).
49Though some Javanese stories may have escaped the revisionist Victorian sugar-coating that made
European fairy-tales less Grimm, and Asian fables fit for “civilized” consumption:
“Pada mulanya teringat olehku kisah percintaan antara permaisuri Susuhunan Amangkurat IV dengan Raden Sukra. Sayang terlalu mengerikan dan pasti tidak baik untuk kesehatannya” (BM, p.230).
[The first thing that came to mind was the tale of romance between the consort of Sunan Amangkurat IV and Raden Sukra. Too bad it was so horrifying, and was bound to be bad for her health.]
50Suurhof turns out to be Minke’s adversary: it is fitting that his appearance begins the story’s action. 51“Didapatinya aku sedang mencangkungi gambar sang dara, kekasih para dewa itu. Ia terbahak,
diri menggerabak dan tersipu. Lebih kurangajar lagi justru seruannya: ‘Ahoi, si philogynik, matakeranjang kita, buaya kita! Bulan mana pula sedang kau rindukan?’” (BM, p.5).
Buaya here has a strong sexual connotation which “crocodile” does not have in English.
52A revelation Pramoedya postpones to highlight the absurdity of Minke’s infatuation, while
like Miss Magda Peters’ story about Thomas Aquinas. She was Her Majesty Queen Wilhelmina. The date, month and year of her birth had given the astrologers the opportunity to raise her up as queen and cast me down as her subject. And my queen conversely never knew that I actually existed on this earth. If perhaps she had been born a century or two before or after me, surely this heart would not be so forlorn.”53 Wilhelmina’s mass-produced portrait is supposed to evoke Polis before Eros,54 but either way, Minke is excluded. The Dutch queen is too far away, socially, for a “Native” to embrace.55 But the modern consciousness of simultaneity allows Minke to gauge the disparity between their geographic and social distances, and to
recognize the artificiality of their relative social places. Already he blames the astrologers rather than the stars, but not yet “ourselves.”56
Once narrative time starts with Robert Suurhof’s arrival at Minke’s digs, Minke’s displacement from the lofty vantage point of the political center57 is echoed
53“Dan sekarang seluruh Jawa berpesta-pora, mungkin juga seluruh Hindia Belanda. Triwarna
berkibar riang di mana-mana: dara yang seorang, Dewi Kecantikan kekasih para dewa itu, kini naik tahta. Ia sekarang ratuku. Aku kawulanya. Tepat seperti cerita Juffrouw Magda Peters tentang Thomas Aquinas. Ia adalah Sri Ratu Wilhelmina. Tanggal, bulan, dan tahun kelahiran telah memberikan kesempatan pada astrolog untuk mengangkatnya jadi ratu dan menjatuhkan aku jadi kawulanya. Dan ratuku itu malahan tidak pernah tahu, aku benar-benar ada di atas bumi ini. Sekiranya ia lahir satu atau dua abad sebelum atau sesudah aku barangtentu hati ini takkan jadi begini nelangsa” (BM, p.6).
54Doris Summer suggests, however, that the two tend to arrive hand in hand (Foundational Fictions:
the National Romances of Latin America, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991, p.30ff.).
55Or, as Tirto himself wrote:
“...Sri Baginda Ratu...yang sudah seperti bintang di langit dengan daya apa pun tidak bisa kita datangi dan tidak bisa mendatangi kita...” (cited in SP, p.54).
[Her Majesty the Queen...whom like a star in the sky we cannot approach with whatever power, nor can [the star] come to us....]
56As would Cassius:
“Men at some times are masters of their fates. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings.” (Julius Caesar, I, ii, 145-7).
57But to Surabaya, not the Vorstenlanden (where we might imagine Java dizzily gazing upon its several
navels). When Minke visits Solo for the first time, he is shown around, in custody, by a Dutch police officer who is something of a Javanologist: “yang dapat bersenang bersantai di atas kasur
kebudayaan dan peradabanmu [who is able to relax in comfort upon the mattress of your civilization and culture]” (ASB, pp.283-4). Surabaya, as an old pasisir port at the mouth of the Brantas, was an outward-looking gateway to Java’s interior. In the nineteenth century, Surabaya grew faster than Batavia, fanned by the winds of commerce and fueled especially by the sugar industry (Susan Abeyasekere, Jakarta: A History, revised ed., New York: Oxford University Press, 1989, pp.81-2). Pramoedya explained:
by another move out of town. Suurhof invites Minke along to visit an acquaintance, Robert Mellema, whose sister is “incomparably pretty, no less so than that picture. Which is only a picture, after all” (BM, p.5). He then challenges Minke to work his “philogynist” charms on the girl. The two youths head out of Surabaya (in a carriage of the latest model, with springs) to visit the Boerderij Buitenzorg in the suburb of Wonokromo. Buitenzorg also happens to be the name of the Dutch suburb outside (and above) Batavia: the Governor-General’s home, and the colonial government’s real, off-center center.58 The name means Carefree,59 but it is also Nyai’s name: “From the name Buitenzorg she got the name Ontosoroh—a Javanese appellation” (BM, p.11). “Soroh” suggests too, in Javanese, how Nyai was “handed over” to the Dutch sugar-factory boss, Herman Mellema, by her parents, to become a nyai.60 It also somewhat resembles the Indonesian intisari—the gist, core, essence—and perhaps Nyai is indeed the alternative center of Pramoedya’s story.61
priyayi” (Tempo, August 30, 1980, pp.42-3).
[Well in fact the story was around there. And also Surabaya then was the largest trading city, that brought to life new ideas from the whole world.... As for Batavia, at the time it was a city of bureaucrats.]
That the story was “around there” suggests that it is drawn from sources other than the life of Tirto Adhi Soerjo alone.
58“In the nineteenth century Batavia also lost some of its government departments to Buitenzorg and
Bandung as the European élite discovered the more temperate climate of these hill resorts and could reach them more easily with the improvement of main roads at the start of the century and with the extension of the railway system in the 1880s. The Governor-General and his coordinating secretariat were located in Buitenzorg, as were the Departments of Agriculture, Arts, and Education”
(Abeyasekere, Jakarta, pp.82-3).
59After Sans Souci, the rococo Prussian palace outside Berlin. 60Here, the Native concubine of a European.
61Pangemanann suggests as much as he comments on his own study of Minke’s manuscripts:
“Aku ambil naskah Bumi Manusia dan mulai hendak membacanya untuk kesekian kali. Garis-garis pinsil panjang-panjang pada pinggir halaman adalah tanda-tanda yang menunjukkan bagian yang harus aku perhatikan: peralihan dari cara berfikir Pribumi pada cara berfikir Eropa, bentuk-bentuk pernyataannya, penggeseran selera dan pandangan. Dan selalu intinya adalah Sanikem” (RK, p.276).
[I took the volume The Human Earth and began to read it for the umpteenth time. Extensive lines marked in pencil in the pages’ margins were signs pointing to the sections I needed to focus on: the switch from a Native way of thinking to a European one, the shapes of his statements, the shifting of tastes and views. And always the core was Sanikem [Nyai Ontosoroh].]
(Note how Pangemanann is again in a position analogous to that of the reader, especially a biographer or historian.)
Apparently Nyai was the protagonist of the story in its first telling. As Pramoedya explained: “Yang saya ceritakan secara lisan hanya kerangkanya saja.... Kisahnya sendiri tentang seorang wanita yang tertindas yang menjadi kuat karena penindasan itu” (Kompas, August 29, 1980, p.6).
Nyai’s dairy farm on the outskirts of Surabaya, as a business establishment run along European lines, is a new kind of community for the times, yet it also has some of the same characteristics as the “world of the village” of this chapter’s epigraph, and Nyai is its founder and guiding spirit, its cakal-bakal.62 The community’s members are linked together by a web of personal obligation that develops through their ongoing, face-to-face interaction within the framework of a common enterprise: a web that even encompasses the (only partly) contractual relationship between employer and employee.63 Fittingly, those characters Minke introduces into the community—Jean and Maysoroh Marais, Jan Dapperste, Trunodongso and his family, even Jan Tantang—are also connected to him by friendship, favors or promises. The web of obligation is one root of solidarity, as Minke later realizes in a moment of alienation or kenelangsaan: “The only road open,” he reflects, “is to the hearts of those of the same fate, values, ties and trials: Nyai Ontosoroh, Annelies, Jean Marais, Darsam” (BM, p.284). But the community of the Boerderij is only part of a wider, anonymous society, too large (as the queen is too distant) for personal obligation to embrace.64 To interpret the principle of community on a huge and impersonal scale requires a leap of imagination, which coincides with a change of consciousness among its members.
* * * How things come into view
From his carriage seat, en route to the Boerderij, Minke observes:
“The villagers on their way to the city on foot did not gain my attention. The main road of yellow stones ran straight to Wonokromo. Houses, dryfields and ricefields, trees along the road enclosed in baskets of bamboo, sections of forest bathed in the silver rays of the sun, all, all of it flew by merrily. And vaguely there in the distance appeared the mountains, standing calmly in their arrogance, like reclining ascetics turned to stone.”65
62Or, as the family physician and confidante Dr. Martinet describes her: “Ia seorang pribadi
cemerlang, seorang nakhoda yang tak bakal membiarkan kapalnya rusak di tengah pelayaran, apalagi tenggelam [she is a remarkable person, a captain who will never let her ship be damaged during the voyage, let alone sink]” (BM, p.311).
63Pramoedya focuses specifically on the interplay of economic necessity and personal obligation in his
novella, Gulat di Jakarta (1953), Kuala Lumpur: Wira Karya, 1995.
64“Javanese villagers have always known that they are connected to people they have never seen, but
these ties were once imagined particularistically—as indefinitely stretched nets of kinship and clientship” (Anderson, Imagined Communities, p.6).
65“Orang-orang desa, ke kota berjalan kaki, tak masuk dalam perhatianku. Jalan raya batu kuning itu
This is not a simple description of landscape and nature to lend verisimilitude to a realist narrative. Minke the narrator remarks on the presence of people Minke the protagonist does not notice: whether the narrator “remembers” villagers or simply knows there must have been some on the road, his comment suggests that they are somehow important to him as they were not to his younger self. The landscape flies by merrily as if, in Minke’s perspective, it is the world that is in motion while his carriage remains still. The image of trees enclosed, even encaged (dikurung) in
bamboo baskets, as if arranged by human industry, and the anthropomorphic simile applied to the mountains, firmly subordinate the natural environment to human, and more particularly to Minke’s, imagination. The narratorial reference to villagers hints that the now human earth, from Minke’s perspective no longer static and flat, will eventually become more visibly populated.
At the dairy farm, Minke charms the girl, Annelies, and is charmed by her. She leads him on foot around the grounds:
“Like a small child tagging along after its mother I walked behind her. And if she weren’t pretty and attractive, how could such a thing happen? Oh, philogynist!”66
Across fields, through cattlepens and horsestalls (where the fastidious Minke would never go if not led by a “pretty girl”), through a landscape populated by the farm’s employees and dependents, a landscape that belongs to a business enterprise:
“‘Let’s go to the villages. There are four on our land. The head of each family of inhabitants works for us.’
All along the road the village people paid their respects to us. They addressed the girl as Miss or Mistress.
‘So how many hectares of land do you have?’ I asked carelessly. ‘One hundred eighty.’
One hundred eighty! I couldn’t imagine such a wide area. And she continued:
‘Ricefields and dryfields. Not including the woods and scrublands.’ Woods. She owns a forest. Crazy. Owning a forest! What for? ‘Only for firewood,’ she added.
‘You have swamps too, perhaps?’
‘Yes, there are a couple of small marshes.’ She owns swamps too.
‘How about hills?’ I asked. ‘Any hills?’ ‘You’re making fun of me,’ she pinched me.
tenang dalam keangkuhannya, seperti pertapa berbaring membatu” (BM, p.9).
66“Seperti seorang bocah membuntuti ibunya aku berjalan di belakangnya. Dan sekiranya ia tak
‘Probably for their fire when they erupt.’”67
Land at the turn of the century is becoming an increasingly scarce factor of
production on Java, while labor is increasingly plentiful, but these changes are not the source of Minke’s puzzlement. The colonial map is also a capitalist one: as every square meter must fall under one political jurisdiction or another, so every parcel of land must have an owner.68 No blank spots. The very ubiquity of the political and economic systems that encompass Minke’s world renders them hard to see. Their omnipresence, however, is behind the sense of hauntedness that builds as the story progresses.
Minke’s unrequitable desire for Wilhelmina, which provides part of the
character’s originary motivation, is complemented by his attraction to Annelies. The young couple’s romance also motivates the reading: the reader anticipates (perhaps yearns for) their union, and anticipates (perhaps dreads) the obstacles narrative convention will place before them.69 The suspense of romance is quickly bound up in an unidentified threat only glimpsed in sudden deus ex machina presences.
The first of these visitations is by Annelies’ Dutch father and her mother’s master, Herman Mellema. Dissolute and erratic, he turns out to be a weak (lemah) phantom. But what he says (that Minke is a Native “monkey”) and what he
represents (that Annelies is European in status) sets up the underlying conflict. The expectation arises that their romance will be obstructed by their social environment.70
67 “‘Mari pergi ke kampung-kampung. Di atas tanah kami ada empat buah kampung. Semua
kepala keluarga penduduk bekerja pada kami.’
Di sepanjang jalan orang-orang-kampung menghormati kami. Mereka memanggil gadis itu Non atau Noni.
‘Jadi berapa hektar saja tanahmu ini?’ tanyaku tak acuh. ‘Seratus delapan puluh.’
Seratus delapan puluh! Tak dapat aku bayangkan sampai seberapa luas. Dan ia meneruskan: ‘Sawah dan ladang. Hutan dan semak-semak belum termasuk.’
Hutan! Dia punya hutan. Gila. Punya hutan! Untuk apa? ‘Hanya untuk sumber kayu bakar,’ ia menambahkan. ‘Rawa juga punya, barangkali?’
‘Ya. Ada dua rawa kecil.’ Rawa pun dia punya.
‘Bukit bagaimana?’ tanyaku. ‘Bukit?’ Kau mengejek,’ ia cubit aku.
‘Barangkali untuk diambil apinya kalau meletus’” (BM, pp.29-30).
68Rumah kaca also means “greenhouse”: its contents are ordered for productive ends.
69“Perhaps,” for while the text plays on its readers’ feelings as well as their expectations, the play is
not primarily seductive. The couple’s romance is not a Romance in the popular sense: a story designed to make its readers fall in love with Love, in order to reproduce (that is, sell) itself.
70Doris Sommer finds a similar dynamic among the “national romances” of Latin America:
What is not initially visible is that the obstruction is systematic, that all the intruders descend from the same machine. On
