A POLITICAL SUBJECT: CHANGING CONSCIOUSNESS IN PRAMOEDYA ANANTA TOER’S 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 ALEXANDER GEOFFREY BARDSLEY AUGUST 1996

© 1996 ALEXANDER GEOFFREY BARDSLEY

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 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.

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KAULAH SEKARANG YANG BERKATA

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I owe thanks to all the people who have had a hand in this. First of all, my committee members, Ben Anderson and Takashi Shiraishi; also Jim Siegel, Saya Shiraishi, Henk Maier and Jomo K.S. Useful comments arrived electronically from Laurie Sears and Laura Summers. Ben Abel, Sumit Mandel and Julie ShackfordBradley deserve recognition for their advice and support, also Anna Gade and Christina Klein. My patient family I owe most of all: but not even they share responsibility for the shortcomings of this work.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Biographical Sketch

3

Dedication

4

Acknowledgments

5

Chapter One: Introduction

1

Chapter Two: Maps and Motion

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Chapter Three: Struggle and Slippage

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Chapter Four: Conclusion

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Sources

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CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION “...[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 See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (revised ed., New York: Verso, 1991), pp.199ff. In 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). 1 2

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2 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 “[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.) 4 Ruth McVey notes in a different context: 3

“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). Or 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). 6 Laurie 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. 7 See 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. 5

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3 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 As Pramoedya notes, quoting Chiang Kai-shek, no people can be colonized by another without its own assistance (“Sikap dan Peran,” p.17). 9 Cf. 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. 10 The 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). 8

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4 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 Bumi 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). 12 This 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. 13 The 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). 14 Pangemanann, 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 11

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5 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. 15 As 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). 16 Long 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. 17 Thus 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.

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6 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 So Suleiman argues (Authoritarian Fictions, pp.18-9). “[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 18 19

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7 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 Dutchlanguage 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). 20 Kepribadian 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. 21 Though 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 Malaylanguage newspapers. 22 Imagined Communities, p.26. 23 Pribumi [Native] is capitalized throughout the quartet, because it is a name, not a common noun.

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8 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 Not “the Dutch,” but those classes in whose interests the colonial system operates. As Minke’s teacher Magda Peters describes it (in school): 24

“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.] Nyai 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. 26 The state does not just imagine its local adversaries, it then calls them into being. 25

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9 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.

As 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. 27

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CHAPTER TWO: MAPS AND MOTION “Akhirnya aku kembali ke dunia desa. Lebih jauh lagi: dunia cakalbakal 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 Pramoedya, Nyanyi Sunyi Seorang Bisu (Kuala Lumpur: Wira Karya, 1995), p.39. On 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). 31 Pramoedya, Sang Pemula (Jakarta: Hasta Mitra, 1985), (hereafter “SP”). 32 School tot Opleiding van Inlandsche Artsen: School for the Education of Native Doctors. 33 The move also takes his story “downstream,” to market: 28 29

“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

10

11 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’sblanket 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. Claire 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: 34

“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 selfinterested, 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. 35 Cf. Anderson, Imagined Communities, pp.170-8.

12 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'seye 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 Mrázek 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). 37 The 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: 36

“Hubungan lalulintas Kompeni selalu jadi sasaran empuk: tilgrap, keretapi dan relnya...” (BM, p.52).

jembatan, jalanan, kawat

[The Company’s lines of communication were always an easy target: telegraph lines, trains and traintracks....]

bridges, roads,

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). [What is it being loaded on the trains here? The same as in Surabaya of course: prosperity and well-being from the villages, for export. And imports too: amnesiating things [or opiates], prosperity and well-being that come already mortgaged. You must always bear in mind the characteristics of the great city in the modern age: it stands atop the spillage/pilferage from the traffic in prosperity and well-being.]

13 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 Along 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). 39 For 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. 40 Fictionally, 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). 41 Bahrum 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: 38

“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). [From that paddy I bought some Bata shoes and left for Surabaya to go to the school I could complete as quickly as possible, so I could get a job fast. That was my fifteenth year, and my first time wearing shoes.]

14 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 42

This 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).

Tirto was, as Shiraishi comments, “a product of the age of the train and newspapers” (“Reading Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s Sang Pemula,” Indonesia 44 (October 1987), p.138). Minke is also a product of the novel—Dutch literature is his favorite class in school. 43

15 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 HBS: Hoogere Burger School, which Tirto Adhi Soerjo never attended. Minke’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). 46 Inventions are ticks in world time in Pangemanann’s narrative as well, but they are only that, and not the figures of progress that they are for Minke. Compare Minke’s trilingual wonder at the appearance of the bicycle, “sang vélocipede, sang sepéda, sang keréta angin!” (ASB, p.285), to Pangemanann’s casual mention of a policeman on a Harley Davidson (RK, p.203). 44 45

16 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 47

The 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! BetawiSurabaya 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.] “Dara kekasih para dewa ini seumur denganku: delapanbelas. Kami berdua dilahirkan pada tahun yang sama: 1880. Hanya satu angka berbentuk batang, tiga lainnya bulat-bulat seperti kelereng 48

17 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). Though 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: 49

“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.] Suurhof turns out to be Minke’s adversary: it is fitting that his appearance begins the story’s action. “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. 50 51

A revelation Pramoedya postpones to highlight the absurdity of Minke’s infatuation, while simultaneously giving a gemes-ful poke to the masculine eye: we anticipate, say, a Lily Langtry, and get the Queen instead. The device also points to Minke’s reticence—the reader does not know everything he is thinking—and to the way the reader is invited to guess, sometimes incorrectly, at things the text does not make explicit. 52

18 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 “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). 54 Doris 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.). 55 Or, as Tirto himself wrote: 53

“...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....] 56

As 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).

But 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: 57

“Ya, memang ceritanya sekitar sana. Dan juga Surabaya ketika itu adalah kota dagang terbesar, yang melahirkan idé-idé baru dari seluruh dunia.... Kalau Betawi, ketika itu kota

19 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). 59 After Sans Souci, the rococo Prussian palace outside Berlin. 60 Here, the Native concubine of a European. 61 Pangemanann 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). [The story I told orally was just the skeleton.... The story itself was about a woman oppressed who becomes strong because of that oppression.]

20 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 Or, 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). 63 Pramoedya 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 lurus langsung ke Wonokromo. Rumah, ladang, sawah, pepohonan jalanan yang dikurung dengan kranjang bambu, bagian-bagian hutan yang bermandikan sinar perak matari, semua, semua beterbangan riang. Dan, di kejauhan sana samar-samar nampak gunung-gemunung yang berdiri 62

21 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 cantik dan menarik, mana mungkin yang demikian bisa terjadi? Ai, philogynik!” (BM, p.23).

22 ‘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 “‘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). 68 Rumah 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. 70 Doris Sommer finds a similar dynamic among the “national romances” of Latin America: 67

“Tensions that inevitably exist and drive the story on are external to the couple: the counterproductive social constraints that underline the naturalness and the inevitability of the lovers’ transgressive desire.... [They] must imagine their ideal relationship through an alternative society” (Foundational Fictions, pp.17-8).

23 What is not initially visible is that the obstruction is systematic, that all the intruders descend from the same machine. Only gradually does the sense of haunting grow into a suspicion of conspiracy and finally into a perception of the structure of colonial domination. *** Power, obscurity and suspicion Although Minke considers the Mellema household “odd and eerie,” he accepts Nyai’s invitation to come and stay there. When within a week a nervous knocking awakens him at four in the morning, the apparition indeed proves to come from outside Wonokromo: a police agent has come to take Minke away. Why Minke is being taken into custody the agent cannot explain, but in his uncommunicativeness lie hints of what it is he represents: “‘He has a right to know what the problem is.’ ‘There are no orders about that, Nyai. If there is nothing mentioned in them, clearly no one in fact may or may yet know about the case, including those involved.’ ‘That can’t be,’ I objected, ‘I’m a Raden Mas, and cannot be treated just anyhow,’ and I awaited his reply. Seeing he didn’t know how he should answer I continued, ‘I possess Forum Privilegiatum.’71 ‘No one can deny it, Tuan Raden Mas Minke.’’’72 The agent plays his role according to orders and regulations. He does not respond to Minke’s declaration of (Javanese) aristocratic status. Only when Minke’s status in Dutch colonial law is pointed out, does he acknowledge it. Despite this regard for official form, however, the agent is acting, not unofficially, not secretly, but unpublically. As Nyai remarks, the dawn timing of the agent’s visit does not really make it secret (BM, p.112). The visit, like Minke’s case, is not unknown, only Or as Terry Eagleton puts it more generally: “Where human subjects politically begin...is with certain needs and desires. Yet need and desire are also what render us non-identical with ourselves, opening us up to some broader social dimension; and what is posed within this dimension is the question of what general conditions would be necessary for our particular needs and desires to be fulfilled” (“Nationalism: Irony and Commitment,” pp.16-7). Forum Privilegiatum refers to the right of high-ranking Native aristocrats and their near descendants to be treated as Europeans before the law. 72 “‘Dia berhak mengetahui soalnya.’ ‘Tak ada perintah untuk itu, Nyai. Kalau tiada tersebut didalamnya jelas perkaranya memang belum atau tidak boleh diketahui orang, termasuk oleh yang bersangkutan.’ Tidak bisa begitu,’ bantahku, ‘aku seorang Raden Mas, tak bisa diperlakukan asal saja begini,’ dan aku menunggu jawaban. Melihat ia tak tahu bagaimana mesti menjawab aku teruskan, ‘aku punya Forum Privilegiatum.’ ‘Tak ada yang bisa menyangkal, Tuan Raden Mas Minke’” (BM, pp.110-1). 71

24 uncertain, obscure. The use of a “common civilian carriage” rather than a police vehicle underlines the ambiguity of the event—and it is just this ambiguity that renders response difficult, thus enabling the agent to have his way. By the end of the chapter the reader might reflect that had Minke known why he was being taken into custody, he could well have refused to go along, and refused successfully. From the police agent’s first appearance in the gloom of the front room at Wonokromo, obscurity becomes a motif blanketing the journey to “B.” in mists and twilight.73 The suspense created by the uncertainty of Minke’s destination—where in B., for the protagonist; where is B., for the reader74 —is drawn out against a slow, boring journey punctuated by long periods of waiting. Not knowing the purpose or duration of the wait, without any option but to wait, Minke is no longer in charge of his situation. He can only acquiesce to making the trip on the slow local train, an indignity given an ironic twist by the first class tickets the police agent is handed at the station. Minke has made the journey to B. many times before, though always express, and the overfamiliarity of the route, combined with the slow speed of the train and Minke’s consciousness of his loss of freedom, affect his view of the countryside: “The scenery grew ever more boring: barren land, sometimes grey, sometimes whitish yellow. I fell asleep on an empty stomach. Whatever will happen, let it. Uh, human earth! Sometimes plots of tobacco appeared, shrank, and vanished swept away by velocity. Appeared again, shrank again, vanished again. And fields and fields and fields, without water, planted with dry season crops nearing harvest. And the train crawled slowly, spouting thick, black smoke, and ash, and cinders. Why is it not England that dominates all this? Why the Netherlands? And Japan? How about Japan?”75 73

Pramoedya even allows Minke a wry, punning comment: “Nampaknya dalam udara pagi berhalimun orang tak berada dalam suasana memberi keterangan” (BM, p.113). [Apparently in the misty morning air people were not in the mood/atmosphere to provide clarification.]

The initial, as a literary device, can operate here in a number of ways. As an abbreviation it suggests, like Minke’s “false” name, that a “true” name is being concealed. But as an abbreviation it can also indicate multiple referents: Bojonegoro and Blora, for example. Or the initial may designate a fictional place, to loosen the geographical and historical constraints on the story. In this passage, however, it marks the disparity in what the reader, protagonist, and narrator respectively know about “B.” It is a device that calls attention to itself, and in doing so, focuses our critical attention on the operations of the text. 75 “Pemandangan tambah lama tambah membosankan: tanah kersang, kadang kelabu, kadang kuning keputihan. Aku tertidur dengan perut lapar. Apa pun bakal terjadi, terjadilah. Uh, bumi manusia! Kadang muncul kebun tembakau, kecil, dan hilang tersapu kelajuan. Muncul lagi, kecil lagi, hilang lagi. Dan sawah dan sawah dan sawah, tanpa air, ditanami palawija menjelang panen. Dan kereta 74

25 The tobacco plots and dried-out ricefields become substitutable items in series, devoid of particularities that might associate this plot personally with that farmer: the substitutability of the fields suggests the potential substitutability of their owners. The “succession of plurals” “conjure[s] up the social space” of the colony for Minke,76 but it is the uprooting of the fields77 from particularity to category that provokes his question about the colony’s rulers. The apparent deference with which the police agent treats Minke directs attention to issues of authority. Five times in fewer pages Minke notes that the agent carries his bags for him, though Minke does not, and perhaps could not, command him to do so. A meal he does not order, “too luxurious” for a police agent, is brought to him, suspiciously including his favorite, chocolate milk, which is “not yet well known among Natives” (BM, p.114). On their arrival at the bupati’s residence in B., the agent begins to address Minke in high Javanese. But the trappings of privilege only exacerbate Minke’s frustration at his powerlessness. Left to wait in what he takes to be an interrogation room, Minke is tortured—by mosquitoes: “And these mosquitoes maniacally ganged up and attacked the only person within. Impertinence! I swore. Is this how one treats a Raden Mas and an H.B.S. student to boot? An educated person and the blood of Javanese kings? And already these clothes could be felt clinging to my frame. My body had begun to smell of sweat. I had never experienced illtreatment of this kind before”78 By repeated use of the demonstratives ini and begini (“this” or “these”, “like this”), Pramoedya closes the distance between narrator, character and reader to make Minke’s discomfort more immediate: a discomfort he cannot escape only because he may not leave the room, until the agent returns to escort him out with a deferential, “a thousand pardons, my lord Raden Mas.” As they make their way to the audience hall, Minke reflects: “So I’m to be brought before the Bupati of B. God! [sic] on what account? And I, an H.B.S. student, must I crawl before him and raise a merangkak lambat, menyemburkan asap tebal, hitam, dan debu, dan lelatu. Mengapa bukan Inggris yang menguasai semua ini? Mengapa Belanda? Dan Jepang? Bagaimana Jepang?” (BM, pp.110-1). 76 See Anderson, Imagined Communities, p.30. 77 Again Minke’s perspective suggests the landscape moves, “swept away by velocity,” while the train “crawls.” 78 “Dan nyamuk yang keranjingan ini, mereka mengerubut, menyerang satu-satunya orang di dalamnya. Kurangajar! sumpahku. Begini orang mengurus seorang Raden Mas dan siswa H.B.S. pula? Seorang terpelajar dan darah raja-raja Jawa? Dan pakaian ini sudah terasa lengket pada tubuh. Badan sudah mulai diganggu bau keringat. Tak pernah aku mengalami aniaya semacam ini” (BM, p.115).

26 sembah79 at each period of every sentence I utter, for someone I do not know at all? While walking towards the hall, already lit by four lamps, I felt like I would cry. What use is studying the arts and sciences of Europe, of socializing with Europeans, if in the end one must still crawl, slithering like a snail, and make obeisance to some petty king who is probably illiterate on top of it. God, god! To face a bupati is the same as preparing to take humiliation without being allowed to defend oneself... ”80 When the police agent instructs Minke to remove his shoes and socks, and directs him to slide across the floor on his knees, he is enforcing not Dutch colonial law, but Native court protocol. Yet, as Minke records, an “uncanny force compelled me to follow his orders.”81 The hierarchy of the court contradicts the implicitly meritocratic status he associates with European education. Minke imagines how his classmates would laugh to see him, driving home the point that he must grovel before the bupati because he is “really” Native: his classmates, having European status, would never have to bow and scrape before Native nobility. The humiliation of going barefoot would, like mosquito-torture, seem quite trivial except for the assault it represents on Minke’s self-worth, an assault the reader is not only aware of but made to feel by the immediacy of his narratorial voice. Minke crawls across the floor of the dais to crouch, head bowed, before an empty rocking-chair, a “most beautiful heirloom of the V.O.C.82 before it experienced bankruptcy.” In his thoughts he calls on the chair to witness his plight. He waits in humble posture before it, fuming, not yet recognizing that it, like the police agent, represents the real power behind the bupati—a vivid, hilarious figure for indirect rule. As Minke waits and waits, his field of vision limited to the patch of floor and the footstool in front of him, the text teases him (and the reader) in his blinkeredness. The creak of the door, the flop of the bupati’s slippers (explicitly recalling Herman Mellema’s entrance at Wonokromo), the rocking of the chair, the clearing of the

A gesture of obeisance. “Jadi aku akan dihadapkan pada Bupati B. God! urusan apa pula? Dan aku ini, siswa H.B.S., haruskah merangkak di hadapannya dan mengangkat sembah pada setiap titik kalimatku sendiri untuk orang yang sama sekali tidak kukenal? Dalam berjalan ke pendopo yang sudah diterangi dengan empat buah lampu itu aku merasa seperti hendak menangis. Apa guna belajar ilmu dan pengetahuan Eropa, bergaul dengan orang-orang Eropa, kalau akhirnya toh harus merangkak, beringsut seperti keong dan menyembah seorang raja kecil yang barangkali butahuruf pula? God, God! Menghadap seorang bupati sama dengan bersiap menampung penghinaan tanpa boleh membela diri” (BM, p.115-6). 81 Slyly implying that Javanese custom is a kind of superstition, while pointing to the way it mystifies authority. 82 Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie: the Dutch East India Company. 79 80

27 bupati’s throat, all add to the suspense, and to Minke’s frustration. Then he feels a “rather long object” gently tapping on his head, substituting insult for injury:83 “After striking me five times, the object was withdrawn, and now hung beside the chair: a riding crop fashioned from a bull’s genitals, the haft wrapped in choice, thin leather.”84 Even after the bupati speaks, the suspense is stretched to the point of absurdity, first by the bupati’s unrecognizably hoarse voice, and then by Minke’s continuing denial: “No, it can’t be him! It can’t be! No!” The revelation that the bupati is actually Minke’s own father evokes in memory the information the reader has about his family: his repeated insistence that he is not a bupati’s son, his estrangement from his family and the letters from B. that he refuses to open, his assertion that the bupati of B. is “neither kith nor kin,” and finally the literally phallic instrument that the text displays after chastising Minke with it. Minke’s willful blindness to his situation despite all the clues available encourages the reader not to rely complacently on his narration, but to try to read past it. Where Minke’s desire for Wilhelmina and then Annelies constitutes his originary motivation, his meeting with his authoritarian father engenders a second stimulus. As his father scolds him for unfilial and improper behavior, Minke’s submissive replies are accompanied by a rebellious internal monologue. Minke’s father, aware that he can compel outward compliance but not inner obedience, threatens him with the crop, only provoking further the opposition he seeks to quell. Minke’s antagonism to what his father is and to what he himself is supposed to become define his identity negatively, pushing him to become something else instead. Minke’s resentment still keeps him unaware of the way authority circulates around him. The police agent turns out to represent Minke’s father, but he only does so because the father in turn represents the colonial state—a connection Minke does not make. Nor does he register that it is through the state that his family knows so much about his movements. His father tells him he is being watched, but he doesn’t pause to wonder who is doing the watching: “You think all these people are blind, they don’t know anything about what date you moved to Wonokromo? Or that you took the letters with you without reading them?”85

An insult all the more offensive, like the feet on the stool in front of his nose, because Minke is “really” Javanese. 84 ”Setelah lima kali memukul, benda itu ditariknya, kini tergantung di samping kursi: cambuk kuda tunggangan dari kemaluan sapi jantan dengan tangkai tertutup kulit pilihan, tipis” (BM, p.118). 85 “Kau kira semua orang ini buta, tak tahu sesuatu pada tanggal berapa kau pindah ke Wonokromo? Dan kau bawa serta surat-surat itu tanpa kau baca?” (BM, p.118). 83

28 But the reader, having been alerted to the reticences of the text by the surprising introduction of Minke’s father, is already suspicious, suspensefully anticipating the events that will provoke a similar response on Minke’s part. At the train station, as Minke is departing from B., a suspicious character does indeed appear suddenly. Minke decides the man is following and spying on him, but he has no idea why he is being followed or who the man is. He can only refer to the stranger by his appearance, as Si Gendut [Fatso]. Other than his corpulence, however, the stranger’s appearance gives few clear clues to his identity: in a racially stratified colonial society, even his race is indeterminate. Si Gendut continues to haunt Minke, the stranger’s origins and purpose unknown, until the police arrest him much later near the end of Anak Semua Bangsa. He turns out to be a Menadonese detective, Jan Tantang, who has been watching Minke, at first officially, later unofficially, for the Assistant Resident of B., Herbert de la Croix. The intervening text is scattered with clues about Si Gendut’s role as the unexplained source of information behind the de la Croix family’s letters and telegrams: the suspicious reader is encouraged to piece them together, even if Minke does not.86 Minke’s suspicions, however, are easily directed away from the authoritative source of his surveillance by a personal, particular and therefore more comprehensible threat. On his return to Surabaya, Nyai’s chief employee, Darsam, whispers to him that Annelies’ jealous brother Robert Mellema has asked Darsam to dispose of him. Minke’s suspicions grow into a panic which, aside from Robert and the reasonable conclusion that the threat derives from his involvement with the Mellema family, has no clear object. Robert is not a red herring, in fact. He is involved in a plot with a Chinese brothel-owner that, through Herman Mellema’s death, brings Nyai and company into confrontation with the colonial order. *** Law and public opinion Minke is able to conquer his fear for Annelies’ sake. Her illness is worrisome, a fragility that suggests there is worse to come. Once the couple become lovers, Minke’s peace is disturbed by the gathering clouds of social disapprobation, as his jealous adversary Robert Suurhof spreads rumors of the couple’s unwedded bliss in school and exposes Minke’s writer alter-ego, Max Tollenaar [Translator], as a Native, in a school discussion-meeting and by anonymous letter to the publisher of the On becoming familiar with the narrator of the fourth volume, Pangemanann, a French-educated Catholic Menadonese detective turned government bureaucrat directed to spy on the Native intelligentsia, the reader may be reminded of the earlier Menadonese detective and his boss, a government official with an apparently French and Christian name. Together they suggest an inverted prefiguration of Pangemanann. But since the figural comparison is beyond the by then silenced Minke’s narratorial grasp, it points “upwards” to the author: like the clues to Si Gendut’s identity, the comparison draws the reader into complicity with Pramoedya and away from Minke. 86

29 newspaper Minke writes for as well. These difficulties seem manageable, until Si Gendut’s reappearance opens up the conflict suddenly. Just as rumored sightings of Fatso are bringing Minke’s anxiety to an intolerable level, Si Gendut leads Darsam, Minke, Annelies and Nyai on a slapstick chase87 into the Chinese brothel next door where Herman Mellema has been poisoned. The murder case immediately becomes public, and the reports in various newspapers suggest that the newspapers’ respective clienteles have a stake in how the case turns out. Minke discovers how little the public debate has to do with the facts of the case. Instead, the conflicting interests of different social groups adhere to the crime, bringing the cleavages within colonial society into view. The murder case against the brothel-owner, Ah Tjong, is tried in a European court, ensuring that the public charge it has acquired is channeled in the colonialists’ interests. They literally have the last word, as testimony in six languages is translated into Dutch, and it is in that language, though she is forbidden to use it, that Nyai has her say. But Nyai’s family, and Minke, have been brought irremediably before the public eye. The public’s interested and unjust opinion causes Minke to be expelled from school, demonstrating to him the way power circulates in the public sphere, and bringing him into an antagonistic relationship with the colonialists. From this position, thoroughly alienated, Minke is able to discern the contradictions between the colonialists’ professed ideals and the injustice of the colonial order. He considers how the principle of racial superiority becomes entangled with the practice of concubinage and the figure of the nyai: “Sitting in a chair in the office like this the problem of Totok [“pure” European], Indo [Eurasian] and Native appeared before my inner eye, sweeping away the alienation itself. These elements formed a web of life like a spider-web. And in the middle of it was the spider: the concubine or nyai. She is not one who takes all the victims that come to her. On the contrary, the web captures every humiliation for her to endure alone. She is not a boss though she lives in the same room as her lord. She is not included in the class of the children she herself gives birth to. She is not Totok, not Indo, and one can say she is no longer Native. She is a mountain of secrets.”88 The unrealistic style of the chase should not just be put down to Pramoedya indulging in writerly bravura, though by breaking the illusion of realism the author does draw attention to himself. He uses Si Gendut as a plot device to initiate action—like the clown figures in many literary traditions, including Javanese—but the device reflects back on Si Gendut’s character: within the story, he answers to another dalang [puppeteer] besides Pramoedya. 88 “Duduk di kursi dalam kantor begini masalah Totok, Indo dan Pribumi membayang di hadapan mata batinku, menggusur kenelangsaan sendiri. Unsur-unsur itu membentuk jaring-jaring kehidupan laksana jaring laba-laba. Dan di tengah-tengahnya adalah si laba-laba: gundik atau nyainyai. Dia bukan menampung semua kurban yang datang padanya. Sebaliknya, jaring-jaringnya 87

30 Minke envisions the social topography of the colony as a steeply graded landscape, parts of which are invisible to the public eye, with the institution of concubinage incorporating the contradictions between the standard of racial difference and the fact of family. Yet the role of the state in creating and enforcing the social structure remains obscure to him. Minke’s article about Nyai and concubinage is published in the Dutchlanguage newspaper he regularly writes for, embarrassing the colonialists. He is reinstated in school, and after graduating, marries Annelies in an Islamic wedding.89 Society’s hostility is muted, and though the colonial government engineers the departure of Minke’s liberal (and favorite) schoolteacher, Magda Peters, from the Indies, and refuses to support his continued education in the Netherlands, Minke and the Boerderij enjoy several months of peace before the hammer falls. This time it is European law, and the manner of its application in the colony, that come as a revelation to Minke. Herman Mellema’s legitimate son, Maurits, has filed suit to take possession of the Boerderij and to establish his guardianship over his half-sister Annelies who, because she is legally “Dutch,” is also still legally a minor. As Natives, Nyai and Minke have no standing before the European court, and Minke’s marriage to Annelies is considered null and void. Minke gets glimpses into the workings of the system, represented by piles of legal documentation (which in turn refer to telegrams sent back and forth between South Africa, Amsterdam and Surabaya), but though he can sense the particular interests using the system, he has yet to recognize the interested nature of the system itself. The impersonal character of the law baffles him: “Uh, the Court of Amsterdam. It has never even seen us at all. How can a court, a White Court at that, with persons who are highly educated and experienced at dealing with justice, with the title Meester [i.e., with a law degree], work to implement a law so opposed to our sense of law? To our sense of justice?”90 Moreover, when Annelies’ physician Dr. Martinet regrets that he knows nothing of the law or of politics, Minke notes that the doctor is the second person to mention politics, but does not reflect on what that might mean. Minke’s growing sense of the interconnectedness of the events that have befallen them expresses itself as a suspicion of conspiracy: menangkapi semua penghinaan untuk ditelannya seorang diri” (BM, p.285). 89 The marriage not only formalizes his place in the community of the Boerderij Buitenzorg, it is also the principle occasion the Boerderij celebrates as a community. 90 “Uh, Pengadilan Amsterdam! Sama sekali belum pernah melihat kami. Bagaimana bisa sebuah pengadilan, Pengadilan Putih pula, dengan orang-orang yang sangat terpelajar dan berpengalaman mengurusi keadilan, bergelar Meester, bisa bekerja memperlakukan hukum yang begitu berlawanan dengan perasaan hukum kami? dengan perasaan keadilan kami?” (BM, pp.323-4).

31 “My expulsion from school, the withdrawal of the expulsion, the cancellation of school discussions, the removal of Magda Peters, the involvement of the Assistant Resident of B., the invitation announced by the School Director in front of the graduation party, and his nonattendance and that of the teachers at our wedding reception.... Each was tied and entwined with the others to help Maurits Mellema prevail over the Native Sanikem, her child and her son-in-law, property and possessions.”91 His point of view is that of a member of Nyai’s family, and from that subjective perspective, he imagines that these occurrences are all directed against them personally. That the colonial order operates as a general and ongoing “conspiracy” against Natives as such, as political subjects, escapes him. Nyai herself points out that the legal system is rigged against the interests of Natives generally: “‘It’s like this, Nak, Nyo,92 we, all Natives, are unable to hire lawyers. Even with money it’s still not certain one can. More often still because they haven’t the courage. Still more generally because they’ve never studied anything. All their lives the Natives have suffered what we are suffering now. They have no voice, Nak, Nyo—mute as the stones of the river and the mountain, no matter how they are broken up and what they are made into. How loud it would be if they all spoke like us. So much so the sky might even collapse from the noise.’ Mama had begun to forget her own feelings. She had positioned the case as an intellectual problem, leaving behind her own heart and family, tying in the river stones, mountains, sandstone and limestone, that are scattered all over the earth in Java, in the whole Indies, those who had mouths but no voice, and still had a heart inside them.”93 “Pemecatanku dari sekolah, penarikan kembali pemecatan, penutupan diskusi-sekolah, pengusiran Magda Peters, campur-tangan Tuan Assisten Residen B., undangan yang diumumkan oleh Tuan Direktur Sekolah di hadapan pesta lulusan, juga ketidakhadirannya sendiri dan para guru dalam pesta perkawinan kami [...]. Satu-sama-lain bersangkut berpilin untuk memenangkan Maurits Mellema terhadap Pribumi Sanikem, anak dan menantunya, harta dan bendanya” (BM, pp.328-9). 92 Roughly, “my child, young sir.” 93 “‘Begini, Nak, Nyo, kita, Pribumi seluruhnya, tak bisa menyewa advokat. Ada uang pun belum tentu bisa. Lebih banyak lagi karena tak ada keberanian. Lebih umum lagi karena tidak pernah belajar sesuatu. Sepanjang hidupnya Pribumi ini menderitakan apa yang kita deritakan sekarang ini. Tak ada suara, Nak, Nyo—membisu seperti batu-batu kali dan gunung, biarpun dibelah-belah jadi apa saja. Betapa akan ramainya kalau semua mereka bicara seperti kita. Sampai-sampai langit pun mungkin akan roboh kebisingan.’ Mama sudah mulai melupakan perasaannya sendiri. Ia telah menempatkan perkara itu jadi persoalan pikiran, telah meninggalkan hati sendiri dan keluarga, telah menyangkut batu-batu kali, gunung, batu cadas dan kapur, yang berserakan di seluruh bumi Jawa, di seluruh Hindia, mereka yang bermulut tapi tak bersuara, dan tetap ada hati di pedalaman diri” (BM, p.330). 91

32 Nyai pictures the social landscape in greater detail and wider area. More importantly, Nyai’s simile is applied in general terms, and she removes herself from the center of the problem. She can then imagine an anonymous multitude, experiencing similar needs and desires born of a common condition—and the potential for power if those desires could be expressed. From his own bitter experience of being maligned in the press after the murder of Herman Mellema, Minke knows the power of public opinion, and resolves to stir it up himself in the fight against the European court. His efforts and those of his allies to expand the audience of his newspaper articles by translating them into Malay has some effect, but not enough to oppose the power of the colonial state successfully. The stones do indeed speak: the military guard that escorts Annelies to the harbor is pelted with rocks by an angry mob. Nevertheless, she is taken in custody to the Netherlands, where she eventually dies. *** Iteration and change in Anak Semua Bangsa With Annelies’ death at the beginning of Anak Semua Bangsa, Minke’s romantic motivation from the first book is shattered. But her death also generates motivation for the story to continue. Nyai will not let Minke surrender to fate: “‘Now we can only say a prayer, Ma, pray,’ I repeated the words of Panji Darman. ‘No, child, this is the doing of human beings. Planned by human brains, by stubborn human hearts. To human beings must we direct our words. God has never taken the side of losers.’ ‘Ma!’ ‘To no one else. Only to human beings.’ I knew the desire for vengeance raged in her heart. She didn’t need anyone’s pity. And so I to began to learn to feel the heat of revenge.”94 The romance is over, or rather suspended for the duration of Anak Semua Bangsa, but the story of confrontation continues, and the basic conflict in Minke’s storyline continues as well: his needs, desires and aspirations are still blocked by his Native, “‘Sekarang ini kita hanya bisa berdoa, Ma, memohon,’ mengulangi kata-kata Panji Darman. ‘Tidak, Nak, ini perbuatan manusia. Direncanakan oleh otak manusia, oleh hati manusia yang degil. Pada manusia kita harus hadapkan kata-kata kita. Tuhan tidak pernah berpihak pada yang kalah.’ ‘Ma!’ ‘Bukan pada siapa pun. Hanya pada manusia.’ Aku tahu, dendam berkecamuk dalam hatinya. Ia tak membutuhkan iba-kasihan siapa pun. Dan begitulah aku pun mulai belajar merasai panasnya dendam” (ASB, pp.36-7). 94

33 politically subject status. The obstacle to their fulfillment, like the target of his revenge, still needs to be discovered and overcome. Like his antagonism to his father, Minke’s desire for revenge defines him negatively. The anticipated narrative trajectory is one towards fuller knowledge of himself as well as his environment—knowledge he will acquire from other characters and disparate sources. Unsurprisingly, Anak Semua Bangsa is more discursive and dialogic95 than its predecessor, but it includes three journeys and one climactic confrontation that develop and focus Minke’s perception of his condition. First, Nyai and Minke take a vacation to visit Nyai’s brother in the sugargrowing region of Sidoarjo. Minke, who continues to see things from a personal point of view, has been offended by his French painter friend Jean Marais’ request that he write in Malay instead of Dutch—which he feels would be less prestigeful, even demeaning—and irked by the Eurasian journalist Kommer’s comment that he “doesn’t know his own people.”96 On the way to the train station, he thinks: “Entering the main road my mood began to change. You don’t know your own people! Now with the addition: You don’t know your own country! A feeling of shame that was appropriate. I would redeem myself from that unparry-able charge. How many catties do you think that man in short black trousers in front there is carrying? I don’t know. He’s carrying a tall basket of peanuts. Who’s he going to sell them to? Where? One load of nuts? I don’t know. What’s their price? I don’t know. Is it enough for food for about a week? I don’t know. Don’t know! Don’t know!”97 The difference between this carriage ride and Minke’s first trip to Wonokromo is striking. Instead of fields, trees and mountains, Minke’s attention is focused on precisely the “villagers on their way to the city” that escaped his notice before. His physical perspective is similar, but his perception has changed. On the train to B., Minke mostly looked out the window. This time, he looks around the train: “The train we rode was very slow and stopped frequently. First and second class had only one carriage each. All the passengers wore shoes Traits that will be discussed more fully in the next chapter. Both of these well-meaning men want Minke to “speak to” his fellow Natives. Their arguments are discussed below, pages 54-56. 97 “Memasuki jalan raya suasana hati mulai berubah. Kau tak kenal bangsamu sendiri! Sekarang dengan tambahan: Kau tak kenal negerimu sendiri! Baik, aku tak mengenal bangsa dan negeriku. Perasaan malu yang pada tempatnya. Aku akan tebus dakwaan tak tertangkis itu. Berapa kati kiranya yang dipikul lelaki bercelana tanggung hitam di depan sana itu? Aku tak tahu. Berapa harganya? Aku tak tahu. Apa cukup untuk makan barang seminggu? Aku tak tahu. Tak tahu! tak tahu!” (ASB, p.110). 95 96

34 or slippers. In the second class car, they wore slippers or sandals, no shoes. The third class car was “chicken-clawed” [barefoot]. Traders going to or from the market were crowded into it, and all the smells of the market followed them, and the flies as well. In first class there were only the three of us. In second class, about ten Chinese and a haji with his hat removed. So much dust and ash. One could be sure the passengers from all classes always got off with dirty clothes.”98 The distinctions between categories of passengers are thrown into relief by their common context. All the passengers are traveling on the same train, in the same direction, and are soiled by the same dirt. The footwear that chiefly marks the different classes also marks the arbitrariness of them—a point driven home by the haji’s missing hat (he removes it to conceal his haji status and avoid, apparently unsuccessfully, having to ride second class and thus pay more, as hajis and Chinese are required to do). The train provides a frame of reference within which the colonial order is readily figured. It also sets off Nyai’s and Minke’s ambiguous status: Native, but here “first class.” When Minke looks back out the window, he sees corvee labor squads working along the tracks. On the trip to B., he envisioned the substitutability of the fields; here, he imagines substituting the workers’ fate for his. He ponders the hidden talents the workers might possess that their overseer might not, currently going to waste while they perform unskilled labor without compensation, only because, as rural villagers, they did not inherit their own farmland. He reflects: “In fact I’d known all this since I was little. Only on the train did it suddenly occupy my thoughts.99” As Minke’s perspective shifts, knowledge that he already possesses, but has never thought about, comes into focus. The slowness of the train, which so frustrated Minke during the trip to B., on this occasion allows him to examine his surroundings with care. Speed, which once signaled progress, now represents the distance between Minke and “his own people.” Minke is not in custody this time, or otherwise threatened. The antagonism that characterized his previous trips is absent. “Keretapi yang kami tumpangi sangat lambat dan sebentar-sebentar berhenti. Klas satu dan dua hanya satu gerbong. Semua penumpang bersepatu atau berselop. Gerbong klas dua berselop atau bersandal, tanpa sepatu. Gerbong klas tiga cakar ayam. Pedagang-pedagang dari atau ke pasar berjejalan di dalamnya, dan segala bau pasar ikut serta, termasuk juga lalat. Di klas satu hanya ada kami bertiga. Di klas dua barang sepuluh orang China dan seorang haji tanpa kopiah putih dilepas. Debu dan lelatu sedemikian banyak. Penumpang dari semua klas dapat dipastikan selalu turun dengan pakaian kotor” (ASB, p.113). 99 “Semua ini memang sudah kuketahui sejak kecil. Hanya di atas keretapi ini mendadak jadi penghuni pikiran” (ASB, p.114). 98

35 Walking alone in the countryside near Tulangan, even sweat does not annoy him: “The sun’s rays began to shimmer. Sweat had begun to dampen my back.... While walking along I savored all my enjoyment of it, and of my own personal health. I felt very, very lucky to get to be aware of myself amongst the verdure, free as a bird. Especially since never in my life had I gone walking all alone and as far as this too. Maybe already exceeding five kilometers.”100 As he saunters along, Minke spots a lone cottage surrounded by trees, and overhears the end of an argument. He allows his curiosity to lead him there. The angry farmer, Trunodongso, addresses him rudely, but Minke does not permit himself the privilege of taking offense. He draws the farmer out, and learns that Trunodongso and all the local peasants are being exploited by the sugar factory with the connivance of local officials: he discovers people whose antagonism to the authorities is parallel but not (as far as he knows) directly related to his. Hostile as Minke is to the Java of his father’s mini-court, this version of Java comes as a revelation to him: “I felt happiness expanding in my chest. I sucked the open air deeply into my lungs and spread my arms like a garuda101 ready to fly. Kommer was right too, if you’re willing to pay just a little attention, actually a new continent appears, with its mountains and rivers, with its islands and waters. I would stay longer in this new continent. Columbus wasn’t the only discoverer of continents. I was too.”102 A little patch of Java’s interior represents to Minke a broader landscape that is at once foreign to him and yet “his own country.” Free to follow his own inclinations, he decides to stay and familiarize himself with the life of Javanese peasants. Because he chooses to suffer the discomforts of peasant life, the mosquitoes—just as hungry as they were in B.—are something to be endured rather than railed against. Whereas the humiliations of the trip to B. provoked Minke’s rejection of Javanese aristocratic

“Matari mulai memancarkan sinar-teriknya. Keringat sudah mulai membasahi punggung. [...] Sambil berjalan aku rasa-rasakan segala kenikmatan, juga kesehatan diriku pribadi. Aku merasa sangat, sangat beruntung dapat menyedari diri di tengah kehijauan, bebas seperti burung. Lagi pula tak pernah dalam hidupku aku berjalan seorang diri dan sejauh ini pula. Mungkin sudah melebihi lima kilometer” (ASB, p.154). 101 A supernatural bird from Hindu tradition. 102 “Aku rasai kebahagiaan berkembang dalam dada. Kuhisap udara lepas ini dalam-dalam ke paruku dan kubentangkan kedua belah lenganku seakan garuda hendak terbang. Betul juga Kommer, sedikit saja mau memperhatikan, ternyata ada benua baru muncul, dengan gunung dan kalinya, dengan kepulauan dan perairannya. Aku akan lebih lama tinggal di benua baru ini. Bukan Columbus saja penemu benua. Juga aku” (ASB, p.162). 100

36 life, the self-humblings of his visit to Tulangan prompt him to promise help for his “fellow Javanese” farmers. The peasants’ limited and subjective view of the world is like Minke’s own on an even smaller scale, and when they impatiently rebel against the local authorities, they are suppressed just as easily as Annelies was taken from Wonokromo. Minke’s warning to Trunodongso that there are things that cannot be achieved with “machetes and anger” demonstrates his growing understanding of the role of scale in conflicts between Natives and the colonialists. His visit to Tulangan, however, threatens to implicate him in the peasant uprising, and doubting his ability to defend himself against a hostile state, he resolves to flee to Batavia. But Trunodongso shows up at the Boerderij first, to call in Minke’s promise. Nyai sends Minke to retrieve Trunodongso’s family from their hiding-place in a raftman’s hut near the Brantas, reprising his previous journey under very different circumstances. His long walk south from the main road is on a path bordered by cactus and dead thorn instead of sunlit sugarcane. When he finds the raft-man, he has no time to win him over with friendliness and humility. He uses his recent insights into the “little guy’s” fear of outsiders to compel the man to do his bidding. Trunodongso’s family, too, have to be pulled along “with dragging steps,” their fear of separation from the head of the family providing Minke leverage. He is in too much of a hurry for persuasion, but despite their difference, he is able to lead them to safety. The experience shows Minke how much social distance lies between him and most Natives: “I felt unable to open any further conversation. I was aware there was a centuries-long distance between me and them. A distance of centuries! This perhaps was what my history teacher once called: a social gap, maybe even a historical gap. Among one people, with one source of food and one source of drink, in one country, even in one carriage, there can occur a gap, not yet or not to be spanned.”103 The romanticized solidarity Minke felt in Tulangan is complicated by the fact that its objects do not feel the same way. They can only imagine personal ties, and gaining their trust is a slow process. To be able to resist their exploiters successfully, they would need ties on a scale and of an impersonal type they can not yet imagine. With Trunodongso and family sheltering at the Boerderij, the danger to Minke of being accused of colluding with peasant rebels is all the greater, and at Nyai’s “Aku merasa tak mampu membuka percakapan lebih lanjut. Sadarlah aku pada adanya jarak berabad antara aku dengan mereka. Jarak berabad! Inilah mungkin yang dikatakan oleh guru sejarah dulu: jarak sosial, boleh jadi juga jarak sejarah. Dalam satu bangsa, dengan satu asal makan dan asal minum, di atas satu negeri, bahkan dalam satu andong, bisa terjadi suatu jarak, belum atau tidak terseberangi” (ASB, p.239, original emphasis). 103

37 urging, he slips out of Wonokromo before dawn to sail to Batavia. Minke has repeatedly declared, however, that he would never run away from trouble “like a criminal,” and the prospect of his leaving Nyai alone to face the consequences of his actions leads the reader to expect that his flight will be unsuccessful. His journey turns out to be a circular one. It works largely as a framing mechanism for his encounter with a new character, which will be discussed at greater length in the next chapter. But the journey as a whole broadens Minke’s perspective on his condition. As the ship takes Minke away from the island of Java for the first time, the suspense of his escape is burst by the sudden presence of a stranger at his elbow. Contrary to expectation, this intruder is not a representative of the colonial order, but a radical journalist, Ter Haar, who promptly engages Minke in a one-sided conversation about a world of issues: outside of the context of Java, Ter Haar introduces Minke to topics of trans-Indies and international scope. Then when the ship docks at Semarang, the anticipated agent of the state appears. The familiar drill of being taken into custody without explanation but with great courtesy is reenacted.104 Once more taking a train journey against his will, Minke’s head is still filled with Ter Haar’s words, this time concerning the domination of European capital over the landscape around him. By the time Minke and his escort break their trip in Solo, the effect of Ter Haar’s lectures, compounded by Minke’s own powerlessness, is to make the Natives there seem small and weak and atomized: “Lanterns on that road. Wall lamps at the opening of every alley. Peddler’s oil lamps the length of the street. Lamp, lamp, lamp. Lamps everywhere. Dimly outshining one another. Forgive your child, Mother, not only have I not answered your letters, I’m still not even capable of pleasing you. I’m still not capable of becoming what you wish. Even though your hope is so simple: that I write in Javanese. Speak to the Javanese, says Jean Marais. And Kommer of course. All I see are little lamps, Mother.”105 From what he has learned from Ter Haar about the influence of European capitalism in the region, Solo, the center of Native merchant activity, appears hopelessly 104

Minke draws the comparison to his previous abduction wryly: “Dulu dijemput agen polisi, dan Ayahanda diangkat jadi bupati. Sekarang seorang sekaut, pasti Ayahanda tidak diangkat jadi Gubernur Jendral Hindia Belanda” (ASB, p.280). [Before, I was fetched by a police agent, and Father was promoted to bupati. Now it’s an official, surely Father hasn’t been promoted to Governor General of the Netherlands Indies.]

“Lampu-lampu ting jalanan itu. Lampu-lampu cempor di setiap mulut gang. Lampu-lampu pelita penjaja sepanjang jalan. Lampu, lampu, lampu. Di mana-mana lampu. Kecil-mengecil tidak terang. Ampuni anakmu ini, Bunda, bukan saja surat-suratmu belum sahaya balas, juga belum mampu sahaya menyenangkan hatimu. Belum mampu sahaya menjadi apa yang kau kehendaki. Sekali pun sederhana saja harapanmu: menulis dalam Jawa. Bicara pada orang Jawa, kata Jean Marais. Juga Kommer tentu. Hanya lampu kecil-mengecil yang kulihat, Bunda” (ASB, p.284). 105

38 outmatched. As potential allies, moreover, Minke’s fellow subjects look to him powerless compared to a state that at any time, in any place in Java, can take away his freedom. Minke is depressed, but when he and the police official arrive back in Surabaya (for reasons Minke still has not been told), he is greeted with an odd sign of hope: “This is what they call the wind-cart, gentlemen, the velocipede. Of true German make. Swift, fast as the wind. It’s the wind’s business to keep the rider from falling. Sit safe in the saddle. Turn your legs a bit. And...rider and vehicle fly forth like an arrow! Anyone can buy one.”106 The appearance of a simple, if accessible, new means of transportation is not as trivial as it seems: “Several articles in magazines published in the Netherlands had ridiculed young ladies who were starting to ride bicycles. It’s not proper, they said. If the wind gusts, they said further, all eyes will turn, not just possibly causing sin, but causing accidents! The misfortune is, with everything new, it’s reckless people that go first. Once they’ve started, the world lines up following behind them. They’ve started to ride on public roads, just for no particular purpose!”107 The Dutch magazine writers’ anxiety about women freely riding around on bicycles suggests quite how liberating this new conveyance might prove to be. It is a small sign of Progress, but where one begins, others will follow. Minke returns to face not prosecution for assisting in a peasant revolt, but the resumption of the murder case against the Chinese brothel owner, which itself leads in to the climactic confrontation between the community of the Boerderij and the colonialists. As before, the court turns its hostile attention on the witnesses, the prosecutor directing the course of testimony to uncover damaging or incriminating information about the inhabitants of the Boerderij. Minke’s sense that something is operating against them behind the scenes comes out in testimony: “‘What do you mean, Mr. Prosecutor, by someone suspected?’ ‘Someone who is thought would harm Nyai and you yourself.’ “Ini yang dinamai kereta-angin, Tuan-tuan, velocipede. Bikinan Jerman sejati. Kencang, cepat seperti angin. Sang angin juga yang punya urusan maka penumpangnya tidak jatuh. Duduk aman di sadel. Kaki sedikit berayun. Dan...penumpang dan kereta melesit seperti anak panah! Setiap orang bisa beli” (ASB, p.285). 107 “Beberapa karangan dalam majalah terbitan Nederland telah mengejek noni-noni yang mula-mula naik kereta-angin. Tidak sopan, katanya. Kalau angin meniup, katanya lagi, mata pada melirik, bukan saja bisa terbitkan dosa, juga terbitkan kecelakaan! Celakanya, dalam setiap yang baru, orang ugal-ugalan juga yang memulai. Sekali dimulai, dunia berbaris mengikuti di belakangnya. Mereka sudah mulai berkendara di jalanan umum, justru bukan untuk sesuatu keperluan!” (ASB, p.286). 106

39 ‘So far we haven’t seen whoever has harmed us,’ I said. ‘So there is someone?’ ‘There is.’ ‘Where?’ ‘Don’t know.’ ‘What harm have you suffered?’ ‘The loss of my wife all this time.’”108 Minke knows that Maurits Mellema and his mother brought the lawsuit that led to Annelies’ death. His reticence in court may be just that, but perhaps he suspects something beyond the Mellemas to be responsible for his loss. A visit by a government accountant has alerted Nyai to the impending takeover of the Boerderij by Maurits or one of his agents, and she concludes that the trial proceedings are being used to damage their reputation and make their eviction easier. With all public avenues for resistance closed, she decides to fight back on a more personal level. Maurits’ arrival at Wonokromo is staged109 as a confrontation between the Boerderij community and Maurits alone. They accuse him of being personally responsible for Annelies’ death, which he considers “too harsh”: “‘I can’t accept that. Everything has its rules,’ objected the guest. He continued to stand, and all the welcomers remained standing too. ‘True,’ said Nyai in Malay, ‘everything has its rules of how to deprive us and benefit you.’ ‘It’s not I who make the rules.’ ‘Sir, you have tried to use the rules well for your benefit.’110 With the help of an impassioned assault by Jean Marais’ young Eurasian daughter May, who stands in for Maurits’ dead half-sister as she calls him a murderer, the confident young Dutch naval engineer is ashamed and finally rendered speechless. “‘Apa maksud Tuan Jaksa dengan seseorang yang dicurigai?’ ‘Yang dianggap akan merugikan Nyai dan Tuan sendiri.’ ‘Selama ini yang merugikan kami tak pernah kulihat,’ kataku. ‘Jadi adakah itu?’ ‘Ada.’ ‘Di mana?’ ‘Tidak tahu.’ ‘Kerugian apa yang Tuan deritakan?’ ‘Kehilangan istriku sampai sekarang’” (ASB, p.303). 109 Very much staged: each of the four books closes with a scene so melodramatic the reader is made self-consciously aware of how Pramoedya is gemes-fully manipulating his sentiments. 110 “‘Aku tak bisa terima itu. Semua ada aturannya,’ bantah tamu itu. Ia tetap berdiri, dan semua penyambut juga masih tetap berdiri. ‘Betul,’ kata Nyai dalam Melayu, ‘semua ada aturannya bagaimana merugikan kami dan menguntungkan Tuan.’ ‘Bukan aku yang membuat aturan itu.’ ‘Dan Tuan dengan baik telah berusaha gunakan aturan itu buat keuntungan Tuan’” (ASB, p.342). 108

40 His spirit is broken,111 and he leaves Wonokromo personally defeated. As a colonialist, however, he has still won. The Boerderij is legally his; the confrontation is over. The protagonists’ defeat promises that their struggle will be continued on other battlegrounds. Their partial victory over Maurits suggests that their ultimate antagonist is not an individual, but the order he represents, and that its hostility toward them is not personal, but systemic. It is beyond the capacity of a single person or small group to overcome. Exactly what their antagonist is—what they are resisting—is still not clearly expressed. Fittingly, however, the colonialists, through the prosecutor’s provocative questions and Maurits’ defensive prevarications, suggest an answer: it is “the rules” that have deprived Minke and Nyai of their rights and property, and Annelies of her life. *** Minke’s ultimate antagonist is political in nature, but his properly political education has barely begun. It will take him, in Jejak Langkah, on a Promethean journey to the political center of the colony in Batavia (and its off-center center, Buitenzorg). In the mean time, his consciousness has changed radically. The idealistic young man at the beginning of Bumi Manusia who—in school, through reading novels and newspapers, riding trains and using the telegraph—came to imagine himself as a participant in the “human community,” preparing to share in the wonders of the coming modern age, has found his entrance to that state blocked. The same colonizing power that provided his education, brought the products of print-capitalism to his island, and introduced modern technologies of communication and transportation, has “cast him down” as the queen’s subject, denying him his kepribadian, his sovereignty over himself. Unintentionally, it has helped produce a new adversary. Minke could not come into being as an adversary except as a conscious agent. The process by which Minke’s consciousness changes is described from his subjective point of view, to account for his own role in it. As the text recreates the process from his perspective, it becomes apparent how often the shifts in the way he perceives his world arise in response to moments of estrangement: when he is taken into custody, compelled to make obeisance to his father, or humiliated in court, on the one hand; or while visiting a poor family of Javanese farmers, whose way of life is foreign to his own, on the other. This perspective also recaptures something that, from an omniscient point of view, would be hard to represent, if not altogether forgotten: that Minke’s ultimate antagonist, the colonial state, remains largely concealed, even In much the same way as he broke his father Herman’s spirit on a visit years before, accusing him of ruining his mother’s reputation, and of committing the “blood sin” of “mixing the blood of Christian Europe with the blood of colored Native infidels [mencampurkan darah Kristen Eropa dengan darah kafir Pribumi berwarna]” (BM, p.92). 111

41 as its agents and allies repeatedly intrude into his life. Minke’s own story is not yet a story of confrontation. It is a story of the changes in consciousness that proceed confrontation, a story that, when the confrontation is narrated, may be forgotten by the members of the community he first imagined. Minke’s changing consciousness implies the estrangement from his halfforgotten former self that engenders his first-person narrative. Pramoedya uses the narrator as a device to slip between a first-person voice that approximates the protagonist’s and a more distant, implied third person voice that throws the limits of Minke’s perception into relief by showing the reader what Minke does not (yet) see. Occasionally, the author stretches the conventions of realism to reach past the narrator and pull the reader closer to him, opening more critical distance between the reader and both narrator and protagonist. One effect of this distancing is to put the other characters on a more equal authoritative footing with Minke, inviting the reader to take a critical view of his interactions with them. For Minke’s consciousness does not change only in response to the impediments and interventions of the colonial order, but through dialogue with people of other positions and perspectives as well.

CHAPTER THREE: STRUGGLE AND SLIPPAGE “Were the Dutch—some Dutch of course, as some Javanese, some Chinese, and some Eurasians—rather than being ‘the other,’ the watchers, not in fact essential segments of the movement? Is the dividing line, across which the ‘translation’ was supposedly happening, not something that to a large extent only appeared so at that time, having been reported and filed that way, and thus fearfully anticipated, and now remembered as real and fully fledged from the false perspective of what actually developed only later?” (Mrázek, “Indonesian Studies in Motion,” p.172). “We cannot miss him: he does make our fire, Fetch in our wood, and serves in offices That do profit us. What, ho! slave! Caliban! Thou earth, thou! Speak! [...] You taught me language, and my profit on’t Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you For learning me your language!” (The Tempest: I, ii, 311-4, 364-6). *** Narration and dialogue Pramoedya’s Karya Buru begins: “People call me: Minke. My own name.... For now I don’t have to mention it. Not because I’m mystery-crazed. I’ve thought it over: I truly don’t yet need to show myself in front of other people’s eyes.”112 The conventions of the European novel in the age of print-capitalism are nowadays familiar in literate circles world-wide, and “Minke’s” opening reticence falls well within the parameters of a comfortably typical first-person narrator, without straining the tacit contract between author and reader. The narrator’s coyness reinforces the pact with a nudge and a wink. Perhaps eventually Minke will “show himself” or otherwise explain his use of an alias, but if he does not, the name of a

“Orang memanggil aku: Minke. Namaku sendiri.... Sementara ini tak perlu kusebutkan. Bukan karena gila mysteri. Telah aku timbang: belum perlu benar tampilkan diri di hadapan mata orang lain” (BM, p.1). 112

42

43 fictional character is after all a matter of authorial whim.113 The reader is also expected to accept with equanimity the conceit proposed in the remainder of the short framing first chapter, that the book is a work of fiction developed by the narrator from his own “short notes”: all the better to maintain the illusion of autobiographical realism on which the reader’s confident approach to the text depends. The narrator can be anything, even unreliable and dishonest, as long as the author does not break trust with the reader.114 The narrator’s voice is in fact complexly layered, and Pramoedya builds up the layering with economy: “I started to write these short notes while in mourning: she [dia] had left me, who knew whether temporarily or not. (At the time I didn’t know how it would turn out). Constantly taunting future! Mystery! Everyone will come to it—willing or not, with all one’s body and soul. And all too often it turns out to be a despot. In the end I too shall come to it. Whether it is a gracious or a barbarous god is indeed its affair: humans all too often clap with but one hand. Thirteen years later I reread and restudied these short notes, fused them with dreams, fancy. They became quite different from the originals. Not half-baked. And afterwards this is how they went... ”115 The indeterminate dia (the pronoun is not even gendered in Indonesian) teases the reader with an unknown future. Even after the beginning of the second volume, by which point it is clear that the reference is to Annelies, the dia resonates in subsequent departures. Upon the death of his second wife, Mei, Minke opens up and goes over There is some evidence that Pramoedya once intended to reveal Minke as Tirto Adhi Soerjo in the fourth volume of the quartet. When asked in a 1980 interview why the narrator’s “true” name did not appear in Bumi Manusia, Pram replied: 113

“Ini satu siklus yang tak perlu terburu-buru. Nanti, di akhir cerita akan disebutkan siapa ‘aku.’ Boleh toh?” (Tempo, August 30, 1980, p.43). [This is a cycle that doesn’t need hurrying. Later, at the end of the story, who “I” is will be mentioned. That’s okay, right?” And, in an early manuscript of what later became Rumah Kaca, Minke is referred to throughout as Tirto (Di Atas Lumpur, n.p., n.d.). 114 It is a very contingent sort of trust, however: more “an ambiguous, faintly hostile complicity” (Anderson, “Reading ‘Revenge’,” p.63). 115 “Pada mulanya catatan pendek ini aku tulis dalam masa berkabung: dia telah tinggalkan aku, entah untuk sementara entah tidak. (Waktu itu aku tak tahu bagaimana bakal jadinya). Hari depan yang selalu menggoda! Mysteri! setiap pribadi akan datang padanya—mau-tak-mau, dengan seluruh jiwa dan raganya. Dan terlalu sering dia ternyata maharaja zalim. Juga akhirnya aku datang padanya bakalnya. Adakah dia dewa permurah atau jahil, itulah memang urusan dia: manusia terlalu sering bertepuk hanya sebelah tangan.... Tigabelas tahun kemudian catatan pendek ini kubacai dan kupelajari kembali, kupadu dengan impian, khayal. Memang menjadi lain dari aslinya. Tak kepalang tanggung. Dan begini kemudian jadinya” (BM, p.1).

44 his notes; thirteen years after Annelies’ death, Minke departs into exile in Ambon (leaving his third wife, Prinses van Kasiruta, in the process) where he reworks his notes into fiction. “Her” absence, then, prompts a period of reflection and indicates the moment in which a narratorial voice is generated. As Anak Semua Bangsa opens, Annelies has sailed, “this separation marking a dividing point in my life.” Minke reflects: “The old folk through their tales teach of the existence of a powerful god named Kala [Time]—Batara Kala. They say it is he who drives everything to move ever further from its starting-point, irresistibly, to what end no one will ever know. I too, a human being blind to the future, can only hope to know. Huh, while not all of what has passed can be known! People say, what lies before humankind is only distance. And its limit is the horizon. As the distance is crossed the horizon recedes. What remains is that same distance—eternally. And in front there is that same horizon—eternally. There is no romance strong enough to subdue and grasp them in one’s hand—the eternal distance and the horizon.”116 As Annelies is taken further away, Minke imagines their relative distance in terms of time, and then figures time as distance: a distance that cannot be plotted on the Mercatorian map. The flat map comprehends no horizon, and unless viewed in a series (1900, 1912, 1923), is as static as a photograph. Minke’s dynamic envisioning of distance, by contrast, permits the description of change, because it is imagined from the perspective of a person in space and time, not above it. The horizon before him marks not just an ever-receding limit, but shifting possibility as well. As one moves towards it, what was once unknowably beyond the horizon comes into view. What slips over the horizon behind him, however, passes beyond direct recall.117 To gauge the distance he has traveled and account for the changes he has experienced, Minke reconstructs his journey in narrative, from faulty memory, notes, dreams and fancy. Through his narrative, he imagines and represents his own identity over time. As his account makes clear, however, the course of his journey “Orang tua-tua melalui dongengan mengajarkan akan adanya dewa perkasa bernama Kala—Batara Kala. Katanya dialah yang mendorong semua saja bergerak semakin lama semakin jauh dari titiktolak, tak terlawankan, ke arah yang semua saja tidak bakal tahu. Juga aku, manusia yang buta terhadap hari-depan, hanya dapat berharap tahu. Uh, sedang yang sudah dilewati tak semua dapat diketahui! Orang bilang, apa yang ada di depan manusia hanya jarak. Dan batasnya adalah ufuk. Begitu jarak ditempuh sang ufuk menjauh. Yang tertinggal jarak itu juga—abadi. Di depan sana ufuk yang itu juga—abadi. Tak ada romantika cukup kuat untuk dapat menaklukkan dan menggenggamnya dalam tangan—jarak dan ufuk abadi itu” (ASB, p.1). 117 As changing consciousness brings “characteristic amnesias” (Anderson, Imagined Communities, p.204.) 116

45 and the shape of the self formed in the process, are not determined “one-handedly.” Other agents play a role. Without them, there would be no action and no change. Minke’s first-person narration locates the interpretive center of his story in his own subjective consciousness. As with the view from the center of power, the resulting perspective suffers from certain blind spots. If static, it could not produce the points of contrast through which he can comprehend difference and imagine change. One way to generate contrast, as we have seen, is to move the subject through space and time. Another is to provide him with interlocutors. Speaking from their own subject positions, other characters offer Minke alternative interpretations against which he can measure his own. Much of the action in Bumi Manusia and Anak Semua Bangsa occurs as or is recounted through dialogue. Dialogue has the character of a complicitous struggle between two agencies: resistance on the part of each to surrendering her own sovereign power of interpretation plays off against the cooperative desire to communicate, creating in the slippage between them new understandings.118 Dialogue and interaction are another part of the process through which Minke’s consciousness changes. Minke’s interlocutors might be rudely lumped together according to some schematic, say, “Javanese mothers, European fathers, and assorted foreign advisors.” But Minke encounters them first as individuals, and to read them only as types would obscure some of the play of conflict and cooperation between them. Other characters as individuals provide him with examples he can appropriate, define himself against, and reinterpret. They also project on him expectations that he can make his own, reject, or misconstrue. To the extent that Minke imagines them as types, representing particular instances in a series of similar persons, their examples become modular and more readily available for selective appropriation, while the series itself “conjure[s] up the social space” of the colony,119 prompting questions about the context in which individuals, including himself, can be understood as types. *** The static interpretive center A skeptical critic might hasten to note that dialogue within a novel is illusory, that the “single interpretive center” (see footnote 11) is the author’s, and that his characters’ voices are those of straw men, whose arguments are set up in order to be knocked down. One example might be Telinga’s position in his debate about war with Jean Marais (BM, pp.219-20). But a single, predetermined interpretation cannot be communicated with certainty: 118

“[T]he space left open by the slippage between the story and its authoritative (authorial) interpretation allows for the entry of other, divergent meanings—and the longer the narrative becomes, the more such openings become possible” (Suleiman, Authoritarian Fictions, p.35). 119

See page 25.

46 The voice with which the second chapter of Bumi Manusia opens is that of a younger, already journal-keeping Minke,120 much closer to his protagonist self. He reflects immediately but briefly on his education: “Once the director of my school said in front of the class: what our teachers had provided us by way of general knowledge was quite extensive; much broader than what students of the same grade knew about in many of the countries of Europe itself.”121 Minke is told that what he knows, what he has been taught, is “cukup luas”: broad enough, literally, but meaning really quite broad, even comprehensive. He is told that what he has been taught is much broader than what is learned by students in Europe. Oddly, Minke has no way of evaluating the truth of this. His formal education, ostensibly broad, leaves him unable to judge for himself how much he knows. To the extent his knowledge is derived from a single source, he has no perspective on it, but believes rather than knows. He must take the knowledge that he is knowledgeable on faith. He reflects: “Sure my chest puffed up. I’d never been to Europe. I didn’t know whether the Director’s statement was true or false. Just because it was pleasing, I was inclined to believe him.”122 An odd statement: I was inclined to believe him just because it was pleasing. Did Minke on the schoolbench have this degree of self-knowledge, and waver consciously between doubt and belief? It seems unlikely, but a balder statement, “in my ignorance I believed him,” would put more distance between Minke-in-school and Minke-the-narrator than Pramoedya introduces here.123 Minke’s belief is socially reinforced by the prestige of his teachers in the eyes of his parents (whom—the reader provisionally assumes—he respects) and of “European and Eurasian educated society” (which he also respects): “Moreover all my teachers were born [in Europe] and educated there as well. It felt improper not to trust a teacher. My parents had entrusted me to them. They were considered by European and Indo educated

Thereby adding yet another recording voice to those already established. “Sekali direktur sekolahku bilang di depan klas: yang disampaikan oleh tuan-tuan guru di bidang pengetahuan umum sudah cukup luas; jauh lebih luas daripada yang dapat diketahui oleh para pelajar setingkat di banyak negeri di Eropa sendiri” (BM, p.2). 122 “Tentu dada ini menjadi gembung. Aku belum pernah ke Eropa. Benar-tidaknya ucapan Tuan Direktur aku tak tahu. Hanya karena menyenangkan aku cenderung mempercayainya” (BM, p.2). 123 Max Lane’s translation gets it instructively wrong: “But because it pleased me, I decided to believe him” (This Earth of Mankind, p.16). Not only is the possibility of doubt, left open in the original, cut off (diputuskan!) here, but this Minke’s willful ignorance loses some of our sympathy, a sympathy I think Pramoedya is trying to foster through the closeness of narrator to subject in this passage. 120 121

47 society to be of the best and highest quality in all of the Netherlands Indies. So I had to trust them.”124 Minke does not willfully decide to trust his teachers, he is compelled to. The norms of his social environment that accord high status to “European” and to “teacher” suggest he ought (layak) to believe his teachers. The injunction (layak) becomes an imperative (harus), not because Minke does not know the difference between them, but because he has nowhere else to stand. The deference Minke owes his parents, and the prestige of educated society, precede and preclude any independent act of judgment that he might make, because he has neither the information nor the authority to evaluate what he is told. To do so, he needs to tap other sources of knowledge, and assert his own right to interpret what he learns. *** Minke’s false name In the first two chapters of Bumi Manusia, the development of Minke’s character is set neatly on a course similar to that of a European Bildungsroman, but his identity remains something of a mystery. On a visit to Wonokromo which begins the novel’s action, he introduces himself simply as Minke, and on further questioning, admits that his lack of a surname reflects his Native status. “Minke” is not a Javanese name either, however, as his new acquaintance Annelies teasingly tells her horse: “There’s a guest. That’s him. Minke’s his name. An alias, right? Of course. He’s Moslem, Bawuk, Moslem. But his name’s not Javanese, and it’s not Moslem, and I think it’s not Christian either. An alias. Do you believe his name’s Minke?”125 This prompts a narrative interjection, as Minke the narrator tells his readers a slightly different history from the (unrecorded) one the protagonist tells Annelies. He was once addressed as “Minke” by a hostile and irate teacher and, since nobody knew what the word meant, and it was of course improper not to trust a teacher, the name Mempercayai means “to trust” as well as “to believe.” Note the play here against mempercayakan, “to entrust”: 124

“Lagi pula semua guruku kelahiran di sana, dididik di sana pula. Rasanya tidak layak tak mempercayai guru. Orang tuaku telah mempercayakan diriku pada mereka. Oleh masyarakat terpelajar Eropa dan Indo dianggap terbaik dan tertinggi nilainya di seluruh Hindia Belanda. Maka aku harus mempercayainya” (BM, p.2). Here and elsewhere in the quartet, “educated” is modified by other determinants of status and not the other way around (e.g. “the Native educated” and not “educated Natives”), implying rhetorically that the state of being educated defines the subject more significantly than such superficial characteristics as race. “Sedang ada tamu. Itu orangnya. Minke namanya. Nama samaran, kan? Tentu saja. Dia Islam, Bawuk, Islam. Tapi namanya bukan Jawa, juga bukan Islam, juga bukan Kristen kiraku. Nama samaran. Kau percaya namanya Minke?” (BM, p.27). 125

48 stuck. On studying English years later, he figured out that the teacher had probably started to call him “monkey,” and covered it up (BM, pp.28-9). At least the novel’s first line, “people call me Minke,” is now clear. And strangely familiar: “...[M]y father being a foreigner of Bremen...married my mother, whose relations were named Robinson, and a very good family in that country, and from whom I was called Robinson Kreutzner; but by the usual corruption of words in England we are now called, nay, we call ourselves, and write our name ‘Crusoe,’ and so my companions always called me” (Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, p.8); “My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip” (Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, p.1). It is not the similarities that are striking so much as the differences. Minke did not name himself, accidentally or otherwise, as did Pip. The external agency of Minke’s naming sets him in almost as conspicuous contrast to Pip as Annelies to Estella or Nyai to Miss Havisham. But the key is the family name. Minke has none. Or rather, he has the “family” name given to Natives: monkey. One of Minke’s teachers, when asked about what his name might mean, mentioned the “English bard” who posed the question, “what’s in a name?” Minke cannot remember the bard’s name126 (Shakespeare) nor recognize the (famous) reference: “O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo? Deny thy father and refuse thy name! Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love, And I’ll no longer be a Capulet. [...] ‘Tis but thy name that is my enemy. Thou art thyself, though not a Montague. What’s Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot, Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part Belonging to a man. O, be some other name! What’s in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet” (Romeo and Juliet: II, ii, 35-46). As with Shakespeare’s tragic couple, the union of Minke and Annelies is doomed by the “family” names they inherit. When Annelies’s father Herman Mellema appears, he promptly addresses Minke as “monkey” [monyet], twice (BM, p.37). Nowhere a 126

Or not until after Annelies’s departure, by which time it is too late (ASB, p.18).

49 place for them: the colonial state will not recognize, let alone bless, the marriage of a “Dutch” girl and a “Native” boy. Those who know Romeo and Juliet can foresee the trajectory of this romance as well. Minke does not know that Annelies’s name is “Dutch”—she identifies herself as Native, like her mother.127 He does not know that the colonial state will enforce the exclusive categories of the census as it enforces the exclusive jurisdictions of the modern political map and the capitalist imperative of ownership. Pramoedya’s reader does not necessarily know these things either, anymore than she necessarily catches the textual references to Shakespeare or to Hugo, with whom Minke is not familiar (BM, p.104), or to Defoe, whom he assigns Annelies to read (BM, p.213). The reader does not have to know these things. If she does, the knowledge draws her into complicity with whomever she shares it: narrator, another authoritative character, or beyond them, the author.128 That which is not known, however, is an invitation to learn: knowing that there is something that is not known stimulates the reader’s curiosity. While Pramoedya’s literary references are too numerous and too eclectic for any reasonably-anticipated reader to grasp them all,129 he compounds his readers’ curiosity with devices that frustrate it. Annelies promises to tell Minke the story Sie Jin Kuie, though she never does so in the text.130 Many readers will not recognize Xi

127

As Doctor Martinet later theorizes for Minke: “Dia memang berkulit putih. Aku punya dugaan begini: pengaruh dari luar, sangat kuat tak terlawan, telah membikin gambaran salah tentang dirinya sendiri. Ia merasa seorang Pribumi yang seasli-aslinya” (BM, p.243). [She is indeed white-skinned. I have this hypothesis: an outside influence, irresistible and very strong, has made up for her a false picture of herself. She feels she is a completely genuine Native.]

But it is the name and not the picture that is false, and the “outside force” not Nyai, but colonialism. 128 Anderson considers that the obscure reference to Giordano Bruno in Pramoedya’s short story “Dendam,” “simply links ‘I’ [narrative Voice] and ‘you’ [reader] in an understanding that excludes everyone else in the story, but at the same time lures ‘you’ by memory into Pramoedya’s authorial embrace” (“Reading ‘Revenge’,” p.63). 129 With the perhaps obvious effect that the text will accommodate different readings according to the reader’s background, or better yet his pesangon: a term of Javanese origin that Pramoedya uses figuratively to mean something like the English “baggage,” but with a more positive connotation (resources rather than burden): “And these reactions in turn are shaped exclusively by what is in that person’s pesangon, or, to put it more clearly, by the totality of the information within his self...” (see “Perburuan 1950 and Keluarga Gerilya 1950,” pp.27, 25n.). The dented, old brown metal suitcase that Nyai, Annelies and Minke each carry into their respective exiles might also be thought of as representing their pesangon (BM, pp.75, 352; JL, p.462). 130 There are many such loose ends. When Jean Marais asks Minke about the trial of Pronocitro that Wiroguno once staged, Minke promises to tell him about it “some other time,” a time that never comes (BM, p.285). Similarly, Marais asks Minke if he has ever heard the story of the French painter Toulouse-Lautrec, then rather than explain himself, simply smiles enigmatically (BM, p.292).

50 Yu Ji, the Journey to the West,131 in which a trouble-making, Promethean monkey brings back to China word, texts, of an earlier Enlightenment.132 On the other hand, almost any Indonesian reader, learning Minke’s name means monkey, will think of one of the best known dramatic heroes in Southeast Asia, Hanuman, the MonkeyKing of the Ramayana.133 In a more-than-European cultural context, “monkey” has potentially valorous connotations, making the interpretation of what was intended by Minke’s teacher as a slur contestable. But the teacher’s effort to cover up this insult (“Quiet you monk...Minke!”) empties the name of inherited meaning, inviting Minke to appropriate it and fill it (with) himself. *** Minke’s interlocutors The Bildungsroman-style thread in Minke’s narrative does not entail the (re)discovery of a true, eternal self, but the development of kepribadian. Kepribadian designates here a sovereign expression of self, determined partly in contradistinction to imposed and inherited identities such as “Native” or “Javanese.” To invent himself as an individual apart from these given categories, Minke assembles his self in response to the various alternatives with which he is presented, learning from, emulating and distinguishing himself from the other characters he comes into contact with. His process of self-determination complicitously involves his interlocutors, whose examples and expectations he selectively appropriates and makes his own. The most important of the interlocutors is Nyai Ontosoroh: it is to her that Minke is “apprenticed.” She stands in stark contrast to his schoolteachers. As the Native concubine of a European, no segment of society respects her. Yet during their first meeting, Minke likens her to “a teacher from an wise new tradition [aliran baru yang bijaksana]” (BM, p.20). Her skills and learning impress him with their own

Though a Malay-language translation was published as early as 1886 (Noriaki Oshikawa, “Patjar Merah Indonesia and Tan Malaka,” Reading Southeast Asia, Ithaca: SEAP, 1990, p.16). 132 See Charles Hucker, China’s Imperial Past, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975, pp.407-8. Hucker’s description bears repeating: 131

“Monkey is the real hero—an irrepressible madcap prankster who has been assigned to escort [the monk] Hsüan-tsung in penance for having almost laid Heaven in ruins, to the great annoyance of the Buddha and Lao-Tzu as well. When, with Monkey’s help, Hsüantsung finally reaches the Buddha’s headquarters in paradise, he finds to his dismay that he must put up with the officiousness and corruption of an elaborate hierarchy of bureaucratic officials.” Philip Thomas notes that, while “the hero of the Ramayana is not the monkey Hanuman, but the prince Rama,...Minke holds a role comparable to that of both the Indian Rama and Hanuman” (“Amalgamation of the Monkeys: A Re-View of Pramoedya’s Bumi Manusia,” Kabar Seberang, no.13/14, 1984, p.26). If Minke recalls Hanuman, I would prefer to cast someone or something else as Rama. 133

51 authority, despite their lack of social validation. He is all the more impressed because she is an autodidact, with no formal education: “‘How can that be, without school?’ ‘What’s wrong with it? Life can provide everything to whoever knows how to and is able to receive it.’ I was seriously startled to hear that answer. Never had that been said by any one among my teachers.”134 Nyai is an example, for Minke, of how much one can learn independently, and a source of knowledge not taught in school. She represents an authority apart from Europe. She is familiar with European culture, but throughout the first two books, takes a critical stance towards it. In the process, she demonstrates to Minke that the knowledge he has been taught in school is neither comprehensive nor beyond questioning. As a type, Nyai is an “example of a new person in the modern age” (BM, p.20) who is also a Native woman: “there are in fact very many great women. Only Nyai Ontosoroh is the first I’ve ever met” (BM, p.65). Minke has heard or read of others, and his thoughts follow the series from Nyai to Kartini. Women as a class represent a subjected group, and the success of “great women” like Kartini provides him with a model for his own ambitions. Nyai’s authority is also personal and charismatic, and this worries Minke. He wonders at first if his fascination with her can be attributed to black magic.135 He is alarmed at her ability to make him do things, and at his lack of will to resist: “Why had I become so soft in the hands of this particular woman? Like a lump of clay that she can shape as she likes? Why was there no resistance within myself? Not even a desire to hold back? As if she knew and could command the interior of my self, and lead me in directions that I myself wished?”136 There is in fact very little resistance on Minke’s part in their exchanges, only shocked cries of “Mama!” and the occasional note of doubt. But in the congruity of their intentions her personality threatens to overwhelm him: “‘Mana bisa tanpa sekolah?’ ‘Apa salahnya? Hidup bisa memberikan segala pada barang siapa tahu dan pandai menerima.’ Sungguh aku terperanjat mendengar jawaban itu. Tak pernah itu dikatakan oleh setiap orang di antara guru-guruku” (BM, p.64). 135 Minke’s prejudices and expectations (which may also be those of some of Pramoedya’s readers) are entertained in order to prove them false, and demonstrate the process by which he learns. 136 “Mengapa aku jadi begini lunak di tangan wanita seorang ini? Seakan segumpal lempung yang bisa dibentuknya sesuka hatinya? Mengapa tak ada perlawanan dalam diriku? Bahkan kehendak untuk bertahan pun tiada? Seakan ia tahu dan dapat menguasai pedalaman diriku, dan memimpinku ke arah yang aku sendiri kehendaki?” (BM, p.192). 134

52 “And I myself was no less [embarrassed]. There was no other option. I had tried to fashion myself as a man, individual and whole, before this extraordinary woman. For certain, each time she spoke, my efforts failed. My kepribadian was eclipsed by her reflection.137 Indeed I knew: this kind of thing couldn’t be allowed to go on for long”;138 “Working near Mama I felt like a dwarf behind a giant, like a piece of gravel at the foot of a hill. I had no meaning at all. My pribadi sank beneath the intensity of her thoughts.”139 Nyai has helped Minke leave the schoolbench intellectually and strike out on his own, but to become fully self-reliant and to distinguish his own personality from hers, he feels he has to leave her too. Minke’s own mother is nothing like Mama. She is a Javanese noblewoman, without European education, gentle and patient. But she also takes a critical stance towards Europe, from a position firmly established in her own culture: “‘Why are you concerned about the Dutch? You’re still not Javanese enough, not faithful enough to your own ancestors. Tell me, people say you’ve become a poet. Where are your verses that I can sing late at night when I miss you?’ ‘I can’t write in Javanese, Mother.’ ‘There, if you were still Javanese, you would always be able to write in Javanese. You write in Dutch, son, because you no longer want to be Javanese. You write for the Dutch. Why do you regard them so well? They eat and drink from Java’s earth too. You yourself don’t eat and drink from Dutch earth. Tell me, why do you regard them so well?’”140

Bayang-bayangnya also suggests her images or imagination. “Dan aku sendiri tidak kurang dari itu. Tak ada peluang lain. Sudah kucoba bangunkan diri sebagai pria berpribadi dan utuh di hadapan wanita luarbiasa ini. Tak urung setiap kali ia bicara usahaku gagal. Kepribadianku terlindungi oleh bayang-bayangnya. Memang aku tahu: yang demikian tak boleh berlarut terus” (BM, p.64). 139 “Bekerja di dekat Mama aku merasa sebagai cebol di belakang raksasa, sebagai batu krikil di kaki sebuah bukit. Aku tak ada arti apa-apa. Pribadiku tenggelam dalam kehebatan pikirannya” (ASB, p.72). 140 “‘Mengapa kau urusi orang Belanda? Kau belum lagi cukup Jawa, belum cukup patuhi leluhurmu sendiri. Coba, kata orang kau sudah jadi pujangga. Mana tembang-tembangmu yang dapat kunyanyikan di malam-malam aku rindukan kau?’ ‘Sahaya tidak dapat menulis Jawa, Bunda.’ ‘Nah, kalau kau masih Jawa, kau akan selalu bisa menulis Jawa. Kau menulis Belanda, Gus, karena kau sudah tak mau jadi Jawa lagi. Kau menulis untuk orang Belanda. Mengapa kau indahkan benar mereka? Mereka juga minum dan makan dari bumi Jawa. Kau sendiri tidak makan dan minum dari bumi Belanda. Coba, mengapa kau indahkan benar mereka?’” (BM, p.304). 137 138

53 Her point is not so much that Minke’s view of Europe is excessively positive, but that his attitude towards Java is excessively negative. She represents and argues on behalf of the worthwhile elements of Minke’s own heritage. Minke’s mother also has a powerful, if more emotional, hold on him. His education has opened up a vast cultural distance between them, but whenever he feels he has hurt her feelings because of it, he falls to his knees and begs her forgiveness. She does not judge him. In response to her questions above, he reflects: “I felt dim-witted responding to Mother’s words, spoken with tenderness though bearing a force that couldn’t be matched. Everybody made demands of me. Even Mother now. Mother knew and I knew too, I wouldn’t answer.... Ah, Mother, my beloved Mother, who never coerced me, never mistreated me, not even with a little pinch, not with words, not with fingers either.”141 Minke’s responses to his mother’s gentle urgings are apologies. He cannot bring himself to write in Javanese, marry a Javanese woman, or humble himself before his patriarchal father. But he learns through his exchanges with her, not only how far he has come from his origins, but the value of some of what he has left behind. Still, he suspects that what is valuable is really his mother herself. When she lectures him before his wedding about the five syarat142 of a Javanese satria, he wonders: “I nodded in agreement, understanding this was a wisdom born of centuries of experience. Only I didn’t know, whose was this wisdom? The ancestors’ or Mother’s personally?”143 To the extent that her wisdom is uniquely hers, Minke’s mother does not represent “Java” or any type, only herself. Minke’s friend, Jean Marais, is similarly gentle and wise. Minke goes to him frequently for advice, and as with his mother’s, recalls it whenever he needs guidance. A painter from France who lost his leg fighting on behalf of the Netherlands Indies government in the Aceh war, Jean refuses to learn Dutch and is “very ashamed to have been involved in colonial matters” (BM, p.219). His example of personal integrity is matched by his rejection of colonialism. He is the most “Dungulah aku bila menjawabi kata-kata Bunda yang diucapkan dengan lemah-lembut namun mengandung kekerasan tak terimbangi itu. Ya-ya, semua menuntut dari diriku. Juga Bunda sekarang ini. Bunda tahu dan aku pun tahu, aku takkan menjawab. [...] Ah, Bunda, Bundaku tercinta, ibu yang tak pernah memaksa aku, tak pernah menyiksa, biar satu cubitan kecil pun, tidak dengan kata, tidak pula dengan jari” (BM, pp.304-5). 142 A word I cannot translate to my satisfaction. “Requirement,” “prerequisite” and “condition” do not quite serve. Syarat seems close to isyarat (sign, signal), but with a causative sense. 143 “Aku mengangguk-angguk menyetujui, mengerti itu juga kebijaksanaan yang lahir dari pengalaman berabad. Hanya aku tak tahu siapa punya kebijaksanaan itu? Nenek-moyang atau Bunda pribadi?” (BM, p.308). 141

54 authoritative and least authoritarian paternal figure in the quartet, and so attracts the reader’s sympathy when he and Minke argue. Some of Jean’s most important advice comes precisely when Minke does not ask for it. Just for this reason, Minke reacts with surprising antipathy: “Prejudice had made his words feel like they were leaping up knowing no humility, arrogant and sharply lecturing, even reprimanding. My fury surged. I felt he was opening a road to bring me down. He wanted me to write in Malay, so he himself could read it directly, and on the other hand my fame and achievements as well as my prestige would be ruined.”144 Minke interprets Jean’s request from a self-centered point of view. His resentment keeps him from accepting Jean’s reasonable argument.145 Instead, he looks for similarly personal, self-centered motivations in his friend, who responds: “You suppose wrong, Minke. Don’t reckon me into this problem. It’s in your own interests that I say this.”146 To no avail. The argument ends in shouting and tears on both sides. When Minke returns to “repay” his fury and crow about his latest success, Jean tries a different tack. He approaches the problem by analogy, comparing his own work painting portraits to order to that of a Japanese prostitute, describing his use of Jepara motifs in his woodworking as “immortalizing the beautiful works of your people,” and suggesting he would rather, if he were able, translate Javanese literature into French than “work like Maiko like this.” Minke is confused. Anticipating a personal attack, he cannot work out Jean’s “puzzle” at first. Even when he does, he jumps to the same conclusion as before: “I began to think over his words. Suddenly there came a vague understanding, appearing from the ties of meaning between one sentence and the next.... Right. He was still on the attack. And I could sense the intention of his attack was still: to divert me from Dutch to Malay or Javanese. Clearly he didn’t appreciate my progress with English.”147 “Prasangka telah membikin kata-katanya terasa melambung tak kenal rendahhati, angkuh dan tajam menggurui, bahkan menegur. Kegeramananku meluap. Kurasakan dia sedang membuka jalan untuk menjerumuskan. Dia menghendaki aku menulis dalam Melayu, biar dia sendiri bisa langsung baca, sebaliknya kemashuran dan prestasi serta prestiseku hancur” (ASB, pp.48-9). 145 Minke’s anger-driven obtuseness recalls his trip to B. Here, similarly, the reader is invited to read past Minke’s own comments. 146 “Kau salah duga, Minke. Jangan jumlahkan aku dalam persoalan in. Buat kepentinganmu sendiri aku bicara ini” (ASB, p.49). 147 “Aku mulai memikirkan kata-katanya. Tiba-tiba datang pengertian samar, muncul dari hubungan pengertian antara satu kalimat dengan yang lain [...] Benar. Ia masih tetap dalam keadaan 144

55 Whether it is expressed directly or indirectly, Minke refuses to listen to the request as long as it comes from Jean, in part because Jean is a European and Minke can perceive no valid interest he might have in making it, and in part because Minke sees Jean as a fellow artist and in a way a competitor for fame and success. He does not imagine that Jean’s request might be disinterested. It takes a mutual acquaintance, Kommer, to convince Minke that writing in Malay might be a good idea. Kommer is a Eurasian journalist who writes for a Malay-language newspaper, so his interest in the issue seems reasonable. Minke does not know him that well either, so Kommer’s motives are less likely to be personally directed at him. Most importantly, perhaps, Kommer invites him to look at the evidence: a stack of Malay- and Javanese-language newspapers he brings out. The papers direct Minke’s attention away from personalities long enough to consider the issue dispassionately. Kommer argues his case aggressively, and Minke wonders at his own calm: “Probably he was preparing even more demands. Apparently it wasn’t just Mother alone, Jean Marais and Kommer too made demands of me. And now Kommer—a man whose origins I knew nothing of, maybe from the sky, maybe from the belly of the earth, I don’t know— appeared before me like a prosecutor short of prey. And I wasn’t angry. If I approved of the present demands, for sure tomorrow or the next day other demands would arrive in hordes.”148 Although Kommer’s approach is more domineering than Jean’s, Minke does not experience it as personally threatening. Kommer presents the request as a matter of choice. When he tells Minke he should write in Malay out of loyalty to his people, Minke asks him why he, “more European than Native,” writes in Malay himself. Kommer argues that “descent doesn’t mean much” compared to loyalty to a people and a country one loves. Precisely because Kommer is Eurasian, he can, like Annelies, choose to align himself with the Natives, and demonstrate loyalty as a matter of volition, not the necessary consequence of an inherited or imposed identity. Minke even finds Kommer’s forceful manner of argument attractive: “The person who sat in front of me, who knows whether he was aware of it or not, had illuminated the path of my life as a writer. I considered menyerang. Dan dapat kurasai maksud serangannya tetap: mengkisarkan aku dari basa Belanda pada Melayu atau Jawa. Jelas dia tak menghargai kemajuanku dengan Inggris” (ASB, p.54). 148 “Kira-kira ia sedang menyiapkan tuntutan lebih banyak lagi. Ternyata bukan Bunda saja juga Jean Marais, juga Kommer menuntut. Dan sekarang Kommer—orang tak kukenal asal-muasalnya, entah dari langit entah dari perut bumi—muncul di hadapanku seperti seorang jaksa kekurangan kurban. Dan, aku tak juga gusar. Kalau tuntutan yang sekarang ini aku benarkan tak urung besok atau lusa tuntutan lain akan datang berbondong” (ASB, p.104).

56 him a teacher without a reputation, a great man without pedigree. I became respectful and fond of him, as if he were part of my own body and brain. He had no hesitation in presenting those of his ideas he considered correct. He was a minor prophet.... Kommer’s words felt like a huge wave, moving, alive, and shifting me from my former position.”149 Kommer has established his authority and bona fides in Minke’s eyes, and at this point brings him sharply back to himself by suggesting that he “does not know his own people.” Minke finds the charge painful, especially coming from “people who are not Natives: Indo and French,” but this time does not reject it out of hand. “Knowing,” and writing for, Natives has become an obligation he accepts as his own, not an imposition deriving from his politically subject status. In time, Kommer’s overbearing style becomes a negative example for Minke to avoid. During the vacation in Tulangan, Kommer stops by and reads Minke’s latest story. He faults Minke for being too serious, pessimistic, and inclined to speechifying. But while Minke manages not to take offense, Kommer’s own tendency to polemic opens him up to similar criticism: “I mulled over all of Kommer’s statements, which always had the quality of coercing and commanding me, oppressing me and taking away my freedom. I knew: his intentions were good, and not everything he wanted from me was wrong. Maybe even all of it was right. But why must his enthusiasm [semangat] be like that? Why must he brag so much about his own greatness while allowing his enthusiasm to dominate the people around him? “Must” and “Never” became the banners of each piece of advice. As if there were nothing else beyond that. In our acquaintance that was not yet long or deep I was really drawn to him. It was impressed upon me that he was an arbiter without compare. The more I knew him, that first impression was gradually replaced by another, rejecting, unsympathetic, even antipathetic.”150 “Orang yang duduk di hadapanku ini, entah disadarinya entah tidak, telah menyuluhi jalan hidupku sebagai pengarang. Aku anggap dia seorang guru tanpa nama, orang besar tanpa asal. Aku menjadi hormat dan sayang padanya, seakan ia bagian dari tubuh dan otakku sendiri. Ia tidak punya keraguan dalam menyampaikan pikirannya yang dianggapnya benar. Ia seorang nabi kecil. [...] Kata-kata Kommer terasa sebagai gelumbang besar, bergerak, hidup, dan mengisarkan diriku dari pendirian semula” (ASB, p.105-6). 150 “[A]ku renungkan semua ucapan Kommer yang selalu bersifat memaksa dan memerintah, menindas dan merampas kebebasanku. Aku tahu: maksudnya baik, tidak semua yang diinginkannya dari diriku keliru. Mungkin juga semua benar. Tetapi mengapa semangatnya mesti begitu? Mengapa ia lebih banyak bermegah-megah tentang kebesaran diri sambil melampiaskan semangat untuk menguasai orang-orang selingkungannya? Harus dan jangan menjadi panji-panji dalam setiap sarannya. Seakan tak ada yang lain di luar itu. Pada perkenalan yang belum lama dan 149

57 Kommer’s language of imperatives and impossibilities denies Minke room for interpretation. His authoritarian style of argument compels Minke either to reject or submit to it. Minke compares Kommer’s domineering ways to those of his father and elder brother, and imagines them as representatives of a type: “Might this be the backward character of people who have never been acquainted with the spirit of the French Revolution? Men who take too much pleasure in ordering around their families and neighbors and weaker fellows?”151 He recalls Jean’s admonition to be just, and decides he himself has “not yet studied and practiced justice enough, until justice itself becomes your nature” (ASB, p.184). As much as his criticism, Kommer’s short-comings have led Minke to discover some of his own. Like Jean Marais, Annelies’ physician, Dr. Martinet, stands for an alternative to the domineering type of male. Like Jean too, he does not mix in colonialist circles: “there are no important men among my close friends, because I’ve never had a membership in any kind of club” (BM, p.329). Where Marais represents the arts of Europe, Martinet represents its science. In person, though, he is impressive and compelling, but more subtle than Kommer. On one occasion, Dr. Martinet asks to meet with Minke to discuss Annelies’ health. To Minke, his psychological explication of Nyai’s and Annelies’ relationship is altogether new: “Listening to him made me gape. The analysis was involved, difficult, something I was meeting for the first time, but clear and interesting. Astounding how someone could peek into the interior of a person like peeking into the interior of a watch.”152 Minke listens, fascinated, but has little to say: “Don’t just ya-ya-ya. You, sir, are educated, not a yes-man [sic]. If you’re not of the same opinion, say so. It’s not certain that truth is on my side, because I am in fact not a psychologist.... Look, Mr. Minke, in the scientific life there’s no such word as ‘shame.’ One isn’t ashamed to datar sungguh aku tertarik padanya. Terkesan padaku ia seorang jurupenentu tiada bandingan. Makin banyak kukenal dia, kesan pertama lambat-laun digantikan oleh yang lain, yang menolak, tanpa simpati, bahkan antipatik” (ASB, p.182, original emphasis). 151 “[M]ungkinkah itu watak terbelakang dari orang yang tak pernah berkenalan dengan jiwa Revolusi Prancis? Pria yang keenakan memerintah anak-bini dan tetangga dan saudara-saudaranya yang tidak berdaya?” (ASB, p.182). 152 “Aku terlongok-longok mendengarnya. Uraian yang membelit, sulit, untuk pertama kali kutemui, tapi jelas dan menarik. Mengherankan betapa orang bisa mengintip pedalaman seseorang seperti mengintip pedalaman arloji” (BM, p.244).

58 be wrong or mistaken. It’s exactly mistakes and errors that will reinforce the truth, and aid research as well.”153 Minke is reluctant to join in at first because he feels out of his depth. The doctor reassures him that modesty is not necessary to answer his questions, and that for the sake of Annelies’ health, Minke has to be daring, since Annelies is also his responsibility. Martinet pauses, and Minke reflects: “For a long time he didn’t continue his talk. Probably he was getting hesitant. Truthfully, I myself felt relieved if he were assailed by uncertainty. At least I got to breathe freely. It was really only words that he poured down on me. But the feeling! the feeling! the feeling was like he was forcing me to be the anvil on which he pounded a sledgehammer to forge understanding.”154 Rather than simply imposing his views on Minke, Martinet is demanding that Minke cooperate by employing his own powers of interpretation. Minke’s lack of confidence is grounded in his own self-consciousness, an obstacle Martinet tries to persuade him to put aside. The struggle is one between Minke’s desire to cooperate and his resistance to exposing his own point of view to interrogation by his interlocutor. The struggle grows all the more intense when Minke’s intimate relationship with Annelies becomes the topic. Not only does this bring him into conflict with his social conditioning, but it touches on something immanent in his sense of self. Martinet encourages Minke to view himself from a critical and dispassionate perspective, in the “third person.” What distance Minke is able to achieve is precarious and provisional, and Martinet draws Minke’s answers out slowly and painfully. In the process, however, Martinet learns what he needs to know, and brings Minke to cathartic release in tears. Afterwards, Minke regards the doctor with heightened admiration. He realizes that the experience has planted “a seed of new strength with me,” and that Martinet is able to help others and “express his friendship in many ways. And each way makes one pour one’s trust into him” (BM, p.253). Minke finds Martinet’s example of providing service to others appealing. Ultimately, he decides to emulate the doctor by pursuing an education as a physician in Batavia: a career the “Jangan hanya ya-ya-ya. Tuan terpelajar, bukan yes-man. Kalau tidak sependapat, katakan. Belum tentu kebenaran ada pada pihakku, karena aku memang bukan ahli jiwa. [...] Lihat, Tuan Minke, dalam kehidupan ilmu tak ada kata malu. Orang tidak malu karena salah atau keliru. Kekeliruan dan kesalahan justru akan memperkuat kebenaran, jadi juga membantu penyelidikan” (BM, p.246). 154 “Lama ia tak teruskan ceramahnya. Kira-kira ia mulai ragu. Sungguh, aku sendiri merasa terhibur bila ia diserang keraguan. Setidak-tidaknya aku dapat menghela nafas bebas. Memang hanya katakata yang dicurahkannya padaku. Tapi rasanya! rasanya! rasanya diri dipaksanya jadi landasan tempat ia hantamkan palu godam menempa pengertian” (BM, p.248). 153

59 limitations of which are foreshadowed by Martinet’s inability to help Nyai and Minke defend Annelies from Maurits’ lawsuit. Like Dr. Martinet, most of Minke’s principal interlocutors are senior to him. Older, wiser, more knowledgeable or more experienced, they are characterized as “informal teachers.” The main exception is Miriam de la Croix. Daughter of the Assistant Resident of B., she attended the same school as Minke a few years ahead of him. According to school usage, which marries the meritocracy of learning to the fatality of age through the grade system, she and her sister at their first meeting with Minke are his “seniors.” Because they meet as individuals, however, their gradation gradually erodes. Initially, the two young Dutch women adopt the senior role, quizzing Minke about literature and other intellectual topics, though their constant giggling undermines their impression of authority. When their discussion begins to heat up into argument, Miriam starts to win Minke over by characterizing their relationship more equitably: “We’re like bulls, Minke...fighting on first acquaintance, friends thereafter, probably forever” (BM, p.137). The de la Croix girls’ aim, it turns out, is to discover how deeply what Minke learns becomes part of him—whether, in fact, they may consider him their equal as educated people: “‘I believe your intellect can accept the lesson about positive and negative poles. It’s a matter of your needing the grade to pass. Frankly though, do you believe in the truth of the lesson?’ Now I knew: she was testing my psyche [pedalamanku]. Yes, a real test. Frankly, I’d never asked my own self about this. Felt like everything was going fine on its own. Now Sarah butted in: ‘The question now is, do you believe it or not?’ ‘I have to believe,’ I answered. ‘Have to believe in order to pass the examinations. Have to! So you don’t believe yet.’ ‘My teacher, Miss Magda Peters...’ ‘Magda Peters again,’ Sarah cut me off. ‘She’s my teacher. According to her: everything comes from lessons,’ I responded, ‘and practice. Even belief comes from them. You couldn’t possibly believe in Jesus Christ without lessons and practice in believing, right?’”155 “‘Aku percaya pikiranmu dapat menerima pelajaran tentang awan positif dan negatif itu. Soalnya, kau membutuhkan angka untuk dapat lulus. Terus-terang saja, percaya kau pada kebenaran pelajaran itu?’ Tahulah aku sekarang: ia sedang menguji pedalamanku. Ya, betul-betul ujian. Terus-terang saja, aku tak pernah bertanya tentang ini pada diri sendiri. Rasanya semua sudah berjalan baik dan dengan sendirinya. 155

60 Minke’s argument that he has to believe recalls his earlier comments about what he had been taught in school. But this time he has to believe, not because society’s standards leave him no option, but because he needs to believe in the truth of something in order to learn it: knowledge has become contingent on his own assertion of faith in what he is learning. Miriam goes on to explain, “like a teacher,” about a Dutch scholar’s efforts to discover whether Natives can fully absorb European science and knowledge. Minke is entertained to realize that she and Sarah are “aping” the researcher. The girls’ authority is only borrowed. In Minke’s mind, their positions relative to his shift: “I listened on to Miriam’s story. Not as her junior, also not as her student—as an observer.... ‘Have you heard of the Association Theory?’ ‘Miss Miriam, you’re my teacher now,’ I answered, ducking quickly. ‘No, not a teacher,’ suddenly she became modest. ‘It’s already customary that there be an exchange of thoughts among the educated. Isn’t that so?”156 Their relationship is redefined as one between fellow members of an educated class. As Miriam’s father points out, the “exchange of thoughts between educated young men and women” implies potentially important consequences for society: “Who knows, it could become the basis for a better life? Especially if you all become important people?” (BM, p.143). Minke’s subsequent exchanges with Miriam and Sarah take place by letter, encouraging a degree of reciprocity between them. Having read their letters by choice (as opposed to his family’s, which he often ignores), Minke feels obligated to respond. Even so, their well-intentioned expectations for him provoke a degree of resistance: Sekarang Sarah ikut menimbrung: ‘Tentu saja aku yakin kau mengetahui dan menguasai pelajaran ilmu alam itu. Soalnya sekarang: kau percaya-tidak?’ ‘Aku harus percaya,’ jawabku. ‘Harus percaya hanya agar lulus ujian. Harus! Jadi kau belum percaya.’ ‘Guruku, Juffrouw Magda Peters....’ ‘Lagi-lagi Magda Peters,’ potong Sarah. ‘Dia guruku. Menurut dia: semua datang dari pelajaran,’ jawabku, ‘dan latihan. Juga kepercayaan datang dari situ. Kan kau tidak mungkin percaya pada Jesus Kristus tanpa pelajaran dan latihan percaya?’” (BM, pp.137-8, original emphasis). 156 “Aku dengarkan terus cerita Miriam. Bukan sebagai junior bukan juga sebagai murid—sebagai seorang pengamat. [...] ‘Pernah kau dengar tentang teori assosiasi?’ ‘Juffrouw Miriam, kaulah sekarang guruku,’ jawabku mengelak cepat. ‘Bukan, bukan guru,’ tiba-tiba ia jadi rendahhati. ‘Sudah pada galibnya ada pertukaran pikiran antara kaum terpelajar. Begitu, kan?” (BM, p.140).

61 “Getting teachers is fine. No learning is for nothing. Only the feeling is they appear to have an urge to see me become someone important because of their efforts. Are they themselves unable to do as much for their own selves? ‘Boring teachers are torture enough,’ I said.”157 But their expectations are less of him as a person than as an educated representative of his people. Similarly, Miriam imagines herself not as Minke’s senior, but as a representative of Europe, giving her “teaching” the character of cultural exchange: “I don’t know whether what I’ve written represents European thought or not. Nevertheless if I may I regard them as the thoughts of a European girl about the Natives of the Indies. So based on all this, Minke, let us work together to do whatever is good for Java, the Indies, Europe and the world.”158 When it is posed in this fashion, Minke can respond to Miriam’s invitation as he sees fit: “All right, I’ll regard you as representing Europe.... Perhaps, and closer to the truth: you represent your personal dream of Europe. I will answer you, Mir.”159 The model Miriam presents of young educated people communicating across cultures appeals to Minke, and prepares him for his encounter with a young activist from China, Khouw Ah Soe. Minke is asked to transcribe an interview by Nijman, the conservative editor of a Dutch-language newspaper, of a member of the Chinese Young Generation. Khouw’s appearance is not impressive. Barefoot, poorly dressed and gap-toothed, he does not “present himself like an educated person” (ASB, p.55). His demeanor, however, is more appealing: “He moved and spoke freely as if not before a European, but among his own friends. Perhaps an appearance that was displeasing to Nijman, who was used to being excessively honored by Natives. To myself his

“[M]endapatkan guru baik saja. Tak ada pengetahuan percuma. Hanya rasanya mereka nampak bernafsu melihat aku jadi orang penting karena jasa mereka. Apa sendiri mereka tak mampu lakukan untuk diri sendiri? ‘Guru membosankan cukup menganiaya,’ kataku” (BM, p.217). 158 “Aku tak tahu adakah tulisanku ini mewakili pikiran Eropa atau tidak. Walau demikian bolehlah aku anggap sebagai pikiran seorang gadis Eropa terhadap Pribumi Hindia. Maka berdasarkan semua itu, Minke, mari kita bekerjasama melakukan apa saja yang baik untuk Jawa, Hindia, Eropa dan dunia” (ASB, p.97). 159 “Baik, aku anggap kau mewakili Eropa [....] Mungkin, dan lebih mendekati kebenaran: kau mewakili impian pribadimu tentang Eropa. Aku akan jawab kau, Mir” (ASB, p.98). 157

62 attitude was instead sympathetic, attractive. He didn’t try to be as if more than his own self.”160 Khouw responds to Nijman’s increasingly antagonistic questions with confidence and wit, defending his beliefs and aspirations against the colonialist’s sarcasm. When, after Nijman’s hostile report— which bears little resemblance to Minke’s transcription—is published, it becomes clear that Khouw is making huge sacrifices and taking risks to carry out his work, Nyai suggests that Minke might learn a lot from him. Khouw turns up at the Boerderij at the end of his rope. Minke finds himself interpreting for Khouw, since no one else speaks English or any Chinese language. As Khouw’s translator in his conversations with Nyai and then Darsam, Minke is positioned between interlocutors, at the point where slippage takes place and new understandings form, and in this case bestride different cultures as well. He acts as the channel through which other people communicate. When Nyai tells Khouw she is afraid he might be angry at Minke for his part in producing Nijman’s article, Khouw replies: “No. In fact that’s what had to happen. Their own actions will cause people to learn to hate them and oppose them—it’s the same thing in the concession areas in China.”161 As a member of another politically subject people, Khouw represents the beginning of a series—the world is full of colonies as well as independent nations. China, in fact, is quite comparable to Java, from what Khouw tells Minke of his purpose: “‘Only crying out to my own people in diaspora, no more, that the age has changed, that China is no longer the center of the world, and was never the center of the world, that it is true China made many contributions to the civilization of the human community in times past, but it is not the one and only civilized people as they have regarded themselves all along.’ So like the same lot as my people, I thought, the Javanese people, who regard themselves as the most polite, most civilized and most noble of peoples. I smiled.”162 “Ia bergerak dan bicara bebas seakan tidak di hadapan orang Eropa, tapi di tengah temantemannya sendiri. Mungkin satu permunculan yang tidak menyenangkan bagi Nijman, yang terbiasa dihormati secara berlebihan oleh Pribumi. Bagiku sendiri sikapnya justru simpatik, menarik. Ia tidak mencoba berseakan lebih daripada dirinya sendiri” (ASB, p.58). 161 “Tidak. Memang itu yang harus terjadi. Tingkah-laku mereka sendiri akan menyebabkan orang dididik membenci dan melawannya—begitu juga halnya di daerah-daerah konsessi di Tiongkok...” (ASB, p.77). 162 “‘Hanya berseru-seru, tidak lebih, pada sebangsaku di perantauan, bahwa jaman telah berganti, bahwa Cina bukan lagi pusat dunia, dan tidak pernah jadi pusat dunia, bahwa benar Cina telah 160

63 Because Minke shares a similar view towards his own people’s ethnocentrism, Khouw’s activism becomes a potential model for Minke’s own career. Khouw extends the series of subject peoples by telling Minke of the short-lived Republic of the Philippines, introducing him to the idea of a people “awakening,” and makes the point that in the series, each instance can become a model for the others: “Each country in Asia that starts to rise up not only awakens its own self, but also helps to awaken other peoples of the same fate who are left behind, including your country.”163 The example Khouw provides Minke of a political activist pursued both by the government and powerful groups in Chinese society is all the more modularly potent because their respective positions are parallel rather than the same: the condition of political subjugation is a general one, and not specific to the Indies. At the same time it points to the common aspect of their situations—the influence of imperialism on both their countries. As an individual, Khouw represents someone who, as Nyai remarks, “knows how to take lessons from Europe, and knows how to reject the sickness of Europe” (ASB, p.71). Beyond that, he shows Minke a new way of thinking: “And the way he connected one thing with another so neatly as though everything were tied together and entwined. To become a huge structure before me. And I wasn’t able to penetrate my gaze inside it. Yes, a gigantic structure of which each part supported and was supported by the others.... It’s true in everything he discussed he hadn’t entered into detail. Just because of that it became a foundation for me to fantasize about many subjects.”164 This puts to the lie Nijman’s comment to Minke on the level of education among young Chinese: “you sir are much better educated than any of them. The Dutch educational system is among the best in the world.”165 From his encounter with Khouw Ah Soe, Minke learns that there is much that is not taught in Dutch schools, or reported in Dutch colonial newspapers. memberikan banyak sumbangan pada peradaban ummat manusia di masa-masa yang lalu, tapi bukan satu-satunya bangsa yang beradab sebagaimana dianggap mereka selama ini.’ Jadi seperti segolongan sebangsaku, pikirku, bangsa Jawa, yang menganggap dirinya bangsa paling sopan, paling beradab, paling luhur. Aku tersenyum” (ASB, p.79). 163 “Setiap negeri di Asia ini yang mulai bangkit, dia bukan hanya membangkitkan diri sendiri, juga membantu bangkit bangsa-bangsa lain senasibnya yang tertinggal, termasuk negeriku” (ASB, p.80). 164 “Dan cara ia menghubungkan satu dengan yang lain begitu rapi seakan semua bertalian pilinberpilin. Jadi bangunan besar di hadapanku. Dan aku tak dapat menembuskan pandang ke dalamnya. Ya, bangunan raksasa yang setiap bagian tunjang-menunjang dengan bagian yang lain. [...] Memang segala sesuatu yang dibicarakannya tidak pernah memasuki perincian. Justru karena itu ia jadi landasan bagiku untuk berkhayal tentang banyak perkara” (ASB, p.82). 165 “Tuan jauh lebih terpelajar daripada semua mereka. Pendidikan sistim Belanda termasuk pada daftar teratas di dunia ini” (ASB, p.57).

64 Quite how much he does not know Minke learns painfully upon meeting Ter Haar. As noted earlier, Minke encounters the radical Dutch journalist on board ship during his abortive flight from Wonokromo to Batavia. At first impression, Ter Haar cuts a slightly ridiculous figure. He is a chain-smoker, fast-talking, ebullient and elliptical. From the outset, he launches into a series of heated lectures on complicated subjects Minke has difficulty following. Minke finds his bullying style off-putting and stupefying: “As he went on he grew more lecturing. More enthusiastic—the enthusiasm of an unpaid teacher. All the more deadening to the enthusiasm of the student who hasn’t paid.... I didn’t understand. Didn’t understand! Who can fault someone who doesn’t 166 understand?” Grotesquely, Minke imagines Ter Haar as a she-wolf, gripping his neck with angry passion and forcing her teat into his mouth, her milk so thick it is hard to swallow. The image has occurred to Minke before, when Kommer and Marais were demanding that he write in Malay (ASB, p.106), and again during his stay with Trunodongso’s family (ASB, p.165), in each case evoking the wolf who nursed the twin founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus. The image is apt. The knowledge which Ter Haar is force-feeding him is intended to provide him with the tools he will need to advance his people’s aspirations against the interests of the colonialists. Minke struggles to comprehend Ter Haar’s talk about the colonial press, international relations, the Philippine revolution, and especially capitalism, scribbling down what he can after each meeting to go over again later. The narrator (and the author) become self-conscious of what he is recording: “More and more Ter Haar’s talk verged upon a pamphlet. (I myself grew hesitant when writing it down here, whether it was proper to pass on all of it. Moreover I haven’t yet been able to fathom everything he said). But not to note it down wasn’t right either. Ter Haar brought me into other continents that had never been raised into view by geography”;167 “I know these notes won’t interest anyone at all. But I have no other choice than to continue. The problem: this also is included in the scope of my own life.... The wonder of knowledge: without eyes to see it “Makin lama dia makin menggurui. Makin naik semangat—semangat guru tanpa bayaran. Makin menghilangkan semangat si murid tanpa pernah membayar. [...] Aku tidak mengerti. Tidak mengerti! Siapa bisa salahkan orang tidak mengerti?” (ASB, p.255). 167 “Makin lama omongan Ter Haar makin mendekati brosur. (Aku sendiri menjadi ragu waktu menuliskannya di sini apakah patut semua ini aku teruskan. Lagi pula aku pun belum dapat menyelami seluruh ucapannya). Tetapi untuk tidak mencatatnya juga tidak benar: Ter Haar membawa aku memasuki benua-benua lain yang tak pernah dimunculkan ilmu bumi” (ASB, p.260). 166

65 makes one know the breadth of the world: and its richness, and its depth, and its height, and its contents, and its pestilences too.”168 Minke’s narratorial comments assure the reader that the information with which Ter Haar inundates the protagonist is in retrospect in some way as important as it seems to the protagonist at the time. Even partially digested knowledge is valuable as a foundation for future learning. Having illuminated the way capital circulates in the colony, Ter Haar exposes how Minke is himself complicitously involved in the colonial project as a writer, and would continue to be as a doctor: “‘Your compositions, for example, are published just for the sake of reassuring their readers, that nothing is going on in the Indies, that the situation is secure and tranquil—secure and tranquil for the sugar factories, in which case the stockholders will also be calm, and the stock price on the bourse in Amsterdam will remain firm.’ It was as if he were accusing me: your work is nothing other than to please the owners of stock in the factories”;169 “‘And, Mr. Tollenaar, you yourself wish to study to be a doctor. Yes, doctors have to be arranged for so the plantations and factories won’t be disturbed by people falling ill.’ ‘If later I graduate and become a doctor, it’s not my intention....’ ‘Willy-nilly you will be part of the machine of the sugar mill, like the axle, or the flywheel, or the boiler.’”170 Ter Haar reveals to Minke the ubiquity of the economic system in which he is enmeshed, and the way his intentions can be betrayed by his own ignorance, thereby reaffirming the importance of knowledge to his being able to determine the effects of his own actions. “Aku tahu catatan ini tak bakal menarik siapa pun. Tapi aku tak punya pilihan lain daripada meneruskan. Soalnya: ini juga termasuk ruang lingkup kehidupanku sendiri. [...] Keajaiban pengetahuan: Tanpa mata yang melihat dia membikin orang mengetahui luasnya dunia: dan kayanya, dan kedalamannya, dan ketinggiannya, dan kandungannya, dan juga sampar-samparnya” (ASB, p.276). 169 “‘Karangan-karangan Tuan, misalnya, diumumkan sekedar untuk menghibur pembacanya, bahwa tak ada terjadi sesuatu di Hindia, bahwa keadaan aman dan sentausa—aman dan sentausa untuk pabrik-pabrik gula, dengan demikian pemilik saham ikut tenteram, dan harga saham di bursa Amsterdam sana tetap tangguh.’ Dia seakan mendakwa aku: pekerjaanku tak lain daripada menyenangkan para pemilik saham pabrik” (ASB, p.254). 170 “‘Dan Tuan Tollenaar, Tuan sendiri hendak belajar untuk jadi dokter. Ya, dokter-dokter harus diadakan agar perkebunan dan pabrik tidak terganggu oleh orang-orang yang jatuh sakit.’ ‘Kalau kelak aku lulus jadi dokter, bukan maksudku....’ ‘Mau-tak-mau Tuan akan jadi bagian dari mesin penggiling tebu, seperti as, atau roda gila, atau ketel’” (ASB, p.273). 168

66 Ter Haar is another in the series of Minke’s “informal teachers,” and a particularly illegitimate one at that. Like Nyai, he has never been to school, and describes himself figuratively as “the bastard child of one mother and who knows how many fathers” (ASB, p.259). The model is one Minke can appropriate and apply to himself, to become in turn a teacher of knowledges gleaned from diverse and socially unapproved sources. As a type Ter Haar is also, like Khouw Ah Soe, a political activist whose concerns are not determined by self-interest or restricted to a particular geographical context, but apply, like Miriam’s ideals, globally: “I believe more in the French Revolution, Mr. Tollenaar, in Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, not just for myself like it is in all the lands of Europe and the United States, but for each person, each and every one of the peoples of humankind on this earth.... It is not just not liking being oppressed, it is not liking to oppress, more than that: not liking the existence of oppression.”171 As Ter Haar’s beliefs apply globally, so are they available globally, free for appropriation by Minke or anyone, regardless of their background. *** Appropriately for a story of Bildungsroman type, most of Minke’s main interlocutors are cast in teacherly roles.172 The spurious completeness of his Dutchlanguage schooling is complemented by what he learns through his exchanges with other characters. As alternative sources of knowledge, they provide him with the means to judge by contrast the value and truth of what he knows. As independent agents, they engage him in the complicitous struggle of communication through which he learns to exercise his own powers of interpretation. As individuals, their examples present him with some of the possible ways he can become something besides what he already is, while the demands and expectations they place on him point to still others. As types, their models make such possibilities more readily available—it is easier to imagine becoming “like” a number of other people who are already like each other, than becoming like another individual in all his irreducible particularity—while conjuring up the generality of a society composed of series of anonymous persons of different types. In the play of conflict and cooperation between Minke and his interlocutors, moreover, interpretive slippage brings into

“Aku lebih percaya pada Revolusi Prancis, Tuan Tollenaar. Kebebasan, Persaudaraan dan Persamaan, bukan hanya untuk diri sendiri seperti sekarang terjadi di seluruh daratan Eropa dan Amerika Serikat, tapi untuk setiap orang, setiap dan semua bangsa manusia di atas bumi ini. [...] Bukan hanya tidak suka ditindas, tidak suka menindas, lebih dari itu; tidak suka adanya penindasan...” (ASB, pp.268-9). 172 The principal exception is Annelies, who in addition to being Minke’s love interest is also his first student. 171

67 being new possibilities not already embodied in the examples and models of others, or anticipated in their expectations. The result of all this exchange is change. What Minke achieves is not his identity—something that is the same as itself, over time—but kepribadian. It is the sovereign expression of himself, carried out in acts of volition and interpretation that take place in his subjective consciousness, and are best described from a subjective point of view. As Minke’s consciousness changes, however, past subjective experience slips away from direct recall, leaving the account of self-expression to be recreated in narrative. It is here that identity is invented as a fictional construct, composed of faulty memory, dreams and fancy: it is an aftereffect of kepribadian.

CHAPTER FOUR: CONCLUSION “Sang dagang, orang yang mengembara dan menjelajah terdapat dalam setiap negeri orang. Tentu saja. Kelana namanya. Seorang acuan yang menggerakkan pandangan orang di sekitarnya. Seorang pedoman hidup yang mengarahkan harapan orang setempat. Seorang pembawa unsur dan gejala baru. Pahlawan yang mengganggu pikiran kawan dan lawan. Tokoh yang kegundahannya mampu memutarbalikkan peraturan yang sudah tersedia begitu lama.”173 [The Trader, someone who roams [over land] and roves [over seas], is found in every country. Of course. Traveler is his name. A point of reference who moves the views of those around him. A living compass who directs the hopes of his neighbors. A bringer of new mediums and tokens. A hero who troubles the thoughts of friend and foe. A figure whose restlessness174 is capable of overturning the order that has been in place for so long.] Pramoedya’s first-person account of Minke’s changing consciousness in Bumi Manusia and Anak Semua Bangsa presents the passage of an individual agent through the course of events and experiences that produce in him new perceptions and aspirations, which will in turn lead to the emergence of a new social entity. Clearly an intricate process. But Minke’s aspirations are not wholly unprecedented, and his perceptions not wholly unique. Both are the result of his complicitous engagement with other individuals, and with the ubiquitous political and economic systems in which they are all enmeshed. People and systems together make up his social context. They determine the range of possibilities open to him, including its limits. It is his own struggle for self-determination, however, that sets the particular course of his career. The political system that renders Minke its subject does not take into account his own subjectivity. It maps him invisibly, addresses him deafly, and counts him only as an item in a series, sebagai inventaris (as inventory: BM, p.322). Its logics, however, are immanent in the institutions that embody it, in the means of communication and transportation by which it operates, and in the way it organizes society. Through these vehicles, its existence is communicated to Minke. He learns the grammar of its language. And interpreting what he learns, he imagines other possibilities.

173 174

Henk Maier, “Hikayat Dagang,” kalam 4, 1995, p.8. Kegundahan also has a sense of “resentment.”

68

69 If the logic of the system cannot encompass the subjectivity of a political subject, the state, through its personnel, can imagine it. The agents and allies of the state fearfully anticipate Minke’s opposition. Through threats, and mystification, and behaving as if everything were quite normal, they try to keep him passive. But what goes on in individual consciousness is hard to oversee. Time and again, in anxious over-compensation, they violate Minke’s personal sovereignty, provoking the antagonism they seek to suppress. The state engenders the grammar of Minke’s opposition, but the (creole) idiom in which he expresses it develops in conversation with other agents. The play of conflict and cooperation between them trains him in interpreting the methods, languages and ideas of others to be applied creatively as circumstances require. He comes to see their differences from himself as examples he can adapt and make his own. He finds that the expectations they have for him can indicate opportunities he had not conceived of himself. He discovers that the knowledges they share with or force on him become the means through which he expresses himself. While the languages in which they communicate they possess in common with him, his style remains his own. Minke’s perceptions and aspirations form in response to his social context, but in that context he is the first of the state’s political subjects to develop them. Through the fatalities of historical timing, aristocratic birth, and talent, he has privileged access to education and the modern technologies of communication and transportation, giving him the opportunity to imagine society, through print and experience, in generalized terms. By the same fatalities and their consequences, he is brought into contact with foreigners, providing him with models—precedents—of alternative ways to imagine himself politically. The changes in Minke’s political consciousness, then, are the unintended and locally unprecedented, but nevertheless typical outcome of accident and historical condition. After Minke, similar political consciousness spreads among his fellow subjects by direct example. By recounting the story of this “Initiator” in the first-person, Pramoedya recreates the processes by which this locally new type of political agent came first into being. Only in the first-person can Minke’s own agency in the changes he undergoes be represented. And only fictively (if not necessarily in fiction) can Pramoedya reinvent what it must have “been like” not yet to understand the world in the way those who followed Minke would. But here there arises a conflict: because Minke as narrator cannot directly recall the past erased by his own changing consciousness, he too has to “remember” his story through fiction. The reader, then, is caught up in a double fiction. She must, by tacit contract, try to suppress her own “false perspective of what actually only happened later,” as well as her awareness that Pramoedya is manipulating Minke’s story to the potential disadvantage of its own narrator. It is as if Pangemanann admitted to reworking

70 Minke’s manuscripts himself. But Pramoedya is able to turn all this to advantage, reaching past the compromised narrator to remind the reader of things neither Minke can know, thereby allowing his story of the past to comment upon the present. *** By dwelling on the character of Minke and confining its attention to Bumi Manusia and Anak Semua Bangsa, this thesis loses sight of some of the reasons that Minke’s story is important. A broader account of these first two books would itself begin to evoke the collectivity Minke is starting to imagine. It is only after Minke moves to the political centers of Batavia and Buitenzorg in Jejak Langkah that his concerns really begin to expand beyond Java to encompass the Indies. It is only in Jejak Langkah that the new sequence in the story of confrontation really begins. Until it does, the way that the confrontation between the Boerderij and colonialism is part of an ongoing struggle is not apparent. The way each sequence leads into the next— the reason why Minke is “apprenticed” to Nyai—cannot be described. Minke’s story is important because it is the precursor of other stories. His change of consciousness will be followed by that of other Natives. But until he publishes his own newspapers and establishes modern organizations in Jejak Langkah, it is difficult to see how Minke himself communicates new imaginings to his fellows. The colonial state, too, and its role in producing unintended new developments become much clearer in the last two volumes. What becomes clear as well is how some amnesias are created by interested efforts to prevent change, rather than by change itself.

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