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Bali-Hoo
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20250 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1992 |
2,961 Words |
| Author
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Guneli Gun
Guneli Gun is a Turk who writes her fiction in English. She
lives in Oberlin, Ohio, where she has taught creative writing
and women's studies at Oberlin College. She is the author of
Book of Trances (Julian Friedmann Publishers, 1979) and the
recent picaresque novel On the Road to Baghdad (Hunter House,
1991). She is a contributor to the Paris Review and World
Literature Today. |
THE PAINTED ALPHABET
Diana Darling
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1992
224 pp., $19.95
Diana Darling, a practicing sculptor who lives in Bali, says of a sculptured head she calls Some Syllable that it was "an attempt to make the most beautiful head I could." One suspects that The Painted Alphabet, too, is Darling's attempt to make the most beautiful book she is capable of imagining. This reviewer, not being an art critic, is not in a position to judge whether the sculpted head is indeed beautiful, but in fiction (an art Darling is new to) an attempt at the "beautiful" all too often purges the work of depth, saps its strength, and compromises its honesty, reducing it to a rich surface, or an object, that is indubitably very "pretty."
The Painted Alphabet is based on an ancient Hindu-Balinese morality play/recital called Dukuh Sildari. Obviously used as a teaching tale by the Balinese for their temple festivals, the text can take several days and nights to perform, as evidenced by the seven cassettes on which the author says she has captured the entire recital. Like all mystically oriented teaching stories, Dukuh Sildari, too, is deliberately entertaining in order to be instructive. And as in all teaching stories, especially of the East and the Middle East, what is being taught is not conventional morality. What's being taught is far too subtle. The inner workings of these tales are about putting the audience into a "state," thereby creating a consciousness that goes beyond the ordinary, workaday self.
Although the didactic bits would make an uninitiated Western audience yawn, the people who "own" this tale, the Balinese, take it straight. Darling has gone for the entertainment, having purged the tale of its inner workings, and has inserted into the story some pretty obvious "politically correct" Western ideology. One wouldn't mind it so much if it had been a bona fide Balinese author using the text for his own ends, but when a Westerner "appropriates" the material to sell it back home, having suitably dressed it up for seekers of petty plunder from exotic lands, the appropriation becomes more than culturally sticky. It becomes sticky sweet.
The Story
A peasant named Sildari, unable to stand the ugliness of his time (insanity, scandal, slander, etc.), leaves for the mountains to study with
...
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