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A Sense of the Past
| Article
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12110 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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3 / 1994 |
2,092 Words |
| Author
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Jack W. Meinhardt
Jack W. Meinhardt has lectured on literature at the University
of Indonesia and Pace University and has written a numer of
articles on Indonesian history and literature. |
PARA PRIYAYI
Sebuah Novel
Umar Kayam
Jakarta: Pustaka Utama Grafiti, 1993
308 pp.
"Wanagalih," the opening chapter of Umar Kayam's Para Priyayi, is the name of the town in East Java where much of the novel is set. This chapter, like the others, is told in the first person by one of the main characters--by Lantip, who was born in a village outside of Wanagalih but now lives in Jakarta. Unlike the other chapters, however, its title is a place-name, which is important in a work concerned with those layers of experience separating us from the past; for a place asks to be entered, to be delved into, and is something suited to revealing the sedimentation of life and events laid down by time.
The town of Wanagalih is the embodiment of a storied past, of the long memory of Japanese civilization with its roots in myths and legends and of later, more visible encrustations. Lantip's narrative, observing the life of the present-day town, inevitably encounters the signs of an earlier history, or histories, built up over centuries. He sees the town square with its markets crammed with foreign-made appliances, for example, and tells us that it was the site where, during the revolutionary struggles of the late 1940s, communist forces hanged all of the local officials, and where, even earlier, the Dutch put up a regency palace. Wanagalih is a composite of various temporal strata; it is a map of the life, and the epochs, that have marched through East Java. The river children swim in after school was the birthplace of the Javanese Ratu Adil, or Just King, we are told; and Wanagalih's rich babel of languages--Old Javanese, modern Javanese, Indonesian/Malay, Dutch, Chinese, and, increasingly, English--demonstrates that its history, in some measure, lives on in the present.
It is Umar Kayam's complex moral response to the past, to history as a kind of primary inheritance, that distinguishes him from two of the central strains in modern Indonesian literature. Writers in the formal or aesthetic tradition, on the one hand, comprising mostly playwrights and poets but also such writers of experimental fiction as Danarto and Putu Wijaya, have sought to expand the range of available artistic techniques but have shown, for the most part, little interest in history. Many of Indonesia's most important novelists, on the other hand, belong to what we might call the critical tradition of historical realism. In this group are writers who want to present political and
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