Richard Oh

Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s
Arok of Java: A Novel of Early Indonesia
Translated by Max Lane
Horizon Books
387 pages

In his final critical hours, Pramoedya was rushed to a hospital. Lying in bed struggling for his life, he surprised everyone at his bedside with a request for his favorite kretek cigarette. When told he was not allowed to smoke in hospital, he asked to be immediately removed back to his house. His last wish finally granted, he took a few puffs at his kretek cigarette and passed away. Those final moments could very well sum up Pramoedya’s life as a man and a writer: an undaunted man who fought unflinchingly against any forms of injustice, repression and inhumanity.

Arok of Java, translated by Max Lane, is a much-anticipated addition to the collection of Pramoedya’s works that have been made available to English-speaking readers. The originally titled Arok Dedes was published in 1999. Compared to the preeminent Buru Quartet, it is not much known abroad, except for a handful of Pramoedya’s scholars. It is nonetheless an important work that eerily foretells the political state we are in today. Pramoedya showed that greed, intrigues, betrayals, racial and religious conflicts brought on by those in power often result in the loss of the lives of common people and are as recurrent in the past as in present day Indonesia.

Set in the year 1140 Saka (1220 A.D), in a Gubernatorial State of Tumapel under the reign of King Sri Kretajaya in Kediri, Arok is a tale of the rise of a sudra (the lowest Hindu caste) young man with unknown parentage named Arok who learns from a Budhist monk and a Vishnu Bramin to become a ksatria, a warrior, to lead a band of commoners just like himself to topple the rule of the ruthless brigand-turned Governor of Tumapel, Tunggul Ametung. What makes the novel especially intriguing is the way Pramoedya details Arok’s rise through his clever maneuvering rather than his skills as a warrior to penetrate into Tunggul Ametung’s inner-circle and with the help of Ken Dedes, the beautiful but reluctant consort of the Governor, for she was kidnapped from her village and forced to marry the villain, finally trumps the evil ruler.  For Pramoedya, the kstarias, the military, are basically untutored brutes manipulated by lure of greed and power, just as Tunggul Ametung by the King of Kediri. The Brahmins, the educated elite, are also scathingly criticized for being uselessly inert in their wisdom. Arok, being of the lower caste, educated by a Budhist teacher and A Brahmin master to read Sanskrit and the lontars, historical tracts, is the perfect amalgamation of a scholar-warrior approved by the Brahmins to take on the task of taking down the corrupt ruler of Tumapel. In the end, Arok wins the admiration and the heart of the Brahmini Ken Dedes, but there is a hint that she, too, cannot stand having to share power with a man not of Hindu blood. One gets a sense in the end that the prolonged conflicts involving race and religion can never be truly resolved unless one makes real efforts to respect another human being despite his/her creed or race. Arok’s triumphant address to his supporters clearly points this out: “Look now. Here I am a worshipper of Shiva, my wife Umang, worshipper of Vishnu, my adopted father Bango Samparan and also Ki Lembung are Vishnuites. My teacher, respected Tantripala is a Buddhist, my master teacher His Holiness Dang Hyang Lohgawe is a Shivaite. The good laws that have lasted now for two hundred years were the blessed gift of a Vishnu king, Sri Erlangga. The goodness of a person cannot be judged by how he worships the gods but by his behavior towards his fellow human beings.”

When the novel was banned during the New Order regime, there was much speculation that Arok Dedes was aimed at Suharto, who arose from the peasant stock and later ruled the country by force. Max Lane in his preface leaves this open for our speculation, drawing our attention rather to the historical parallel of the first president, Soekarno. Whichever way the allusion might seem to point, I believe that Pramoedya’s main concern is much broader and sweeping. He shows us that throughout our fragile history innocent blood has been shed because of the self-interest of a small ruling group of people grappling for power. These people are often described by Pramoedya as the priyaji, or in his harsher description, ‘the clowns.’ Pramoedya maintained to the end of his day that the current so-called reformasi politicians are but clowns who don’t know how to lead. One is inclined to speculate at the end whether Arok will rule as wisely as all the people of Tumapel hope he will. With the highbrow Ken Dedes, who has had of a taste of power since moving into the Tumapel palace, on one side and his brave but unpolished peasant wife on the other side, Arok is, no matter how well-intentioned his vision might be, indeed in a double bind. Perhaps Arok should have heeded more closely what his Brahmin master Lohgawe has hinted at when he recounted to Arok about his restless search for the secret of Budhism’s great power. Lohgawe travels all over until one day he arrives in Ceylon and encounters a monk by the name Viriyasanti who poses this question to him: “Why does my honored friend seek the secret power of Buddhist beliefs? Is not that power to be found hidden in every person? From among all the people, one individual rises up, others carry out his will. Great worldly achievements occur because others are ready to bow down before him as his slave. He is a king. Does my honored friend aspire to become a king?”  Lohgawe ceases his search because he chooses to be a humble fumbler of knowledge.

Arok of Java is a seamlessly crafted tale unfolding initially through the viewpoints of each character taking off from different departure points of the narrative to be rejoined into one thrusting stream in the final chapters. Page by engrossing page is brought vividly alive by Pramoedya’s mastery of the era, its religion, myths and history. Max Lane’s translation captures the simplicity of Pramoedya’s prose and focuses meticulously on the flow of narrative rather than nitpicking on individual word choices. Although it is marred occasionally by such editorial mishap as misspellings of Tunggul as Tunggal Ametung, it is nonetheless a smoothly rendered work we should all be grateful for.

The Tent
By Margaret Atwood
155 Pages
Bloomsbury

If you were a multiple award-winning author and in between a serious book project, what would you do? Under the pressure from your publisher, you’d publish stuff that might in all likelihood be consigned to oblivion in one of your drawers. Stuff you desultorily jotted down on one of those insomniac nights, or rambling thoughts plucked from an afternoon torpor.

Now if you were Margaret Atwood, the scribbles, desultory or not, could very well be brilliant insights of our lives. The Tent is such a mongrel of a book. It’s hard whether to describe it as non-fiction, autobiographical or short stories without plots or just sundry thoughts from a great writer. It consists of three parts, each containing ten to fourteen prose pieces about three to four pages in length. These are small bites of fabulous writings, which could easily have been drafts that had been excised from her many books.
But on closer scrutiny these are quite personal reflections written almost in fable-like fashion. The first part of the book describes the being of the writer. It tells of the writer’s life: being an elderly established writer advising the young (Encouraging the Young), a writer’s loss of her own identity (Voice and Impenetrable Forest), media intrusion (No More Photo). In Part Two, you’ll find the flights of a writer’s imagination in tales such as Plots for Exotics, Our Cat Enters Heaven, Chicken Little Goes too Far, and The Animals Reject Their Names and Things Return to their Origins and Three Novels I Won’t Write Soon. Part Three can be easily described as a writer’s nightmarish visions: the Tent, Something Has Happened, But It could Still, and Eating the Birds.

Each of these tales is like a prose poem, lyrical but biting, a world unto itself. Reading these tales reminds me so much of Italo Calvino and the folksy feel of his stories. In their simplicity and stylistic diversity, they shine with the refracting brilliance of a gem.

In the Tent, the sense of futility for a writer in a world at conflict is described powerfully. “Why do you think this writing of yours, this graphomania in a flimsy cave, this scribbling back and forth and up and down over the walls of what is beginning to seem like a prison, is capable of protecting anyone at all? Yourself included. It’s an illusion, the belief that your doodling is a kind of armor, a kind of charm, because no one knows better than you do how fragile our tent really is. Already there’s a clomping of leather-covered feet, there’s a scratching, there’s a scrabbling, there’s a sound of rasping breath. Wind comes in, our candle tips over and flares up, and a loose tent-flap catches fire, and through the widening black-edged gap you can see the eyes of the howlers, red and shining in the light from your burning paper shelter, but you keep on writing anyway because what else can you do?”

Our Cat Enters Heaven is a whimsical tale about a cat that dies and goes to Heaven and finds God up on the tree. He goes up to God, who appears to him as a cat. “Meow, said our cat. Meow, said God. Actually it was more like a roar. I always thought you were a cat, said our cat, but I wasn’t sure. In heaven all things are revealed, said God. This is the form in which I choose to appear to you. I’m glad you aren’t a dog, said our cat. Do you think I could have my testicles back?” Then the cat notices the little creatures scuttling here and there, he asks God, “Well, how about some of those mice? They aren’t mice, said God. But catch as many as you like. Don’t kill them right away. Make them suffer. You mean, play with them? said our cat. I used to get in trouble for that. It’s a question of semantics, said God. You won’t get in trouble for that here. Our cat chose to ignore this remark, as he did not know what “semantics” was. He did not intend to make a fool of himself. If they aren’t mice, what are they? he said. Already he’d pounced on one. He held it down under his paw. It was kicking, and uttering tiny shrieks. They’re the souls of human beings who have been bad on Earth, said God, half-closing its yellowy-green eyes. Now if you don’t mind, it’s time for my nap. What are they doing in heaven then? said our cat. Our heaven is their hell, said God. I like a balanced universe.”

In a satirical piece about a writer advising to the young, Atwood waxes acidic. “What a fine and shining person I am, so much kinder than when I’d just finished being young myself. I was severe then; my standards were exacting. The young – I felt – were allowed to get away with far too much, as I had been. But now I’m generosity itself. Affably I smile and dole.” Then she admits her ulterior motive, “On second thought, my motives are less pure than they appear. They are murkier. They are lurkier.” We soon find out why in this confession. “I won’t fatten them in cages, though. I won’t ply them with poisoned fruit items. I won’t change them into clockwork images or talking shadows. I won’t drain out their life’s blood. They can do all those things for themselves.”

After the bilious satire, the grim asides, you would think you’re reading a writer in her menopausal funk. Atwood, in the closing tale But It Could Still, however, knowingly admits to this truth. “At this dim season of the year we hunger for such tales. Winter’s tales, they are. We want to huddle round them, as if around a small but cheerful fire. The sun sets at four, the temperature plummets, the wind howls, the snow cascades down. Though you nearly froze your fingers off, you did get the tulips planted, just in time. In four months they’ll come up, you have faith in that, and they’ll look like the picture in the catalogue. … what would you call them if they were in a story? Would they be happy endings, or happy beginnings? But they aren’t in a story, and neither are you. You tucked them back under the mulch and the dead leaves, however. It was the right thing to do on the darkest day of the year.”

The final line again echoes that same “What else can you do?” refrain. There’s a sense that the world spins around year long in the best and worst of times, a writer, stripped of her power to make any changes, is still needed because people still want to huddle round a small cheerful fire. Atwood radiates warmth most confidently in these wintry days of dissent and discontent.

Everyman
By Philip Roth
Jonathan Cape
182 Pages

Philip Roth is probably the most self-obsessed author you would come across in literature. For a period of time, he wrote about nothing else but himself, a Jewish boy from New Jersey, putting himself in characters such as Zuckermann or Roth, through trials and tribulations of the human experience. The Zuckermann’s series of books – The Ghost Writer, Zuckermann Unbound, The Anatomy Lesson, The Prague Orgy, The Counterlife, The Human Stain – and then the Roth series – The Facts, Deception, The Plot Against America – all deal with the themes of being a Jew, caught in the maelstroms of love, hate, and a maleficent life in America. Most of his characters are male with a strong libido, a propensity for multiple-marital mishaps, incorrigible and aged and driven with libido for younger women, undiminished by constant afflictions of health.

Some of his earlier works have ranged from brilliant, such as The Ghost Writer (about his pilgrimage to a maestro, Saul Bellow), Portnoy’s Complaint (about a Jew lusting after a goy woman), to the claustrophobically depressing Zuckermann’s books. In the past ten years, however, he has taken a sudden turn and beaten to a different tune, to a brighter and broader range, and won almost all the literary prizes a writer could ever think to win. But his obsession has never strayed very far from desires and the bodily functions.

Roth’s favorite obsession is naturally the body: what sparks the libido and propels a man to repeated follies, in the process making a mess of his life. EVERYMAN, Roth’s latest novel whose title taken from a fifteenth century English drama about the summoning of the living to the death, has a moral somewhere that tells us the all too clear message that we never just stumble into a folly, but we unwittingly let ourselves trip into the traps of life, and then come a time in our old age the reckoning of all damages committed, by then remorse is usually much too late, and we as the readers are left with all the mess left behind, trying to make some sense out of it.  Distressingly downbeat? This is by far Roth’s most uncompromising novel. The novel is packed full of characters dying or on the brink of dying of a slew of illnesses, from Peritonitis, brain cancer to fatal cardiac arrhythmia. Not your regular poolside read on a sunny day, for sure. It’s sometimes so forbiddingly morbid you want to recoil from it all, but with Roth’s mastery in language and narrative craft one is drawn into the plights of these characters. Because we hope against hope that there lies somewhere a morsel of truth, a bright ray of promise. But in this particular case, the author is adamantly unsparing. He hands us this slim book and says, Take this. This is all there is about life. The strange thing is that by the time one emerges from the novel, one feels like grabbing a beer from the freezer and guzzling it down with gusto. Because the novel makes us realize it’s great to be alive and our troubles are but trifles compared to these guys in the book, so cheers to a good life. A bad life has been examined to its microscopic details, one that is nonetheless lived to its most daring end. Which path to be taken? You wouldn’t be any wiser any way. None is freely given either. Equipped with the most caution, a man/ woman would inevitably trip and a wrong turn can mean a one-way raunchy ride to hell. Or a muddled life shed light on. So what gives? There’s really nothing to lose. The main thing then boils down to this: to have the courage not to avert your glance at the sun. So that’s probably the right state of mind to read this novel.

EVERYMAN opens with an aerial view of a burial, seen from the point of view of Everyman, thus the unnamed main character, who recently passed away after a series of heart bypass surgery. His sons, Lonny and Randy from his first marriage are there (these progenies never forgive him for leaving their mother. Randy describes his father’s attempt at painting as that of a “happy cobbler”), so are his second wife Phoebe (same bitterness for his philandering way) and her daughter Nancy (the only character in the whole novel who seems to understand him, in whom he seems to find some rays of hope (which later as you might guess falter just as well) for becoming a better person than he ever has been) and friends from his past advertising life and his brother Howie, the successful and impregnably healthy brother, admired and then envied by him for being so successful and so seemingly untouched by the kinds of trouble he had had to go through in his life. Aside from the gravedigger, a black Southerner at the end the novel, Howie is the only other character that seems to weather life’s turbulences with ease.

As the novel begins to unveil Everyman’s life, we see how he proceeds from a small Jewish boy working at his father’s watch shop to slowly turning into the “otherness,” the unrecognized being he eventually discovers he’s turned into. Ultimately his woes begin and end with his attractions to women. He left his first wife and sons to hook up with the fair-skinned Phoebe who takes good care of him and their daughter Nancy. He then leaves Phoebe for a Danish beauty, a model he runs into on a shoot. Being only in her twenties, she can’t deal with his many hospitalizations and who ultimately leaves him in the care of a hospice nurse Maureen Mrazek, who has a reputation of inspiring patients to get up from their deathbeds.

For most of the woes in his life, Everyman has this to say, when comforting Nancy who is going through a tough time being a single parent to twins, ‘ “But there’s no remaking reality,” he said softly, rubbing her back and stroking her hair and rocking her gently in his arms. “Just take it as it comes. Hold your ground and take it as it comes. There’s no other way.” ‘ A gritty truth from one who knows just about every kind of pain. For Everyman, spirituality and any other false hopes are non sequiturs. His faith is in the body. ‘ “Religion was a lie that he had recognized early in life, and he found all religions offensive, considered their superstitious folderol meaningless, childish, couldn’t stand the complete unadultness – the baby talk and the righteousness and the sheep, the avid believers. No hocus-pocus about death and God or obsolete fantasies of heaven for him. There was only our bodies, born to live and die on terms decided by the bodies that had lived and died before us.” ‘ No fancy belief here, just plain straightforward faith in one’s genes as the sole determinants of the success or failure of our lives. He in fact blames his being always shortchanged in life on the bad genes he inherits from his parents. This he sees clearly in Howie, his brother, who inherits all the best his parents can give.  This, I think, is Roth’s ironic twist of the Everyman’s rugged simplicity. To the end of his life, Everyman carries himself, with albeit ever diminishing confidence, but always with his head held high, his beliefs unflagging.

Even when he encounters the gravedigger, a black Southerner who looks to him “more like a school teacher than a hard laborer,” he learns the gritty facts of the grave digging. He spends a few hours watching the black gravedigger, questioning the details of digging a hole. He finds out that it takes three to four hours to make a hole, six feet deep, and then a couple of hours to make sure the bottom of the hole will be flat. It needs to be flat for the coffin to be properly laid down. There’s no cheap escape for truth here from the author. In the last pages of the book, we are left with the simple observation of Everyman, unfazed by the operation that will eventually take his life, “Nothing could extinguish the vitality of that boy whose slender little torpedo of an unscathed body (when he was young and surfing) once rode the big Atlantic waves from a hundred yards out in the wild ocean all the way in to shore. Oh the abandon of it, and the smell of the salt water and the scorching sun! Daylight, he thought, penetrating everywhere, day after summer day of that daylight blazing off a living sea, an optical treasure so vast and valuable that he could have been peering through the jeweler’s loupe …” And he discovers death just as he has feared it would be, i.e promising nothing other than oblivion. “ He went under feeling far from felled, anything but doomed, eager yet again to be fulfilled, but nonetheless, he never woke up. Cardiac arrest. He was no more, freed from being, entering into nowhere without ever knowing it. Just as he’d feared from the start.”

Thus lies the worn out life of Everyman. We could sense through his last few words – anything but doomed, eager yet again to be fulfilled – a glimpse of this man’s unfazed spirit for a rebound. At the end, he stares straight at the sun, not fearing its brightness, given the chance he would like to take another shot at it again. A small rugged truth from an eloquent writer who eschews all the obvious elegance of the arts to deliver level-headedly to the readers. One is left with a bitter taste in the mouth, wondering what to make of Everyman’s life. A fulfilled or unfilled life? Could this be Roth’s take on the life of an average man? Or more specifically that of the shenanigans of an artist’s life? Everyman has always tried his hand at painting. Although constantly encouraged by Nancy, he never sees himself making it as an artist. Howie, on the other hand, seems set on course, never veering away from the path he sets his mind on, and never once straying from his home. Compared to Everyman’s turbulent life, Howie leads a calm and prosperous and one could only guess a happy life as well. The reader is left with all these questions. Mr. Roth, however, having done his job, turns his head away, uninterestedly paring his fingernail.

Kalau Revolusi Perancis sering dianggap sebagai ekspresi politik paling tinggi dari semangat Pencerahan, maka ekspresi dari subyektifitas Pencerahan yang paling tinggi yang pernah mampir di Indonesia bisa dikatakan ada dalam sajak-sajak Chairil Anwar. Bagaimana mungkin? Apa manfaatnya buat kita sekarang?

“Aku” sebagai Deklarasi Subyek Pencerahan

Bukan kebetulan bahwa pengenalan kita mengenai semangat jaman dari era Pencerahan terumuskan dan dimulai dengan kata yang sama sebagaimana pengenalan kita terhadap Chairil Anwar yakni pada kata “AKU”.  “AKU” di Chairil berpadanan dengan “AKU” pada “Aku berfikir” alias cogito dari cogito ergo sum yang dikemukakan Descartes yang menjadi dasar bagi penemuan subyek Pencerahan.
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