Thesis 14

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FROM DICHOTOMY TO DIFFERENCE:

THE AUSTRALIAN LITERARY
CONSTRUCTION OF INDONESIA
————————————————————————————
STEPHEN RANKIN B.A.(Hon.), Dip. Teach., Grad. Dip.

PhD Literature
This thesis is presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of Murdoch

University.
1999
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I declare that this thesis is my own account of my research and contains as its main
content work which has not previously been submitted for a degree at any tertiary
education institution.
STEPHEN NICHOLAS
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ABSTRACT
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In this thesis, I examine a selection of Australian novels set in South East
Asia, and especially Indonesia, with a view to identifying ways in which these texts
reflect changes that have taken place in Australia’s relationship to Indonesia over the
last twenty years. I also use a number of Indonesian texts that contribute to an
understanding of this process. I draw predominantly upon novels and short stories
by the Australian writers Christopher Koch, Blanche d’Alpuget, Gerard Lee and Inez
Baranay and the Indonesian writers Umar Kayam, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Achdiat
Mihardja, Gerson Poyk and Dewi Angraenni.
In order to identify and map these changes in attitude as they are exposed in
the texts, I will adopt a postcolonial approach, with an emphasis on constructions of
otherness, using the work of a range of theorists including Immanuel Levinas, Homi
Bhabha, Michel Foucault, Frederic Jameson, Mikhail Bakhtin and Wilson Harris.
In these last decades of the century, there has been evidence in the Australian
public sphere of an increasing openness to, and understanding of, Indonesian culture
and values, both in national foreign policy and in artistic production. I argue,
however, that this apparent improvement in cross cultural relations is at best
superficial and that there is a continuing undercurrent of racism that is increasingly
masked by discursive strategies of tolerance. It is my contention in this thesis that
most of the changes in approach to Asian otherness reflected in Australian fiction in
the 1980s are actually changes in discursive techniques for the concealment of the
cross-cultural suspicion and racism which continue to underlie these narratives and
Australian culture in general in the ‘postcolonial’ period.

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In addition I assert that the novelistic attempts to aesthetically resolve the
contradictory nature of postcolonial hegemony (often through the application of
liberal / humanist notions of tolerance and equality) generate a split in Australian
literary discourse which is representative of a broader contradiction at the heart of
Australian attitudes to Asian alterity at the end of the millennium. The attack made
on ‘political correctness’, multiculturalism, and migration over the last few year in
Australia (and the surprising level of support it has received in the community) is, I
suggest, a consequence of the immense difficulty of attempting to hold together the
contradiction that exists at the heart of Australian discourse concerning the other.
More recent shifts in the Australian fictional construction of Indonesian
identity, examined in the last chapter of the thesis, suggest the emergence of
something more than the mere re-deployment of Western strategies of control. In
these later novels we see the beginnings of a negotiation of cultural alterity which
reflects both the immense difficulties and possibilities that lie ahead for Australia as it
attempts to grapple with its unique geographical context – as a Western culture
located in Asia.
I have also attempted to identify several prerequisites to the development of
genuine and productive cross-cultural dialogue and, through the reading of
Australian literary texts, have indicated the degree to which shifts in Australian
discourse have taken us closer to, or further from, their achievement.
The inclusion and analysis of several Indonesian novels and short stories
reflects the methodological indebtedness of this project to Bakhtin’s theory of
dialogism. Drawing also upon Bhabha’s conception of enunciative presence I argue

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that genuine dialogue can only be achieved with Australia’s near-neighbours through
direct contact with, and metonymic displacement at the edges of, cross-cultural
otherness.
My argument suggests that no matter how ideologically acceptable the
Western tradition of imposing orientalist conceptions may have become in recent
years (in terms of its commitment to tolerance and egalitarianism), it is no substitute
for the process of agonistic dialogue between dissimilar identities. In fact, such a
liberal / humanist approach to the construction of cross-cultural identity plays a role
in preventing effective dialogue because of the appearance of respect for otherness
that it generates. In keeping with this conception of the importance of direct
engagement in the cross-cultural process I have included and analysed several
Indonesian novels and short stories as dialogic responses to Australia’s largely
monologic production of the Indonesian subject.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION................................................................................................................................10
CHAPTER OUTLINES..........................................................................................................................23
CHAPTER 1...........................................................................................................................................33
OUTLINING THE CHAPTER...................................................................................................................33
1. LEVINAS: FREEDOM THROUGH DOMINATION.....................................................................................37
Levinas and the Philosophy of the Same........................................................................................39
Todorov: Observing, Designating, Containing..............................................................................41
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The Human Other: an Ethical Obstacle ........................................................................................45

Concealment: Three Strategies for Maintaining Good Conscience..............................................49
Postcolonial Universality: Complex Ambivalence, Political Correctness....................................59
Suppressing the Contradiction, Aggravating the Split...................................................................61
2. BAKHTIN AND BHABHA: DIALOGUE AT THE BORDERS ........................................................................65
(i) From Epistemology to Enunciation: Opening the Borders of Difference................................67
Bakhtin and the Heteroglossic Universe........................................................................................71
Hybridisation: the Conflict and Interaction of Registers...............................................................75
Privileging the Enunciative: Alternative Ways of Speaking..........................................................78
(ii) Proximity and Liminality: Meeting at the Borders of Difference............................................79
(iii)“Material Change”: A Catalyst for Dialogue.........................................................................84
CHAPTER 2 ..........................................................................................................................................89
OUTLINING THE CHAPTER : A CHRONOLOGY OF DISCOURSE.......................................................................90
KOCH AND THE COLONIAL PHASE........................................................................................................91
Imperial Adventure: The Australian Connection...........................................................................92
TRACING LANGUAGE TO DISCOURSE....................................................................................................94
Stylising the Other: Alterity as Numinosity ...................................................................................99
Horror and Spiritual Evil..............................................................................................................101
Language and the Rhetoric of Evil...............................................................................................106
CHAPTER 3.........................................................................................................................................111
OUTLINING THE CHAPTER.................................................................................................................111
ANALYTICAL STRATEGY: JAMESON AND A FOCUS ON PRODUCTION RATHER THAN OUTCOME........................113
FOUCAULT, DISCONTINUITY, HEGEMONY.............................................................................................115
SINFIELD: FAULTLINES AND PLAUSIBLE STORIES...................................................................................124
Monkeys in the Dark: A Postcolonial Rearrangement.................................................................128
Aesthetic Resolution: Papering Over the Cracks.........................................................................133
Proximity: A Contradiction Challenged.......................................................................................141
TURTLE BEACH: REPRESSION AND RELEASE......................................................................147
CHAPTER 4.........................................................................................................................................153
THE JUXTAPOSITION OF DIFFERENCE: BAKHTIN AND BUTOR...................................................................158
THE BATTLE FOR MINDS: TRADITION VERSUS FREEDOM.......................................................................164
THE INDONESIAN NOVEL: INTEGRATING THE OPPOSITES.........................................................................169
Pre-independence Indonesian Prose: Negotiating the Modern...................................................170
Nationalism: A Silencing from Within..........................................................................................176
Synthesis: Dancing with the Dichotomy......................................................................................181
SPEAKING OVER SILENCE: INDONESIAN SHORT STORIES.........................................................................184
“Dia Yang Menyerah”..................................................................................................................184
“Sri Sumarah”...............................................................................................................................187
NEGOTIATING THE EXTREMES : AN INDONESIAN NOVEL..........................................................................196
“Debu Cinta Bertebaran”............................................................................................................196
Individuality Within Community: A Mutual Dependence............................................................198
Lateral not Lineal Orientation......................................................................................................204
Freedom within Boundaries..........................................................................................................206
The Consequence of Unbounded Freedom...................................................................................210
Contributing to the Universal.......................................................................................................213
In-Between Freedom and Order...................................................................................................222
CHAPTER 5.........................................................................................................................................225
HYBRIDITY, SUBVERSION AND RECUPERATION......................................................................................228
Authenticity: A History of Maintaining the Universal.................................................................229
Hybridity and the Subversion of Authenticity..............................................................................233
Hybridity: A Genealogy of Cultural Value...................................................................................236
THE AUSTRALIAN NOVEL AND THE RECLAMATION OF THE AUTHENTIC......................................................239
Hybridity and the Corruption of Authenticity..............................................................................240
POLITICAL HYBRIDITY: EXAMPLES OF RECUPERATION............................................................................247
The Games of the Strong and the Universal Political Paradigm ...............................................251
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ASIAN HEROES: THE LIBERALS OF THE EAST......................................................................................255

INDONESIAN HEROISM : AN ALTERNATIVE CONTRIBUTION TO THE HYBRID.................................................266
Post-authenticity: The Heroic Hybrid..........................................................................................273
CHAPTER 6.........................................................................................................................................276
PRAMOEDYA: UNIVERSALITY AND INDIVIDUALITY..................................................................................280
Richard Rorty: Solidarity and Objectivity....................................................................................280
‘Kampung Mentality’ and the Enlightenment..............................................................................281
Gadis Pantai: Looking into Ideology...........................................................................................287
Community and Hierarchy............................................................................................................290
The Universal Over the Culturally Specific.................................................................................293
The Individual Over the Communal..............................................................................................296
UMAR KAYAM: CULTURAL SPECIFICITY AND COUNTERING THE UNIVERSAL...............................................299
..................................................................................................................................................299
The Priyayi Family: A Cultural Haven........................................................................................301
Priyayi Genealogies......................................................................................................................304
(i) Sastrodarsono.......................................................................................................................304
(ii) Lantip...................................................................................................................................309
(iii) Mukaram: Forgetting and Remembering..............................................................................311
(iv) Marto and Seten: Ideals or Obligations................................................................................314
Priyayiness Through Western Eyes..............................................................................................318
Suture and Interpellation: Resisting the Hybrid..........................................................................324
DEWI: THE INDONESIAN / AUSTRALIAN HYBRID....................................................................................326
CHAPTER 7.........................................................................................................................................337
1. EPISTEMIC CONTROL: THE OTHER AS DIVERSITY..............................................................................340
Stange and the Epistemic Clash...................................................................................................342
2. ENUNCIATIVE PRACTICES : THE OTHER AS DIFFERENCE.....................................................................345
THE NOVELS: TOURISTS , TRAVELLERS AND TRANSGRESSORS ..................................................................349
(i) The Tourist Traps: Avarice in Wonderland ...........................................................................350
Gerson Poyk: Bali from a Balinese Perspective..........................................................................353
(ii) The Traveller’s Tale: Matt, Marla and the Ideal Bali...........................................................362
(iii) The Transgressor of Discourse: the Agonism of Matt and Bali..........................................370
Textualising the Other...................................................................................................................370
Rejecting the Hybrid.....................................................................................................................374
Transgression and Madness..........................................................................................................376
‘TIME LAG’: CEASING AND SEIZING / UNPICKING AND RE-LINKING..........................................................379
GORDIMER AND THE WESTERN HYBRID..............................................................................................386
CONCLUSION....................................................................................................................................391
WORKS CITED..................................................................................................................................402
THE NOVELS:....................................................................................................................................414
THE SHORT STORIES:....................................................................................................................415
REVIEWS AND ARTICLES CONSULTED ON THE NOVELS AND SHORT STORIES:.....416

BLANCHE D’ALPUGET ARTICLES :.......................................................................................................416
CHRISTOPHER KOCH ARTICLES :........................................................................................................416
DEWI ANGGRAENI ARTICLES :...........................................................................................................417
GERARD LEE ARTICLES :..................................................................................................................417
GLENDA ADAMS ARTICLES :.............................................................................................................418
NADINE GORDIMER ARTICLES :..........................................................................................................418
PRAMOEDYA ANANTA TOER ARTICLES :..............................................................................................419
UMAR KAYAM ARTICLES :................................................................................................................421
WORKS CONSULTED:.....................................................................................................................421
APPENDICES:.....................................................................................................................................436
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APPENDIX 1..................................................................................................................................436
A Journalistic Shift........................................................................................................................436
Suharto as a New South Wales MP..............................................................................................438
Nearer and Dearer: Responsibility and Proximity......................................................................440
APPENDIX 2..................................................................................................................................442
Human Rights as an Australian Strategy of Control....................................................................442
APPENDIX 3..................................................................................................................................448
Passages from Debu Cinta Bertebaran:.......................................................................................448
Passages from Para Priyayi:........................................................................................................450
Passages from Di Bawah Matahari Bali: ....................................................................................452
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to express my great appreciation to Kateryna Longley, who
during an extremely busy period in her own career, provided me with the support and
advice that made it possible to bring order out of chaos. Her constant encouragement
and intellectual insights at key moments in the writing process proved to be
invaluable, not only in completing this project, but in making it an interesting and
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rewarding experience.
I would like to express a similar appreciation to Hugh Webb whose
contribution to the formulation and development of the thesis was crucial during the
first few years of research.
While Ron Blaber did not advise me during my doctoral research his
suggestions concerning theoretical direction in relation to a previous research project
continued to influence my reading and writing throughout this project. I would like
to make my indebtedness known in these acknowledgements.
My long-time friend Brian Holliday and I commenced our Ph.D research
almost coincidentally in the same year. Our innumerable discussions in the coffee
shop of the Alexander Library represent both the most lively discussions and the best
memories I have of this rather long-winded process. I thank him for those.
A number of other people who I will not name have also contributed to the
completion of this task and I will let them know how they helped me as I go along. I
will mention Peter Birt, also a friend of some years, who assisted specifically in
checking my Indonesian translations.
Most of all I would like to thank Nette. She has put up with a great deal over
the last years not only with good grace but with an easy-going sense of humour and
consideration for someone less capable than she in so many ways. I would also like to
thank Sharon, Michael, Kristy and Jessie for bearing with me through all those years
of endless typing and the requests that they: “Be quiet!”.

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INTRODUCTION
It will be argued in this thesis that the contemporary Australian
construction of Indonesian identity has passed through several shifts in emphasis over
the last fifteen to twenty years. These shifts as they are reflected in literary texts, and
the moments of historical disruption which have contributed to their emergence, will
be the central focus of my analysis and the argument that follows from it. The
primary method of approaching the analysis of these shifts will be the close reading
of Australian and Indonesian novels and short stories relating to issues of identity
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construction.
I will argue that Australia has developed a series of discursive strategies over
the last twenty years that have enabled it to resist dialogue with its Asian neighbours
while at the same time fostering the impression that such a dialogue exists as an
important part of its cross-cultural relations. I will also argue that Australian
assertions of human equality and shared global destiny conceal ongoing attitudes and
practices of hegemony and an underlying will to power over the “other”1 re-shaped to
fit postcolonial and postmodern expectations.
The enlightenment conception of human equality when applied, in the
postcolonial context, to those non-Western subjects which remain the targets of
Western hegemonic aspirations, has generated a split which the West has been unable
to resolve (without admitting the continued existence of its colonial mentality).
Nowhere, it will be argued, has the difficult nature of this contradiction become more
apparent than in Australia’s application of this strategy of concealment to its relations
with Indonesia in recent years.
1
As Jeremy Hawthorn suggests, “to characterize a person, group, or institution as ‘other’ is to
place them outside the system of normality or convention to which one belongs oneself. Such
processes of exclusion by categorization are thus central to certain ideological mechanisms.” (207)
In the argument of this thesis, the ideological categorisation relates to the cultural / racial binary
opposition which the West, as the dominant force in colonial and postcolonial discourse, has
generated in order to designate all cultural groupings, outside the category of the west, as foreign.
My use of the term in this thesis does not indicate an agreement with the hegemonic practice out of
which it has emerged but rather a reflection of the limits of description which is the linguistic legacy
of an ongoing Eurocentricism. Keeping in mind the qualifications indicated here, I will leave out the
quotation marks in relation to the words “other” and “otherness” in the rest of the thesis in order to
facilitate greater textual flow.
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The contradictory creature that has been born from the marriage of racist and
humanist values in Australia has been described by Hodge and Mishra, in Dark Side
of the Dream:
The Australian psyche is not a unitary phenomenon, which has an
Orientalist piece of ideological baggage attached somehow to it. On
the contrary, it is organised around this fissure, it is this
contradiction, and typically it projects an inarticulate, egalitarian
Orientalist, a racist republican. (emphasis added xiii)
This fissure between the ‘egalitarian’ and the ‘Orientalist’ has in turn been
severely aggravated by the recent race debate in Australia and the partial revocation
of the authority of ‘political correctness’ since the 1996 election. The political and
social discomfort that this elevation of racial tension has produced in recent years is
derived from the momentary revelation of the artifice and superficiality of liberal
rhetoric. On the basis of my readings of literary texts, it will be suggested that the
postcolonial / liberal voice of equality and justice has not engaged with cultural
difference for the purpose of negotiating it, but rather to fix “difference”2 within the
gaze of its ‘tolerance’ in order to conceal its ongoing will to rule over it. Recent
2
It is important to define the meaning that will be associated with the use of the term
“difference” in the argument of this thesis. Homi Bhabha, in an article titled “The Postcolonial and
the Postmodern: The Question of Agency”, has described the way in which “difference” is used in
specific forms which he describes as “epistemological” and “enunciative”. The epistemological
application of notions of difference relates both to the colonial / orientalist attempt to fix cultural
otherness within a framework of “foreignness” and “belatedness” and, as I will argue later in the
thesis, to a postcolonial / postmodern attempt to re-construct cultural alterity as diversity. In this
latter form otherness is celebrated but nevertheless remains the subject of western observation. Both
of these conceptions of cultural difference manage to maintain distance and fend off the threat of a
disturbing dialogue between alternative ways of seeing the world. The enunciative view of
“difference”, on the other hand, as described by Bhabha, constructs cultural otherness as both
agonistic and alternative, and therefore critically dangerous to the (western) dream of authenticity
and stable identity. According to this view “difference” represents qualities of liminality,
contradiction and indefinable complexity.
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political and sociological events have tended to expose the contradiction that the
voice of ‘political correctness’ has attempted to conceal.
The key characters in the Australian novels under consideration in the thesis,
both the Australian and Indonesian heroes of the texts, are appropriated for, and come
to epitomise, the voice of liberalism in Australia. The predisposition of these
characters to such liberal positions, along with their centrality in the narratives,
represents an important element in the reading of the novels and in the argument that
it generates. It will be a crucial line of argument in the thesis, drawn from my
reading of the Australian literary texts, that liberalism, rather than protecting the
rights of individuals in the cross-cultural setting, has provided the West with an
ideologically appropriate tool of discursive control over cultural otherness in the
postcolonial context. It is important, therefore, before proceeding with an analysis
of the novels that I explain how the term “liberalism” will be used, based upon
contemporary understanding in cultural theory.
Jean Hampton, in Political Philosophy, describes the two central strands of
divergence which sum up the extremes of the liberal argument as Lockean and
Rousseauian. The philosophical emphasis in John Locke’s argument is directed
primarily toward protecting the freedoms of the individual from the interference of
state authority. This stress on the primacy of individual rights has, in turn,
contributed to the development of strongly individualistic and meritocratic political /
social outcomes, such as the laissez-faire theory of economics in nineteenth century
England and the late twentieth century commitment to market driven economic
rationalism in much of the Western world. As Hampton explains: “This style of

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liberalism has also inspired libertarianism and other ‘right wing’ political parties and
movements (171).” Thus, liberalism in this form privileges individual liberty over
social equality and argues against giving the state the power to interfere in the lives
of individuals except to protect them from harm.
The second, or Rousseauian, strand of liberalism places greater emphasis on
the importance of equality in the production and protection of individual freedom.
According to this argument, the absence of an active state leads to the exaggeration
of privilege, the development of class distortion and the consequent incapacity of
individuals to be free in a system of competitive hierarchy. Social vulnerability is
affected, in this form, not by the power of the state but the inordinate power of
individuals. This liberal response to social injustice requires the state to be more
actively involved in administering a system that combats inequality and undue
hierarchy, and provides a democratic environment in which all may aspire to a liberty
of expression and vocation on the basis of equal access to education, health and other
social benefits.
Hampton suggests that philosophical liberalism, while clearly contradictory at
the political extremes, draws together both strains of argument in the mainstream by
accommodating ideas of individual freedom from state domination and state
participation in the protection of these freedoms. She argues that liberal theories
share certain “fundamental commitments” which include: “A commitment to the idea
that people in a political society must be free”; “a commitment to the equality of
people in the political society”; and “a commitment to the idea that the state’s role
must be defined such that it enhances freedom and equality” (179). Other elements
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such as “democracy”, “tolerance’ and “freedom of conscience” also contribute to this
conception of a fundamental view of liberalism.
It will be the argument of this thesis that the predominant liberal voice in
Australia’s relations with Indonesia over the last ten to fifteen years has followed the
Rousseauian model, stressing not only individual rights (or the perceived absence of
those rights) in Indonesia, but more centrally the lack of state participation in the
provision and protection of those rights. The Indonesian political system, in fact, has
been constructed as being active in its obstruction of individual aspirations and the
imposition of state control. The Australian fictional critique of the other in these
terms has highlighted the failings of the state to protect the individual rather than
placing its stress on encouraging individual endeavour in the face of this opposition.
As Milner and Quilty have suggested in Australia in Asia: Comparing
Cultures, the long tradition of liberal ideals in the West has heightened the divide
between east and West along the line of the non-Western state’s abuse of the “natural
rights” of the individual:
The liberal ideological package - a tradition of debate, freedom and
individualism, a stress on equality, and abhorrence of a too vigorous
official nationalism - seems to be more, not less, influential when
Australia is contrasted with Asian countries. That such values are so
well entrenched is a reminder that they are products of a long history,
in some cases reaching back through the Enlightenment and
Renaissance in Europe, and further still to the origins of the Christian

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and classical tradition….The fact that Australians react as they do, in
an apparent knee-jerk fashion, to official killings in China or
Indonesia, or to government ethnic discrimination in Malaysia or Fiji,
is a consequence of inheriting this deeply rooted liberal tradition. (10-
12)
Beyond, and following on from, this, it will be argued in chapter 1, that in the
period since decolonisation the West has intentionally extended the reach of liberal
values to incorporate the non-Western world in a construction of universality or
‘essential’ humanity. The point that I will make is that liberal philosophy, in this
form, has been applied to cross-cultural relations as a postcolonial means or strategy
for perpetuating (re-deploying) the Western will to power over otherness.
An important, though largely unrecognised, outcome of this expansion of
liberal membership, as it is argued in this thesis, has been the development of a
crucial and unresolved contradiction at the heart of Western discourse concerning the
other. The existence of this contradiction, and its effects on Australian / Indonesian
relations in recent years, will also be examined in chapter 1 and explored in several
Australian novels in subsequent chapters.
The novels themselves celebrate the reality of a liberal consciousness that has
dictated ‘enlightened’ Australian attitudes to Asian alterity over the last few decades.
Direct racism or neo-colonial paternalism, where they occur in these texts, are
generally chided for their ideological belatedness or condemned for their political
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incorrectness. The ideals of freedom, justice, democracy and individual endeavour
are marshalled in defense of a muzzled political resistance and a down-trodden
peasantry in the Third World context.
Yet at the heart of this determination to stand up for an oppressed other I will
argue there exists the shadow of a more complex hegemony, a discursive will to
power woven into, and disguised by, the vocabulary of cross-cultural concern and the
assertions of an enlightened universality. It will be suggested that while stark
colonial representations of otherness (the Hansonite enunciation of the “yellow races”
taking over the world) have entered a period of ideological unsustainability in the
climate of postcolonial politics / economics, the West has not surrendered its claim to
civilisational dominance. My argument is that it has, instead, shifted its enunciation
and practice into a region of greater ideological invisibility or compatibility. As I
will show, this has been achieved in a variety of forms each representing a specific
response to the demands of alterations in the relations of power between the West and
its Asian other over the last two decades.
Whether colonial, postcolonial, or postmodern, the West’s redeployment of its
discursive constructions of the other have managed to perpetuate, to some degree, its
own position as central and dominant. Even the humane voice of liberalism has
managed to sidestep the enormous demands and threats inherent in the development
of a genuine cross-cultural dialogic. It will be argued, in fact, that the liberal-
humanist production of the Western relationship to cultural / racial otherness, most
clearly embodied in the discourse of ‘political correctness’, represents both a catalyst

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of the recent outburst of racist outspokenness in this country, and the most effective
obstacle to the development of a rigorous cross-cultural / civilisational dialogue.
In this decade the voice of liberalism has taken on a postmodern character
which has led it to champion the cause of cultural diversity while eschewing the
challenges of cultural difference. In framing this argument, which will be developed
more fully in chapters five and seven, I have drawn in large part on Homi Bhabha’s
theoretical privileging of intercultural agonism over cross-cultural tolerance. In his
1996 article “Culture’s-In-Between”, Bhabha explains the difficulties that real cross-
cultural negotiation (a liminal dialogic) represents for contemporary liberal
discourses in relation to cultural / racial otherness:
The discourse of minorities, spoken for and against in the
multicultural wars, proposes a social subject constituted through
cultural hybridization, the overdetermination of communal or group
differences, the articulation of baffling alikeness and banal divergence.
These borderline negotiations of cultural difference often violate
liberalism’s deep commitment to representing cultural diversity as
plural choice. Liberal discourses on multiculturalism experience the
fragility of their principles of ‘tolerance’ when they attempt to
withstand the pressure of revision… In contemplating late-liberal
culture’s engagements with the migrating, partial culture of minorities
we need to shift our sense of the terrain. . . . (54-55)

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Bhabha suggests that the direction of this shift should be toward “ ‘culture-as-
difference’… the articulation of culture’s borderline, an unhomely space and time”
(55). And this, he argues, quoting Habermas, can only be achieved “once we give up
the universalising sense of ‘the self-referential subject-writ-large, encompassing all
individual subjects. . . .’” (55).
Certainly Western liberalism, like colonialism before it, represents one of the
contemporary strategies of universal discourse that ‘encompasses all individual
subjects’ and in its postmodern representation disperses them into a plurality of
contained and unnegotiated divergences contained within this universality. In
preference to this, Bhabha suggests, despite (and because of) the inherent disruption
that occurs when one recognises otherness as valid difference, that the preferred and
most productive relationship with otherness would be ‘inter-subjective’ (55) or
dialogic. Such a theoretical preference, however, is not reflected in contemporary
practice. Rather, postcolonial and postmodern liberalism have merely generated
more ideologically acceptable versions of the Western will to dominate.
It is important to recognise that this strategy of control and the
contradiction that it produces is not limited to Australia but represents and reflects a
more general Western condition. What is unique to the Australian situation,
however, is the degree to which the underlying contradiction is vulnerable to
exposure due, in large part, to Australia’s peculiar geographic context. Australia is,
in effect, hemmed in to the consideration of more drastic choices regarding the
negotiation (or rejection) of cultural/racial alterity by virtue of its geographic
situation at the bottom of Southeast Asia, its progressive separation from Western
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trading blocs, and particularly the emergence of an erratic but nevertheless
prosperous, and outspoken Asian neighbourhood.
In contrast to these strategies of control and concealment I will argue, in
the latter part of the thesis, for the necessity of active proximity, the entering of the
space between cultures, as a pre-requisite for the development of a true dialogic
relationship. This will follow Bhabha’s argument concerning the shift from
epistemological assertions of value to an enunciative or discursive construction of
cultural meaning production. This argument will be introduced in Chapter1 and
applied to Australian prose texts in Chapter 7.
The argument of this thesis, therefore, is founded on the suggestion that
Australia, in its short history, has seen itself, and by and large continues to see itself,
as a bastion of truth, civility and humanity in a region ruled by superstition, political
feudalism and social injustice. In keeping with this perception of otherness Australia
has not considered the Asian other (and in relation to the focus of this thesis, the
Indonesian other in particular) as an equal partner in a global dialectic, or a
contributor to social development, but rather as a frequently misguided and belated
alterity still requiring Western leadership in order to fully enter the modern world
Underpinning the argument and analysis of this thesis, therefore, are a
number of questions relating to Australia’s relationship to cultural alterity
(particularly the alterity of Indonesia) over the last fifteen or so years. These include
questions concerning Australia’s professed tolerance and egalitarianism. For
example: Has Australia really grown more tolerant in this era of postcolonial /
postmodern discourse? Has Australia attempted to genuinely negotiate cultural

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difference during the emergence of the discourse of global equality? Or has it merely
developed a postmodern strain of containment and control that enables it to
perpetuate racism and cultural monologism while appearing, at least to itself, not to
be doing so? In a period in which diversity and multiculturalism are celebrated, is
anglo-celtic Australia really capable of engaging with multi-ethnic realities? Is there
any sense in which Australia (and the West as a whole) has changed in its attitude to
cultural alterity since decolonisation and the emergence of the discourse of a global
humanity? Or has the West once more achieved a Nietzschean manipulation of the
“army of metaphors” (qtd. in Said, Orientalism 203) in order to reinvent and
revitalise its long reign over the cultural other?
The final question that this thesis will attempt to raise and consider will be
whether there is a way forward into the region of genuine cross-cultural negotiation,
and if so whether there are there any signs that Australia is beginning to move in that
direction? I will attempt to address some of these questions through the close reading
of a number of Australian and Indonesian prose texts which touch on issues
important to any cross-cultural dialogic.
The unique contribution of this thesis to the analysis of issues arising from the
Australian and Indonesian literary texts is derived, in part, from my experience of
Indonesia (I lived and taught in Indonesia from 1977 to 1985) and my ability to use
the language in developing a comprehension of its people and their values.
Innumerable discussions and conversations (normally in Bahasa Indonesia), the
development of long-term relationships, the extensive experience of cultural practices
(in both urban and rural settings), and the repeated challenge to firmly held cultural
preconceptions has generated liminal effects and hybrid changes in my own

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understanding of alterations in Australia’s relationship to Indonesian otherness.
It is my contention that each of the discursive shifts that has taken place in
Australia’s approach to the literary construction of Indonesian identity reflects
perceived alterations in its relations of power with Indonesia. In the last twenty years
or so several changes in attitude to Indonesia have become apparent in the texts under
consideration. These attitudes will be described in broad terms as colonial,

3
postcolonial, postmodern and dialogic.
3
The emphasis that is placed in this thesis on proximity (face to face contact) with the other,
and the need to open ourselves to a cross-cultural dialogic, is also drawn, in part, from my experience
of living in Indonesia. During the period of working closely with Indonesian nationals I developed
an acute awareness of differing perspectives and my own capacity to dismiss alternative value
systems as under-developed or inferior.
One illustration, of many possible examples, of the effects of discordant cultural viewpoints
occurred for me during what came to be known as the Petrus (or “Mysterious Killings”) Affair in
which government death squads were reportedly killing alleged criminals in the streets of cities all
over Indonesia and often leaving the bodies in public view. The toll of these public executions was
estimated to be as high as five thousand. Although at the time government involvement was denied,
everyone knew it was a government operation. Who else could it have been? Suharto himself later
admitted he had had “to apply some treatment” to the growth in criminal activity.
At the time of the killings I mentioned the “affair” to a group of Indonesian friends during a
conversation. They were intelligent men from a range of occupational backgrounds (school teachers,
businessmen and shopkeepers) with whom I had discussed political matters on several occasions.
When I brought up “Petrus” in the conversation, it was with the intention of talking about the terrible
(and obvious) fact that these people were judged and executed without trial (which involved the
presumption of guilt - a clear transgression and (from a Western perspective) inversion of “natural”
justice). Before I could detail my opinions, however, I was surprised to hear each man express his
agreement with the government actions. Ideas were enunciated in a very unforced manner about the
sacrifice of the few for the many (“Sure, some would be innocent or the victims of mistaken identity
but that was an unfortunate but acceptable price to make society safer for the majority of the
people.”). They spoke of the government’s concern to make society safer and more productive by
ridding it of criminal elements who hurt individuals and the community in general. In regard to
government involvement in such an operation they appeared to see it as something of a fatherly act,
and an expression of concern for the nation, carried out by the protective arm of the government.
It was not until that moment that I recognised the assumptions that I had been making in
regard to the beliefs of these people, several of whom I considered to be liberal-minded in political
and social matters. I can hear some in Australia, or elsewhere in the West, saying that what I heard
(but in fact failed to hear) was an expression of self-preservation on the part of a people unwilling to
involve themselves in potentially risky criticism of an authoritarian regime. Through my long
acquaintance with these men, however, it was clear to me that what I was hearing was in fact the
uncomplicated expressions of a quite different value system that privileged the needs of the
community over the rights of the individual, and thereby revealed a tangible faultline between our
ways of seeing the truth.
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Chapter Outlines
The following, and final, section of this chapter will provide a
summarised account or outline of the content of the seven chapters that make up the
body of the thesis.
Chapter 1 examines the way in which Western hegemonic discourses have
adapted to the postcolonial and postmodern shifts in the relations of power. Tracing
Emmanuel Levinas’s concept of the “philosophy of the same”, which argues that
Western philosophical tradition has necessitated the reduction of all differences to
similarity, I have suggested that certain rearrangements have occurred in the Western
strategies of control in the postcolonial context. Levinas’s theory centres on the
crucial moral contradiction that opened up in the heart of Western philosophy at the
point at which it encountered human otherness. In the light of this argument I have
suggested that each phase of the Western attempt to control and negate otherness has
required a concurrent discursive strategy of concealment in order to hide the reality
of hegemony in its relations with cultural othereness.4 As the West has moved into
the postcolonial period (and in more recent years the realisation of what
postcolonialism would require of it), its determination to maintain dominance while
propounding liberal-humanist notions of equality has exacerbated the visibility of the
consequent discursive split. Thus, the need to more effectively suppress the
contradiction has resulted in the aggravation of that which is being concealed, a fact
which has been made particularly obvious through the so-called “Hanson debate” in
this country.
4
This idea of phases of concealment is quite obviously a simplification of complex historical
and sociological cross-currents and contradictions, but I would suggest that it is a model that is
helpful in the context of the argument of this thesis, in that it identifies broad trends that relate to
perceivable shifts in the Australian constructions of Indonesian otherness.
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The second part of Chapter1 draws on Homi Bhabha’s notion of cross-
cultural interaction as an outcome of liminal engagement with cultural alterity. This
argument relates to the most recent phase of Australian literary interaction with
Indonesia.
The negotiation of cultural difference, according to Bhabha, can only be
achieved by shifting the discursive emphasis from an epistemological to an
enunciative emphasis. Cross-cultural interaction, in other words, must be unleashed
from the restrictions and demands of the culturally metaphoric (a non-contiguous
mode that must dominate and substitute alternate meaning), and raised up to the level
of discourse or culturally constructed meaning (a contiguous mode that enables
difference to be negotiated and generates a metonymic relationship at the shared
edges of otherness). A further, and equally necessary, component of the successful
negotiation of cultures is what Levinas describes as “proximity”, Bakhtin calls
“eventness”, and Bhabha calls “agonism”. It is, in other words, the face to face
encounter with, the experience rather than theorisation of, otherness. Heteroglossia
and hybridisation are central ideas in this argument.
Each of these theoretical parts within the chapter is illustrated by marked
changes or shifts in the Australian fictional construction of Indonesia over the last
fifteen to twenty years. The persistence of Australian discursive hegemony is
apparent in the reiteration of orientalist stereotypes in The Year of Living
Dangerously. The attempted renarration of the Australian relationship with
Indonesia and the consequent aggravation of the postcolonial contradictions is
evident in Monkeys in the Dark and Turtle Beach. And the attempted negotiation of
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postcolonial Indonesia in, and through, the discourses of postmodernity are, to some
degree, played out through The Edge of Bali and Troppo Man.
In Chapter2 I have argued that the first phase of the Australian literary
construction of Indonesian identity (in the period under examination) is represented
by the reiteration of colonial strategies of dominance over Indonesian otherness. This
argument is advanced, firstly, by comparing Christopher Koch’s The Year of Living
Dangerously with the preoccupations and stereotypes of the “imperial / adventure”
novels of writers like Kipling, Haggard, Henty and (with some striking variations)
Conrad, and secondly, by suggesting stylistic similarities with a common generic
point of linguistic and tropic departure in the English (particularly Conradian)
colonial description of non-Western otherness: the gothic and horror novels. Many
of the tropes and devices used to make linguistic sense of the numinous and the
spiritually other are applied to the task of interrogating and explaining the culturally
alien for the Western reader. The Australian strand of this genre is of course unique,
and this uniqueness is considered in relation to Koch’s account of Australians living
in Indonesia in the mid 1960s.
Chapter 3 focuses on what I have suggested is the shift from colonial to
postcolonial fictional constructions of Indonesia over the last twenty years. The
analysis will be directed toward identifying the postcolonial exacerbation of the
contradiction in Australian discourse concerning cultural / racial otherness embodied,
as I see it, in d’Alpuget’s novel, Monkeys in the Dark. The argument will be
developed around Frederic Jameson’s conception of aesthetic resolution, Michel
Foucault’s theorisation of historical rupture, and Alan Sinfield’s description of
cultural faultlines. It will be suggested that Blanche d’Alpuget’s novels Monkeys in

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the Dark and Turtle Beach reflect the cross-cultural difficulties experienced by
Australians in proximity to Asian otherness in a period when postcolonial realities
were beginning to be felt in Australia. The re-tooling of Western strategies of
discursive dominance, in response to the awareness of decisive changes in the
relations of power between east and West, have generated a more tangibly
contradictory situation in which cross-cultural equality is espoused at the same time
that attitudes and practices of hegemony are maintained. Proximity to the other, as
described in these novels, is shown to exacerbate and highlight the split in Western
consciousness regarding cultural / racial difference, and thereby necessitate more
effective (more ideologically appropriate) strategies of concealment, or “aesthetic
resolution”. The failure of the Australian characters in d’Alpuget’s novels to
successfully resolve this split in the Australian construction of Indonesia drives them
toward resolution by closure, which involves a direct intolerance of cultural
difference. It will be argued that such a collapse of political correctness under the
weight of ambivalence, and the failure to achieve its resolution, represents a
prophetic literary enunciation of the recent retreat into racism that has occurred
during the period of the emergence of the One Australia Party.
Chapter 4 introduces the first Indonesian texts into the thesis and provides
further explanation of their value in the development of a textual dialogue through
the juxtaposition of differences. The challenge to traditional local culture in
Indonesia by Western modernity is given a cultural and historical context in a brief
overview of the changes of emphasis from pre-independence debate in the early part
of the century to the disempowerment of the tradition / modernisation binary under
Indonesian nationalism, particularly in the New Order period. Short stories such as
“Dia Yang Menyerah” and “Sri Sumarah” are discussed in order to provide a literary
RANKIN 27
enunciation of the enormous disruption and alienation generated in Indonesian
society in the post-war period by the violent interjection of modern political and
cultural forces. The last part of the chapter concentrates on Achdiat Mihardja’s novel
Debu Cinta Bertebaran which describes the experience of a group of Indonesian
expatriates in Sydney just prior to and after the Indonesian abortive coup of 1965.
The focus of analysis here is the narrative debate concerning Western freedom and
individualism from an Indonesian (Sundanese) perspective. Achdiat, who lectured at
the Australian National University, sets up, through his central Indonesian and
Australian characters, an illuminating dialogue concerning the competing values of
social responsibility and individual freedom in the Indonesian mind.
A special contribution of this thesis in regard to primary text selection will be
the analysis of Indonesian novels and short stories in Bahasa Indonesia. Several of
these texts are largely unknown in the West and, as far as I can ascertain, untranslated
into English. Besides Debu Cinta Bertebaran, these texts include Umar Kayam’s
1992 novel Para Priyayi (which was widely read throughout Indonesia itself but has
received little critical coverage in the West), Gerson Poyk’s collection of short stories
Di Bawah Matahari Bali, and a number of Indonesian non-fiction texts including
Linus Suryadi’s Dari pujangga ke penulis Jawa and Nafas budaya Yogya, Ajip
Rosidi’s Ichtisar sedjarah sastra Indonesia, and Kitley, Chauvel and Reeve’s
Australia di Mata Indonesia: Kumpulan Artikel Pers Indonesia 1973-1988. 5 Para
Priyayi and Di Bawah Matahari Bali will be considered in chapters 6 and 7 along
with a range of other Indonesian short stories and novels which have English
5
Other fictional texts not directly analysed in this thesis, but which pertain to the issues of
individualism and alienation in the face of modernisation have also been examined in the original
including Ajip Rosidi’s Anak Tanahair: secercah kisah, Y.B. Mangunwijaya’s Burung-burung
Manyar, Achdiat’s Ateis, and Putu Wijaya and Danarto’s’s collections of short prose pieces.
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translations. 6
Chapter 5 looks at the Australian strategy of maintaining discursive
dominance by resisting the hybrid7 condition of a capitalised, nationalised,
“democratised” Indonesia in the name of a prior authenticity. According to this
process any alteration or hybridisation by Indonesian otherness in the influences of
Westernisation / modernisation8 has been viewed, from an Australian perspective, as
deficient or regressive. By employing this strategy Australia repeatedly attempts to
reclaim those influences of Westernisation / modernisation which the other, through
the processes of colonisation and post-colonisation, has assimilated and hybridised.
Any alterations or additions that the cultures of otherness have incorporated into
those institutions or value systems to which the West makes an ongoing claim, are
constructed by the West as regressive in relation to their ‘authentic’ form. Thus, the
6
Wherever possible I have read the Indonesian texts in the original Bahasa Indonesia, even
where English translations are available, in order to gain a “truer” sense of tone and cultural nuance.
Edwin Gentzler notes in his chapter on “Polysystem Theory and Translation Studies” (in his book
Contemporary Translation Theory) that it is important to recognise that the process of translation
itself is not innocent or devoid of cultural / psychological interference. Any reading of non-English
texts which involves the concept of “translation equivalence” is, in these terms, open to question:
Translation Studies disciples, like several translation theorists before them, tended
to look at one-to-one relationships and functional notions of equivalence; they
believed in the subjective ability of the translator to derive an equivalent text that in
turn influenced the literary and cultural conventions in a particular society.
Polysystem theorists presume the opposite: that the social norms and literary
conventions in the receiving culture (“target” system) govern the aesthetic
presuppositions of the translator and thus influence ensuing translation decisions.
(107)
On this basis, and in order to reduce the cultural filtering effect of two readings, I have tried to refer
to the original language text in my analyses, but have tended to use existing translations for in-text
quotations where English translations were available.
7
While “hybridity” in its postcolonial context is a complex and frequently changing concept,
Homi Bhabha’s definition of the hybrid, as explained in his article “Signs Taken for Wonders”,
represents the broad thrust of its application in this thesis:
Hybridity is the revaluation of the assumption of colonial identity through the
repetition of the descriminatory identity effects. It displays the necessary
deformation and displacement of all sites of discrimination and domination. It
unsettles the mimetic narcissistic demands of colonial power but reimplicates its
identifications in strategies of subversion that turn the gaze of the discriminated
back upon the eye of power. (173)
My use of this concept will be examined in greater detail later in the chapter.
8
‘Westernisation’, rather than ‘modernisation’, will be the preferred term throughout this
thesis. The reason for using this more ethnocentric term is deliberate and has to do, in large part,
with the argument made by Emmanuel Levinas concerning the character of western thought and its
influence on the relationship of the west to all cultural / racial others. Levinas’s argument, and its
application to the direction of this project, will be examined in detail in chapter 1.
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West makes repeated demands for “free and fair elections” and “truly representative
democracy” in a way that allows no room for the negotiation or cultural assimilation
of those values. This discursive rigidity represents, I have argued, a fear of the
subversive effects of the hybrid on the notion of universal value, a notion in which
the West has a hegemonic stake. By examining the “Indonesianised” liberal-
democratic hero that has been inserted into novels such as The Year of Living
Dangerously, Monkeys in the Dark and Glenda Adams’ The Games of the Strong I
suggest an attempt on the part of Australian writers to disentangle non-Western
values from the processes of democratic expression in Indonesia in order to reclaim
its ‘authentic’ nature. The assertion of universal values in relation to such concepts
as democracy and individual human rights represents, in this sense, an extension of
the Western strategy of maintaining its own position as the dominant discursive voice
in the postcolonial context.
Chapter 6 provides a range of Indonesian literary responses to the interruptions of
modernity, from the adoption of the universalist view, to a counter discursive
rejection of universality in the name of cultural specificity, to a mediated, more
agonistic negotiation of difference through the process of active hybridisation. I have
argued that mainstream Indonesian writers can themselves be divided into those who
enunciate the universal, those who oppose the universal through the privileging of the
local, and those who stress the importance of the hybrid. I have suggested in this
chapter that writers like Pramoedya and Mochtar Lubis (while inhabiting quite
opposite political positions in Indonesian society) share a belief in universal values
(albeit from ideologically disparate vantage points). While both writers are critical of
Western political / social practice they construct their writing around a conception of
‘universal’ (or ‘human’) justice and truth. Novelists like Umar Kayam, on the other
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hand, draw directly on elements of cultural specificity to combat the insidious effects
of the centre on Indonesian cultural values. Other writers such as Dewi Anggraeni
and Achdiat Mihardja suggest, through their writing, the value of hybrid outcomes
relating to the negotiation of cultural difference. Writers like Umar and Achdiat are
less well-known outside Indonesia, partly, I would suggest, because their work
reflects a point of view less easily assimilated by a Western readership.
The major part of this chapter encompasses the analysis of two novels, and a long
short story, which represent these points of view: Pramoedya’s Gadis Pantai, Umar
Kayam’s Para Priyayi and Dewi Anggraeni’s “Uncertain Steps”.
Chapter 7 examines what might be described as Australian postmodern literary
constructions of Indonesia in the 1990s. The theoretical emphasis in this chapter is
on Bhabha’s argument concerning the liminal encounter, the cross-cultural entrance
into the agonism and negotiation of time-lag which generates hybrid outcomes.9 The
two Australian novels considered in this chapter, The Edge of Bali and Troppo Man,
deal primarily with the Australian tourist experience of Bali and the ironies of the
Australian ‘traveller’s’ rejection of the tourist ethos. These novels can be described
as postmodern not in their generic literary form, which if anything is realist /
modernist, but rather in relation to their philosophical (anthropological) approach to
Balinese alterity. Under the influence of Western academic and political correctness
in the 1990s both texts address issues of cultural diversity, of the other as alternative
rather than belated.

9
It should be noted that Homi Bhabha’s assertions of the hybrid dynamic (which will form a
central focus of the overall argument of the thesis) are liminal, and therefore represent gradual,
minimal and intermittent changes in identity. Bhabha’s displacement of intercultural dialogue to the
boundaries (the edges) of difference, away from the central metaphors of cultural understanding, is a
recognition of the value, the necessary fact of cultural / national identity, and the limited capacity of
cultures to negotiate their other. Bhabha’s theoretical suggestions therefore represent a way out of
total cultural rigidity and closure, rather than a way into chaos.
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Inez Baranay’s The Edge of Bali approaches its subject strongly cognisant of
its cross-cultural responsibility, as can be seen by its ‘appropriate’ responses and
critical tone, imparted to it by postcolonial theories. In keeping with Bhabha’s
theorisation of the disavowal of difference (“Signs taken for wonders” 172) The Edge
of Bali achieves a postmodern correctness by celebrating diversity, while at the same
time disarming the threat of difference. Otherness in this form represents an object of
study and even worship. Gereme R. Barmé, in his recent article “The Great Con” in
the Australian’s Review of Books touches on this conception of element of a
“romantic hype about Asia” (8) when he writes:
How tiresome, indeed, it has been during the past decade to hear the
nouveau-converts to Asia literacy lecture on the virtues of the Asian
world. “Asian Values” has been touted as some unique concatenation
of spiritual and cultural factors that have been at the core of the
extraordinary economic developments from Japan through to India,
China down to Indonesia since the 1970s. Australians have been
among the most self-righteous and tireless advocates of the Asian
Value myth. (8)
Permitted only a separate (rather than interactive) existence it is kept at a distance
and thereby denied the capacity to interrupt or threaten self-identity. According to
this argument, postmodern / post-structural theories of cultural alterity form a
contemporary strategy of dominance concealed within liberal-academic ideology.
Gerson Poyk’s short story “Kuta, di Sini Cintaku Kerlip Kemerlap” from his Di
Bawah Matahari Bali collection generates a powerful critique of tourist perceptions

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of Balinese culture and a useful counterpoint to Baranay’s critical construction of the
Australian tourist figure. Poyk’s text provides an illuminating literary insight into the
struggles and stresses of the Indonesians of the 1990s, faced by the onslaught of a
rapacious modernity.
The second novel in this chapter, Gerard Lee’s Troppo Man is the only
Australian fictional text, of those examined in this thesis, that takes the reader into
the early stages of a culturally dialogic encounter with otherness. Rather than fixing
the other within a Western construction and celebration of its diversity, Troppo Man
draws the reader into the space between cultures, an agonistic zone that loosens the
edges of identity and allows the possibility of real cross-cultural engagement. It will
be argued, drawing on the theoretical approach of Homi Bhabha, that it is only in this
region of cultural displacement that a genuine negotiation of cross-culturality can be
achieved by Australia in relation to Indonesia, therefore, through the process of (what
Bakhtin calls) dialogic hybridisation. In accordance with this view, it will be
suggested that Australian negotiation requires a willingness to enter into that more
difficult process of agonistic engagement as opposed to the current liberal attempt to
maintain a binary opposition of toleration.

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CHAPTER 1
This thesis will examine Australian novels set in Indonesia,10 in order to
demonstrate the ongoing nature of the Australian will to power over the Indonesian
other, particularly as it has manifested itself in recent strategic shifts in the Australian
construction of Indonesian identity. These shifts have occurred, it will be argued, in
response to alterations in the relations of power between Australia and Indonesia over
the last twenty years. Several Indonesian novels and short stories, which can be read
as responding to the issues raised by the Australian texts, will also be analysed in
order to provide an approximation of cross-cultural dialogue.
Outlining the Chapter
10
Published between 1980 and 1995.
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In this chapter I will outline the three theoretical approaches which will
provide a framework for the argument that will be developed in this chapter, and
which will undergird and direct the overall analysis of the novels in the later chapters
of the thesis.
The first of these theoretical models relates to the persistent nature of the
Western will to dominate otherness (which, I will argue, has continued well into the
postcolonial period). The theories of Emmanuel Levinas concerning Western
consciousness and its relationship to otherness suggest that the West has constantly
adapted its strategies of control in order to maintain its habit of dominance with a
clear conscience.
I will argue, in this chapter, that these adapted strategies can be identified in a
number of Australian texts from the 1980s which reflect the rearrangement (or
retooling) of Australia’s discourses concerning the non-Western other. These
adaptations, it will be suggested, represent a shift from colonial to postcolonial
discourse.
The ‘postcolonial’ novels under consideration in this thesis represent, I will
argue, a literary attempt to achieve an aesthetic resolution of the contradictions that
such projects of concealment have generated. The novels, written by Christopher
Koch, Blanche d’Alpuget and Glenda Adams, constantly returned to the site of the
ideological conflict between the rhetoric of equality and the reality of an ongoing
colonial mentality and practice. These literary texts reflects the inherent complexity
RANKIN 35
of achieving a satisfying resolution of this split in Australian discourse concerning the
other.
Each novel represents a phase of novelistic adaptation to an historical stage, or
point of disruption, corresponding to an identifiable phase in Australia’s political
construction of Indonesian identity. Each text represents either complicity with the
concealment of Western hegemony (in its several forms) or an attempt to resolve the
difficulties which the strategies for concealment generate within Western postcolonial
consciousness. Koch’s novel The Year of Living Dangerously, for example, draws,
stylistically, on the imperial/adventure genre of Kipling, and the “heart of darkness”
imagery of Conrad, to anchor his text in a familiar landscape of orientalist/colonial
categorisation. Despite Koch’s claims to the contrary, I will argue that The Year of
Living Dangerously reflects the Australian connection with European colonialism,
identifies with its values, and appropriates its tropes, representing in the process the
concealment of ongoing colonial hegemony in its construction of Indonesia as a
belated (or intrinsically backward) otherness.11
D’Alpuget, on the other hand, applies the ambivalent voice of a distinctly
postcolonial Australia to her construction of Indonesia, and in so doing is confronted
by the intractable difficulty of the Western contradiction concerning cultural
otherness. Her first novel, Monkeys in the Dark, struggles to resolve the split
between the modern assertion of egalitarianism and the reality of a persistent racist
hegemony (a continuation of the colonial connection) within Australian discourse.
11
In an article titled “The New Heresy Hunters”, Koch rejects criticisms of his novel as
‘racist’ arguing that “most literate Australians know that The Year of Living Dangerously, has been
seen as a novel which is totally sympathetic to the culture of Indonesia” (1986:46),
RANKIN 36
Turtle Beach, reflecting d’Alpuget’s failure to achieve resolution in her previous
novel, confronts Asian alterity with less ambivalence, resorting instead to the
production of a typically colonial binary opposition which generates an emphatic
ideological closure. Glenda Adams’s Games of the Strong further strains the
contradictory nature of Australian dealings with Indonesia in its critique of the
autocratic gaze of the New Order which it wraps in the panopticon of Western
postcolonial classification and discursive control, the prior (and prioritised) gaze
concealed within ‘universalised’ Western discourse. Each of these novels, therefore,
reflects the way in which a society under extreme internal pressure dreams, or
projects, resolution onto its artistic and mythic productions, and so generates a
reassuring narrative of closure and justification.
Frederic Jameson introduces the idea of aesthetic resolution in The Political
Unconscious, when he writes:
Art constitutes a symbolic act, whereby real social contradictions
insurmountable in their own terms, find a purely formal resolution in
the aesthetic realm. (79)
In the second part of the chapter I will present aspects of the theories of
Mikhail Bakhtin and Homi Bhabha concerning cross-cultural interaction and
hybridity. These will be employed later in the thesis to analyse a more recent phase
of Australian interaction with Indonesian identity, as it has been represented through
the novels of the 1990s. I will argue that these novels, The Edge of Bali and Troppo
Man, reflect more contemporary (postcolonial and postmodern) strategies of

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concealment, but also a greater sense of displacement and alienation within the
Australian subject, which generates a greater capacity (and requirement) to negotiate
the cultural alterity of the other. More than merely adapting colonial discourse, these
texts take the reader toward what Homi Bhabha describes as liminal regions of
difference between cultures, raising questions not only about the other but also (and
more importantly in relation to the focus of this thesis) about Australia itself. Lee’s
Troppo Man, in particular, represents a shift away from the Australian reliance on
epistemological points of anchorage and toward a greater willingness to genuinely
negotiate the meaning of otherness on a discursive level. This process, as it is
described in Bhabha’s theory, involves a redirection of critical focus toward the
metonymic/combinatory potential of what he calls the “enunciative present”.
These two main parts of the chapter that I have briefly introduced, then,
represent the theoretical backbone of the thesis and this will be elaborated in what
follows.
1. Levinas: Freedom Through Domination
The first theoretical model that I will focus on relates to the production of the
Western mentality of colonial domination (which has been maintained well beyond
the colonial period by the application of strategies of concealment), and the influence
of this mentality in the West’s ongoing resistance to the negotiation of cultural
difference. In the course of this brief examination it will be argued that the West is
philosophically tied to the project of universalisation. The goal of such a project has
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been the control of all alterity in order that it might be reduced to the ‘same’, so that
the centre might attain freedom from the threat of difference.
I will extend this theoretical model, under the subheading “The Human Other:
an Ethical Obstacle”, by arguing that the persistence of this hegemonic mentality (the
unwillingness of the West to give up its assertion of cultural / political superiority)
has, in the postcolonial context (i.e. in spite of the concurrent emergence of
discourses of global equality), generated a fundamental ideological split in Australian
discourse concerning cultural / racial otherness.
Following on from this observation it will be suggested, under the heading
“Concealment: Three Strategies for Maintaining a Clear Conscience”, that the West
has employed a range of strategies to overcome the consequences of this
ambivalence. Three phases of concealment will be suggested (“The Inhuman Other:
Utilisation”, “The Inferior Other: Education”, and “The Equal Other:
Universalisation”), each of which represents strategic responses to changes in the
prevailing ideological contexts.
In the final part of this theoretical argument, it will be suggested that the most
recent strategic constructs have tended to aggravate the split in Western cross-
cultural discourse, to the degree that it has become progressively more difficult to
hold opposing liberal and hegemonic discourses together as a plausible whole. These
arguments will represent the foundation for my later consideration of the approaches
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taken to the production of the Indonesian subject by the Australian novels of the
1980s.
Levinas and the Philosophy of the Same
I will analyse this ongoing spirit of hegemony (which continues to undergird
Australian attitudes and practices in relation to Asian alterity), and the complicating
of conscience which it has generated, through the theoretical framework of
Emmanuel Levinas’s argument concerning Western attitudes to otherness, and
Tzvetan Todorov’s critical application of Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism to the cross-
cultural context.
Levinas has suggested, in his Collected Philosophical Papers, that the will to
power over otherness is written into Western consciousness to such a degree that
despite the variety of material changes (i.e. social, political, economic) that have
taken place in international relations since decolonisation, it continues, and will
continue, to adapt itself in order to maintain its control of the multi-vocality of
otherness. In “Philosophy and the Idea of the Infinite”, Levinas asserts that the
driving force behind Western thought from Socrates to the present day has been the
desire to produce a context within which ‘thinking beings’ (i.e. Western ‘thinking
beings’) can feel free from the disturbance of difference and alienation; a context in
which they can feel always at home in the world. Levinas describes the thinking
behind the production of such a context as ‘the Philosophy of the Same’ in which
freedom is not defined in terms of heterogeneity and the capacity to choose from
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diversity but rather in terms of monology and the capacity to resist the threat of
diversity. This interiorised or narcissistic focus, which Levinas (borrowing from
Husserl) calls an egology, eschews the external encounter with otherness (and the
experience of shock and displacement which it entails), preferring instead to “dissolve
the other’s alterity” into “the network of a priori ideas, which I bring to bear so as to
capture it” (97).
Thus, freedom seen from the perspective of the “philosophy of the Same” is
defined by Levinas12 as:
the thinking being’s refusal to be alienated, the adherence, the
preserving of his nature, his identity, the feat of remaining the same
despite the unknown lands into which thought seems to lead.
Perceived in this way, philosophy would be engaged in reducing to
the Same all that is opposed to it as other… Freedom, autonomy, the
reduction of the other to the Same, lead to this formula: the conquest
of being by man over the course of history. (qtd. in Peperzak 91)
According to Adriaan Peperzak such an idea of freedom involves “the absence
of all exterior constraints and victory over all alienation by the appropriation and
possession of all that at first seems astonishing and foreign” (44).
Western philosophy, in these terms, sees its task as the containment and
control (in Platonic terms) of ‘opinion’; the channeling of heteronomy into the
mainstream of Western autonomy. The outcome of this logic of freedom is

12
In the full text of “Philosophy and the Idea of the Infinite” included in Peperzak’s Toward
the Other.
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inexorable and inescapable: the absorption of the strangeness of the other into a
predetermined conceptual framework which must, in order to displace displacement
and alienate alienation, always be extended outward. It can permit no exceptions, in
order for the Western ego to secure a safe place in the world. The objective of the
Western dominance of alterity is, as a necessary consequence of such a philosophical
outlook, always directed toward the universal coverage and containment of otherness.
Levinas writes: “Freedom will triumph when the soul’s monologue will have reached
universality, will have encompassed the totality of being (95).”
As long as there is foreignness which has not been understood by, and
positioned within, the Western paradigms of thought, as long as difference survives
outside of the Western network of universal categories and concepts, then the West
remains vulnerable to its disturbance. Alterity, therefore, must be stripped of its
capacity to subvert the universal by being made into a category of that universality, a
category usually defined in terms of inferiority and belatedness.
Todorov: Observing, Designating, Containing
A formative stage in this strategy for containing otherness within the Western
“universal” is the acquisition of knowledge concerning the other, the focus on
understanding the customs and beliefs of human otherness, which has historically
enabled the West to select and refine strategies most appropriate to its task of
domination. As Peperzak writes in To the Other, freedom in Levinas’s terms is:

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[T]he integration of everything in the immanence of a total knowing.
Freedom and immanence! The reduction of all alterity to the reflexive
identity of a supreme consciousness is the ideal of autonomy, the
legislation of the Same. (45)
Tzvetan Todorov, in an interesting study of colonial subjugation, titled The
Conquest of America, provides a useful illustration of this Western strategy for
bringing otherness under its own discursive domination through the accumulation and
control of knowledge. He describes the historical stages of the Spanish (i.e.
European) conquest of the Aztecs in which rapid domination was achieved, in large
part, through the accretion and exploitation of information about Aztec beliefs and
customs.
This capacity to dominate otherness through the aggregation of knowledge
(the quality of observing and learning about the other in order to exercise power over
it) is, according to Todorov, what differentiated the Spanish approach to cultural /
racial alterity from that of the Aztecs who were eventually overcome by a vastly
inferior military force. The deciding factors which served the Spanish desire for
dominance over the other and which disempowered the Aztecs, and finally deprived
them of control over their land and culture, were contained within the differing
paradigms and valorisations of knowledge and language.
While the Aztec interpretation of the alterity of the invaders “is made in the
context of a communication with the world, not that with men” (i.e. the consulting of
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oracles and the interpretation of dreams), Cortes focused his attention on gathering
information about the human other. For Cortes, knowledge of the other represented
power both in terms of military strategy and in relation to the European need to
contain strangeness within the paradigm of the Western universal. Todorov suggests
that the extraordinary success of the West in its project of conquest was:
chiefly due to one specific feature of Western civilisation which for a
long time was regarded as a feature of man himself, its development
and prosperity among Europeans thereby becoming proof of their
natural superiority: it is, paradoxically, Europeans’ capacity to
understand the other. (248)
In Levinas’s terms, the European stress on gathering information about human
otherness represented an expression of the Western sense of needing to enclose
otherness within a thematisation or conceptualisation. This requirement of the
Western psyche was expressed through the strategy of defusing and domesticating
alterity and achieving a semiotic or discursive predominance which, in turn, provided
freedom from the threat of alternative cultural practice and belief. Edward Said, in
Orientalism suggests that Western academia managed the threat of alterity by
encapsulating it within the boundaries of Western thought, by defining and delimiting
it through language, so that:
…anyone employing orientalism…will designate, name, point to, fix
what he is talking about with a word or a phrase, which then is
considered to have acquired, or more simply to be, reality. (72)

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Such a designation of alterity implies its prior investigation, an exploration
(however superficial or mistaken) which enables the centre to speak with sufficient
authority (from its own perspective) to appear to understand and speak on behalf of
otherness.
For Cortes, in Todorov’s description of Spanish conquest, this speaking (i.e.
the application and exploitation of language) is a tool “for manipulation of the other”
(123). It is also a linguistic manifestation, of the philosophy of the same, the semiotic
face of ideological dominance. Cortes always keeps his eye on the human other, is
always alert to any opportunity to manipulate their dependence on the other-worldly
in order to weaken their resistance and give their defeat a quality of symbolic
inevitability. As Todorov explains: “Speech is more a means of manipulating the
other ideas, than it is a faithful reflection of the world.” (118)
Todorov asserts that the typical European approach to alterity has been to
define and reduce it to either accord with, or be seen as subservient to Western
standards and values. The other is treated either as “equal”, and therefore able to be
assimilated into the “universal” Western culture, or as different, and therefore
(necessarily) “inferior” (42). He describes these alternatives as “assimilationist” and
“hierarchical” and explains how each, while taking divergent paths, is derived from
the same sense of cultural superiority. In terms of Levinas’s argument these
strategies reflect the Western need to reduce otherness to sameness.

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The Western dismissal, or assimilation, of otherness has enabled it to remain
relatively constant and unchanged by its encounter with alterity. Thus the West has
been able to maintain a greater degree of cultural / national autonomy in the global
13
context than the non-West.
The Human Other: an Ethical Obstacle
The West, however, has been changed by its relations with non-Western
alterity and these changes have not simply been the result of a passive ‘infection’ or
influence from non-Westernness. They have also emerged from active choices made
by the West to adapt itself to otherness. Even a cursory reading of colonial and
postcolonial history would indicate that any construction of Western domination
which portrays a binary opposition in which the West is always in a position of
dominance, unaffected by alterity, is, at best, inaccurate. Certainly, as I will argue
later in the chapter, the subversive effects of heteroglossia and hybridity have
influenced Western values in critical and enduring ways.
Yet beyond this influence of the other, the West itself has made decisive
alterations (adaptations) in its attitudes and practices in relation to otherness, at key
transitional moments in colonial and postcolonial history (i.e. the West has, at certain
13
It must be remembered that the experience of dialogic uncertainty and contested cultural value is a
reflection of the history of the margin, the alienation and enforced adaptation already endured by the
other under the domination of the colonial logos. The colonial experience was an hierarchic
exchange productive of manifestly unequal cultural influences and transformations. The Englishman
of the colonial period was to some degree transformed by the India which he had colonised, either
through the experience of occupation, or the narration of that occupation through the prose, poetry,
and travel literature of the period. The Indian, on the other hand, was invaded and changed from
within; his territory was forever marked by the English presence; his language marginalised; his
political practice overwhelmed. While interaction and cultural cross-pollination occurred
throughout the colonial period, the most authoritative, intrusive and influential voice was European.
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stages, actively and purposefully negotiated otherness rather than merely attempting
to reduce it to the “universal”). This adaptation to otherness raises a question: given
Levinas’s argument concerning the Western propensity (the perceived necessity) to
dominate difference and reduce it to the same, and its military and economic capacity
(particularly during the colonial period) to enforce that domination, why has the West
chosen, at certain historical points in its relationship with otherness, to negotiate and
change itself (rather than the other) in a way that would appear to contradict its own
strategy for achieving freedom from alterity.
The resolution of this apparent contradiction in Western practice is to be
found, it will be argued, by redirecting our analytical attention away from purely
ontological (and political) reasoning (which would appear to provide answers
inconsistent with, and detrimental to, Western interests) toward the examination of
ethical / moral considerations. According to Levinasian theory, the challenge to the
Western achievement of control over alterity has come in the form of the human face
of otherness, wherein the original pretext of Western domination: the privileging of
the “thinking being” (or human consciousness) over the other is revealed to be
inadequate and unjust. The fact that human consciousness achieved a prior and
superior place in Western thought from Plato onward meant that while “nature
[natural otherness] is made to submit by the ego through consumption, dwelling,
manipulation, work and technology” (Peperzak 42), human otherness can resist and,
if permitted to speak back, has the capacity to undermine the claims of the Same by
interjecting its “equal right” to dominance in terms of the original justification of the
Same (i.e. the priority of human consciousness over otherness).

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As Levinas puts it, if “exterior things” are able to be subverted and reduced to
usefulness, thereby confirming:
the philosophy of the Same, without ever putting into question the
freedom of the I, is this also true of men? Are they given to me as
things are? Do they not put into question my freedom? (qtd. in
Peperzak 98)
Of course, in terms of the original justification of the philosophy of the same,
they do. The human face of the other must generate a moral pause to the same degree
that non-human otherness provides moral vindication. Extending Levinas’s claims, I
will argue in this thesis, that the persistent nature of the Western will to power over
otherness, coupled with the ethical challenge that human alterity has placed on
Western hegemony, has produced a fundamental split or faultline in Western
discourse and practice concerning the other.
This faultline, left unnegotiated, produces two negative outcomes: firstly, the
disturbance of traditional structures of meaning, in which the appearance (the shock)
of human otherness cuts Western certainty adrift from its traditional philosophical
moorings by challenging the Western claim to the possession of “ultimate meaning”
(Peperzak 99); and secondly, the emergence of “bad conscience”, which can only be
allayed if the Western dominance of human otherness can be justified in terms other
than those derived from the conception of the superiority of human consciousness.
Thus, the foundation of Western truth and predominance is brought into question by
the face of the human other, which introduces alternative (multiple) ‘truths’ and
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subverts the justification of Western control through its own humanity. As Levinas
explains it: “Freedom is put into question by the other; and is revealed to be
unjustified” (qtd. in Peperzak 99).
Peperzak, drawing on Levinas’s theory, elaborates on this dilemma by
describing the “radical turn” that occurs,
when the consciousness of a free ego discovers the injustice of its
monopoly confronting the existence of another (Autrui). This
discovery does not simply add an accidental surplus to an essentially
innocent consciousness; it also reveals a certain duplicity in the heart
of the subject: spontaneously inclined to a universal conquest, it is at
the same time aware that since there are others, the world and I belong
(also) to them.” (emphasis added 99)
In accordance with this view, I would suggest, that the ethical consideration
that has had a fundamental effect on Western relations with the colonial and
postcolonial other (an effect which has intervened to complicate and generate a
contradiction within the discourse of the other), has been the Western desire to
achieve its domination of otherness with a clear conscience.14
14
The weakening of British moral authority (and as a consequence, material authority) in its
attempt to maintain control over a non-violently resistant Indian population in the 1930s, or the
complication of Dutch domination of an Indonesian society re-framed (at the beginning of the
twentieth century) by the ideas and language of the Ethical Policy, represent examples of the impact
of “good conscience” on the western practice of domination, and in the production a fundamental
contradiction in western relations with the other.
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The encounter with the ethical limits of hegemonic expansion, in the face of
the human other, has threatened (periodically) to deconstruct the Western arrogation
of dominance and to defer (endlessly) its attainment of the promise of freedom (i.e.
the control and containment of all otherness).
Concealment: Three Strategies for Maintaining Good Conscience
The Western response to the limits imposed by an alternative human identity
has not, however, been to renounce the ongoing will to power over human otherness,
in order to restore good conscience, but rather has been to disguise the transgression
of its own ethical premise through a series of strategies of concealment.15 Therefore,
in order that the pursuit of universal control, the reduction of alterity to the same,
could continue and the promise of freedom be maintained, the split which emerged in
Western discourse concerning the other necessitated the production of strategies of
concealment appropriate to each phase in ideology and each stage in the relations of
power between the West and the other.
In accordance with this claim, it will be argued that whenever the West has
chosen to negotiate otherness it has not been in order to change but in order to
protect itself from the necessity of change. In these terms, negotiation could be seen
as an attempt to conceal guilt rather than achieve a genuine dialogue with difference.
15
These strategies are revealed by the Australian prose texts under consideration later in the
thesis.
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On the basis of this argument, therefore, negotiations with (and adaptation to)
the non-Western other can be seen not only as a strategy to maintain the Western
position of dominance, but also to preserve a clear conscience in the process of
domination. Thus, I would argue that the intersection or collision of the Western will
to dominate otherness, and the emergence of human alterity that undermines the
justification for such domination, has generated an unresolved flaw or contradiction
in the ontology of the West, and necessitated the emergence of practices of

16
concealment.
Even a brief examination of colonial history reveals that the process of
concealing the West’s guilt concerning its control of human otherness has a long
pedigree and has passed through a range of strategies as each has become exposed by
shifts in ideology. From the outset of the period of colonial rule, recognition of
alternative human subjectivity produced within the centre a moral pause, an
unsettling interrogation of the ‘self-evidence’ and universality of its truths. This
disturbance within Western consciousness generated what I will term the first of three
strategies of concealment in the Western colonial and postcolonial relationship with
the other.
16
This threat to the western narrative of truth has evoked two outcomes: a more determined
response by the west, and a more difficult consequence for the west. Firstly, in relation to the
western response to non-western otherness, contact with a profoundly different human other has
made the quest for conformity, the need to reduce difference to a clearly defined and controlled
discursive space, even more urgent because a distinctly alternative consciousness appears to threaten
the western assertion of universality in a far more radical way than could ever have been produced by
local differences (i.e. differences within the European context between versions of westernness.).
Secondly, in terms of a more difficult consequence generated by this alterity, the very act of taking
control of, and imposing conformity on, an ‘other’ consciousness, an alternate egology (which
appeared necessary for the maintenance of western universality and freedom), opened a reflexive
guilt within the western logos, an experience of bad conscience which required appropriate strategies
of concealment (of repression within the subject) in order that the project of domination could be
sustained. Thus, western consciousness in relation to the cultural / racial other became, and remains,
split. As Peperzak describes it: “In turning toward the alterity of the other, I discover that my
freedom is called into question; the other’s appearance reveals the injustice of my monopoly (53).”
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(i) The Inhuman Other: Utilisation
The first strategy represents the most extreme approach of Western disavowal
and discursive manipulation. In this phase of domination, the ‘troubling of good
conscience’ was deflected by the denial of the humanity (the human value of
otherness), or by the reduction of the other to an extreme or subhuman condition of
humanity, an evil ‘negative-entity’ potentially destructive of truly ‘civilised’ (human)
society. As Sartre writes of the colonising soldier in his preface to Wretched of the
Earth:
[S]ince none may enslave, rob or kill his fellow-man without
committing crime, they lay down the principle that the native is not
one of our fellow-men…the order is given to reduce the inhabitants of
the annexed country to the level of superior monkeys in order to
justify the settler’s treatment of them as beasts of burden. (13)
This devaluation of otherness into animal or sub-human subjectivity relieved
the earliest coloniser of the burden of guilt, which accompanied the conquest and
exploitation of (an)other human consciousness in search of freedom. “What is
denied,” Todorov writes, “is the existence of a human substance truly other,
something capable of being not merely an imperfect state of oneself” (42). Where the
attribution of distinctly negative qualities (qualities which still retained strong
elements of bestiality and sub-humanity) were assigned to the other it provided the
West with an oppositional subjectivity valuable in the production of a distinct self-

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identity and an excuse for the mistreatment or massacre of the other (i.e. in the cause
of protecting civilised, truly human society).17
(ii) The Inferior Other: Education
The second strategy employed by the colonial West to conceal its exploitation
of alternative human consciousness emerged as a consequence of two factors (i.e. an
ideological and logistical shift in the global relations of power): firstly, the rapidly
growing influence of humanist discourse at the centre (i.e. in the West); and
secondly, the logistics of an emergent colonial bureaucracy at the margins which
required in addition to the physical (i.e. bestial) labour of the natives, their
assistance in the administration of the colonies (which, of course, entailed the
acknowledgment and development of certain ‘human’ characteristics).
These twin pressures generated by the popularisation, or broadening, of the
humanist ethic at home and the demands of modernisation in the colonies meant that
the disavowal of the human qualities of the other could no longer be sustained as an
acceptable strategy of concealment. With the recognition of the other as human the
17
In the case of Australia’s early development many historians have argued that this
antagonistic/derogatory attitude toward racial difference performed a crucial role in the establishment
of Australia’s own fledgling identity. Humphrey McQueen’s oft-quoted assertion that “[r]acism is
the most important single component of Australian nationalism” (qtd. in Inventing Australia 29)
encapsulates a particular historical view of Australia’s starkly oppositional attitude to racial otherness
in its early society.
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enormous economic and geopolitical advantage of colonial control needed to be
mediated, the domination and mistreatment of a recognisably human other needed to
be concealed within more appropriate and subtle discursive strategies.
This duplicity within Western discourse between its will to power (to reduce
the other to the same in order to maintain or (re)acquire freedom) and its recognition
of the human value, the ‘equal rights’, of an alternative consciousness, generated a
faultline within Western thought which the simple disavowal of the existence of a
human other could no longer conceal.
In order to accommodate the acknowledgment of the human qualities of the
other within colonial discourse, a stress was placed on its cultural belatedness and its
inherent racial inferiority. This adaptation provided scope for the exploitation of the
human labours of alterity and, at the same time, a justification for its continued
subjugation. Now, through the assertion of a higher purpose (in which it was argued
that colonisation was motivated by the desire to raise the ‘belated’ other to the level
of Western advancement) the West could justify (to itself and the other) its
domination of non-Western humanity, and position ‘uncivilised’ political, military
and economic practice within the cloaking context of the ‘civilising project’.
Accordingly, political, academic and literary discourses began to portray the
colonial domination of the human other as a responsibility, a cultural and spiritual
duty that could not be shirked by the West if the other was to be saved from its
backwardness and barbarity. Bhabha describes this strategy of concealment, the

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separation of ‘good conscience’ from hegemonic practice, as the ‘disavowal of
difference’. David Spurr, in The Rhetoric of Empire offers a concise description of
this process when he writes:
Members of a colonizing class will insist on their radical difference
from the colonized as a way of legitimizing their own position in the
colonial community. But at the same time they will insist,
paradoxically on the colonized people’s essential identity with them -
both as a preparation for the domestication of the colonized and as a
moral and philosophical precondition for the civilizing mission. (7)
Thus while the other had been ‘raised up’ to human status it remained,
according to this view, inferior in its culture and values, its institutions and religious
beliefs. This inferiority was constructed in terms of a belatedness or backwardness
which contained within it the implication that there existed a true or transcendent
civilisational system (which was, of course, European). Kipling’s poem “The White
Man’s Burden” came to epitomise the English sense of duty and paternalism in its
dealings with a colonised other:
Take up the White Man’s burden-

In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain.
To seek another’s profit,
And work another’s gain. (emphasis added 136-
137)
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In this form Western political and social value came to be represented in
colonial discourse as ‘true’ human value, with its European identity explicitly
maintained.18 The colonial margins were told to look to, and learn from, the ‘Centre’
which embodied the highest qualities of human aspirations and achievement.
Colonial exploitation was, thereby, characterised as self-sacrifice: the readiness of the
developed world to expend itself in order to bring the other into the modern age.
It is important to note that it is here, with the development of the ‘white man’s
burden’ philosophy, that we see the split emerging in Western discourse concerning
the other, the contradiction between hegemony and philanthropy.19 What we do not
yet see emerging during the colonial period is a discourse of ‘political correctness’
espousing the equality of all. The reason for this, of course, is that there was no need
for such a discourse, as the other continued during this time to be constructed as
belated and unequal, and because this designation of the inferiority of otherness was,
in fact, the crucial element in the perpetration of the lie of Western innocence in the
matter of domination (i.e. that the apparent lack within the other allowed the West to
reconstruct its interference as a duty of care).
18
The non-western subject was introduced to the habits of English discipline and organisation, the
riches of the British educational system, the pragmatics of European engineering know-how, and the
superior ethical values of "western ” religion.
19
This duplicity which reverberated through the core of western relations with the other is
explored by Edward Said in “Orientalism Reconsidered”, where he describes the unresolved nature of
“antithetical attitudes” in which the critique of imperialism exists alongside (but rarely engages with)
the continued perpetration of imperial practice:
What has never taken place is an epistemological critique of the connection
between the development of a historicism which has expanded and developed
enough to include antithetical attitudes such as ideologies of western imperialism
and critiques of imperialism, on the one hand, and, on the other, the actual practice
of imperialism by which the accumulation of territories and populations, the control
of economies and the incorporation and homogenisation of histories are maintained.
(emphasis added 11)
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The need for the production and enforcement of a discourse of ‘political
correctness’, I would suggest, is required only after decolonisation, with the
emergence of an array of independent and sovereign Third World nations, and the
necessary expansion of the rhetoric of egalitarianism from a culturally (or
civilisationally) specific concept into a global ideal.
(iii) The Equal Other: Universalisation
The third or postcolonial phase of concealment represents, I will argue
throughout the thesis, a markedly different proposition, a new strategy for concealing
cross-cultural chauvinism and hegemony, a strategic response to the massive
alteration in the relations of power generated by the upheaval of decolonisation.
The emergence of Third World nationalism and the advancing conviction in
the West that it would lose control of its ‘colonies’ impelled the West to re-tool its
strategies for its future relations with a postcolonial other. As Foucault argues,
decolonisation had a potent effect not only on the West’s material but also its
culturally specific discursive dominance:
The close of the colonial era, led it to be asked of the West what
entitles its culture, its science, its social organisation and finally its
rationality itself, to be able to claim universal validity; was this not a
mirage associated with economic domination and political hegemony?
(qtd. in Young White 9)

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It is an understandable corollary of decolonisation that the displacement of political
and geographic dominance should generate questions and uncertainties concerning the
authority and role of Western universality, in the Western as well as the non-Western
world. I will argue that this deconstruction of the ‘self-evidence’ of Western
superiority did not, however, represent a decline in the Western pursuit of dominance
but rather a re-deployment of its strategies of dominance. This new phase of
concealment, generated by the upheaval of decolonisation, represented (and in large
part continues to represent) a twofold shift in the strategic response of the West to
alterations in the relations of power after decolonisation. The first shift involved the
expansion of the ideal of equality beyond the borders of the West to include its ex-
colonies, in order that the source of universalisation might be concealed by the
rhetoric of global egalitarianism and universalised humanism. Thus the non-western
other, which prior to decolonisation had been designated as human but
inferior/belated, was now inducted into a “full and equal” participation in the
“human”. This in turn enabled the application of the second alteration in the Western
strategy of control, the transposition of explicitly Western values and institutions into
the universal (thereby obscuring its cultural / civilisational specificity). By this
means, rather than identifying the universal as explicitly Western (as occurred during
the colonial period), the West utilised the concept of universality (or humanity) as a
vehicle with which to conceal, and through which to propagate, its ongoing will to
power over the other in the postcolonial era.
With the other being received (of necessity not choice) into the discursive
domain of human equality (which the West had previously reserved for itself) the
concealment of the West’s underlying will to power needed to be reshaped. If it
could not speak openly or convince others directly of the universality of its values and
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institutions (i.e. speak of Western value as the highest form of civilisation); if it
could not overtly collocate European traditions with the best interests of humankind
(as it had been able to do during the period of colonial rule); if it could no longer
impose its values and institutions on states which had become politically independent
and sovereign; then the strategy would be to substitute itself for the universal.
I am suggesting, therefore, that the Western response to the threat to its claim
to cultural superiority took the form of a strategic transposition of its own ethical and
political standards onto a global or ‘human’ context which it constructed as
irreducible and therefore beyond the reach of the relativising/fragmenting effects of
modern and postmodern political and theoretical critique.
As an example of the way in which this process worked it is worth
considering the emergence of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights after 1945.
In this we see the West, after 1945 ceasing (progressively) to speak about the
superiority of Western or European cultural/ethical values and political rights, and
beginning to replace these with the rhetoric of ‘universal’, ‘global’, ‘international’,
and ‘human’ values. Thus, it could be asserted that Western values, translated into
globalised form, permitted the maintenance of Western control within the broadest
possible disavowal of difference, and provided the means for the rejuvenation and
perpetuation of Western discursive authority on a postcolonial world. The shift from
the earlier collocation of Western value with the universal, toward the situation in
which Western value had become the universal, fulfilled the dual requirements of
ideology: control and concealment (i.e. to enter the thoughts of the other in such a
way and to such a degree as to appear to be their own thoughts).

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Postcolonial Universality: Complex Ambivalence, Political Correctness
This embrace (or cultural strangulation) of the rest of the world within a
universality that conceals cultural specificity has generated a difficult set of
contradictions not only for the non-Western but also for the Western world.
William Spanos describes this process of ideological concealment and its
complications in Heidegger and Criticism: Retrieving the Cultural Politics of
Destruction where he explores the Enlightenment reformers overthrow of the ancien
regime. Spanos explains that the old order was deligitimated and made “politically
vulnerable” because “its visibility made it resistible”. This in turn opened the way for
the elaboration of “a far more subtle system of coercion” (168). Such a process of
obfuscation during the period of the Enlightenment, Spanos explains, “put the
anthropologos that replaced the theologos out of reach of the free play of criticism
without at the same time annulling its power to dominate those differential
constituencies that were the targets of the humanist discourse of truth” (169-70). In
other words, power was re-immersed (or concealed) within the ideology of the day
becoming, in effect, invisible and, therefore, immune to the disruptive effects of
resistance.
In the case of the non-Western consciousness in the postcolonial context a
new and more complex ambivalence opened up with the appearance of the strategic
rearrangement of the Western strategy for domination. The greater difficulty that this
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has generated for the non-Western consciousness is derived from the displacement of
the concept of cultural difference (specificity) which was absorbed into the
transcendent principle of the ‘human’ or the universal. Where colonial otherness
could focus on the West as the target of its resentment and resistance, because the
West was speaking overtly of its higher truth, postcolonial otherness is faced by a
more crushing dilemma: how to disentangle its humanity from the focus of its
resistance. The collocation of the Western tradition with human or global values
entangles or confuses resistance to Western hegemony with the implication that such
a resistance subverts human qualities. How, for example, can the non-Western other
oppose the inroads of individualism in the name of community values, when
individual value is represented as the forerunner of human rights? How can the other
question the divisive effect of free enterprise and competition when the capitalist
mode of production is portrayed as the highest and most effective channel of human
aspiration; and so forth. Snarled within a universality which is in fact a
redeployment of Western dominance, a strategic concealment of the old order of
control, the postcolonial individual’s capacity to identify and oppose oppression is
critically disabled.
Thus, we see the hold of the ‘philosophy of the same’ over the Western mind
once more in the perpetuation of Western monology in its newly disguised form.
Ideology, in other words, continues to do its work of concealment, tailoring new and
more discursively appropriate “alibis for our aggression” (Sartre, The Wretched 21).
In the case of the Western mind, I would make the argument that the
postcolonial form of domination has raised crucial difficulties in regard to its capacity
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to maintain a viable and sensible discursive equilibrium between the assertions of a
shared human equality and the reality of the ongoing will to power over otherness.
The unresolved conflict between the old (underlying) story (or conviction) of Western
superiority and the new story of global equality has necessitated the introduction of a
complexly self-protective mode of speaking about otherness that has come to be
described as ‘political correctness’. Endlessly utilised in government policy, media
description and liberal academic rhetoric, political correctness has served a crucial
purpose in the postcolonial West. This has been to conceal the glaring contradiction
in its attitudes and practices in regard to the other.
The fervency and outspokenness of racial resentment which has surfaced in
broad sections of the Australian community during the Hanson debate, reflects the
strain of holding together these two plausible but diametrically opposed stories. The
contradictory marriage of the Western desire to dominate otherness with the liberal-
humanist conception of human equality has produced a repressed aporia in Western
consciousness which cannot be resolved without exposing the persistence of the
colonial project.
Suppressing the Contradiction, Aggravating the Split
The indefatigable nature of the Western will to power in the postcolonial
context, has necessitated the application of ever more complex strategies of
adaptation and concealment in order to achieve the appearance of authenticity. I
would stress that Western consciousness has, in fact, maintained its dominance in the
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postcolonial context only at the price of aggravating and complicating its
ambivalence, of deepening the split at the heart of Western discourse in relation to the
other.20
The fact that the West has been able, in the main, to ignore or avoid the
implications of this duplicity highlights the strategic importance of its concealment.
Not only must humanist rhetoric disguise the fact of hegemony but the work of
concealment itself must be kept out of sight. As Bhabha writes in his 1996 article
“Culture’s In-Between”:
Prejudicial knowledge, racist or sexist, does not pertain to the ethical
or logical ‘reflectiveness’ of the Cartesian subject. It is as Bernard
Williams has described it, ‘a belief guarded against reflection’. (55)
Such a concealment has allowed Australians to sustain a belief in their own tolerance
of difference and their egalitarian spirit, in spite of plentiful evidence to the contrary.
The maintenance of this confidence has recently been disrupted in Australia,
however, by government criticism of political correctness and the interjection of the
populist prejudices of ‘Hansonism’ and the ‘One Party’ movement. A crucial
outcome of the subsequent debate in the Australian community has been the
momentary exposure of the contradiction between tolerance and hegemony in
Australian discourse concerning the other. Social and racial divisions have been
briefly articulated (emerging as challenges to the mores of political correctness) but
20
This exacerbation of ideological contradiction is strongly represented in the Australian
novels which will be considered later in the thesis.
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have also been vigorously opposed by ‘right-thinking’ Australians, generating what
has come to be known as ‘the Hanson debate’.
It is important to note, in relation to the overall argument of this thesis, that
despite the appearance of a clear-cut dichotomy between racist and non-racist
positions in this debate the split has not followed an ideological divide, with the
‘liberal humanists’ committed to the negotiation of difference and the ‘conservatives’
opposed. Instead, I would argue that it has run through all political groupings, and
that the disavowal of difference, and the social contradiction it has produced, has, if
anything, been the child of ‘decent’ liberalism, the necessary shield of the sensitive
conscience.
It is has been the liberal humanist voice raised up against the recent
vocalisation of racist sentiment in Australian society and politics which has appeared
most desperate to close off debate. This is due, I would argue, to the threat that such
a debate represents for the exposure of the contradictory nature of the “enlightened”
postcolonial attitude toward issues of race and otherness. The vehemence of the
liberal response to the interrogation of the politically correct approach to issues of
race and migration has occurred not only because it transgresses ideas of tolerance
and equality but also because it exposes the underlying hegemony which violates
“liberalism’s deep commitment to representing cultural diversity as plural choice”
(“Culture’s In-Between” 54). The challenge to the carefully constructed (and
jealously maintained) terminology of postcolonial liberalism momentarily reveals the
ploy (the true intention) of its rhetoric which is not to engage with difference in order
to negotiate it, but to fix difference within the gaze of its ‘tolerance’ in order to
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conceal its ongoing will to rule over it. For this reason such a debate cannot be
sustained (as is the case in the current racial debate in Australia) without aggravating
the split to the point where it becomes socially intolerable. Bhabha argues, in this
regard, that:
Liberal discourses on multiculturalism experience the fragility of their
principles of ‘tolerance’ when they attempt to withstand the pressure
of revision. In addressing the multicultural demand they encounter the
limit of their enshrined notion of ‘equal respect’. (“Culture’s In-
Between” 54)
While it could be argued that the liberal voice has represented a progressive
position (and there is no doubt that at many levels this is true), I am arguing that the
fervour of its reaction to the re-emergence of manifest racism in this country also
represents an attempt to (re)conceal a contradiction that is more striking in its liberal-
humanist form. The conservative view that we dominate the other in order that we
might lead and educate them, although it is based on deceit, is not directly
contradictory. The liberal dichotomy of equality and hegemony (drawn from the
perception of superiority), on the other hand, is undeniably contradictory. Each
attitude or practice must cancel out, or reduce the value of, the other.
In my argument here I am not suggesting that the views put forward by
Hanson or One Nation, in regard to issues of race and migration, warrant close or
sympathetic consideration in themselves, or that they contribute anything of value to
the development of future cross-cultural relations in this country, but rather that the
discomfort that these arguments have generated in liberal circles do warrant attention
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for what they reveal about more complex postcolonial discourses. In other words, by
their openly racist stance One Nation’s views have forced liberal-humanists to take up
positions that are either more liberal than they would want or to align, or be perceived
to align, themselves with racism.
The struggle to resolve the difficulties which the postcolonial rhetoric of
global equality has generated in relation to the persistence of Western attitudes and
practices of an assumed superiority is played out in the novels of the 1980s and will
be the focus of the critical analysis of the final part of this thesis.
2. Bakhtin and Bhabha: Dialogue at the Borders
The second important theoretical model that I will focus on in this chapter,
and which undergirds the final argument of the thesis, relates to the recent emergence
of a more culturally dialogic voice in Australian fiction. I will examine how such a
dialogism (albeit limited and halting in its present form) has begun to emerge in
Australian fictional constructions of Indonesia. I will also consider the question of
how it is possible that such a dialogue could develop in Australia’s interaction with
Indonesia, in the light of the continued Western will to power over otherness and the
strategies of concealment designed to maintain the validity of this approach in the

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postcolonial context. How is it that Australian culture, with its roots in a
philosophical system which privileges the epistemological containment of otherness,
might open itself to a more productive dialogic engagement?
In the course of this broad argument I will develop a theoretical framework
suggesting that Australian prose texts of the 1990s, which introduce the postmodern
stress on cultural diversity, have hinted at the way forward toward a more dialogic
engagement with otherness. In this theoretical description I am arguing that at least
three elements or prerequisites are required for Australia to enter a meaningful
negotiation of Indonesian alterity. All three of these elements will be introduced in
this second part of the chapter.
Under the subheading “From Epistemology to Enunciation: Opening the
Borders of Difference”, I will argue that the first element or prerequisite contributing
to a capacity to engage in meaningful cross-cultural interaction, is the recognition of
cultural meaning as an outcome of social production and construction rather than the
epistemological / metaphoric assertion of a priori principle. I will suggest in this part
of the argument that a shift to the surface, or discursive level, of meaning production
(from the site of substitutive metaphor to contiguous metonymy) provides a looser,
more relative context for cross-cultural interaction, and the possibility of negotiated
outcomes.
The second element that is required for the development of a dialogue
between cultures, it will be proposed, is a stress on the value of proximity or social

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engagement with the other, which requires an often agonistic interaction at the
borders of difference. Under the subheading “Proximity and Liminality: Meeting at
the Borders”, consideration will be given to the way that the shift toward enunciatory
space also introduces a multiplicity of alternative cultural meanings and temporalities
into the region of contestation and negotiation where cross-cultural alterity actually
meets.
The final prerequisite for real cross-cultural interaction, which represents the
motivation for the emergence of the other two, is what I will call (using a term coined
by Wilson Harris21) “material change”. Material change is a concept introduced by
the Caribbean novelist and essayist to describe the imposition of extreme economic
and social pressure as the necessary prerequisites of cross-cultural interaction.
(i) From Epistemology to Enunciation: Opening the Borders of Difference
The first element that I will argue is necessary for the development of an open
dialogue between cultures is the recognition of the constructed nature of cultural
meaning, a shift, therefore, from an epistemological to an enunciative perception of
truth. Such a shift in perception, it will be suggested, has the capacity to reduce the
threatening quality of difference and release the ‘self’ from the role of defending
cultural truth against the challenge of otherness, enabling it instead to enter into a
negotiation with valid alternative.
21
Harris, Wilson. Tradition, the Writer and Society: Critical Essays. London: New Beacon
Publications, 1967.
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Homi Bhabha, in theorising the interaction of difference, develops a
theoretical approach to the reading and writing of fiction, and the more general
interaction of cultures, which carries with it the potential for a critical exploration of
that space which represents the boundaries of cultural difference. As Ashcroft,
Griffiths and Tiffin suggest in The Empire Writes Back, the critical shift that has
occurred in relation to the typically “destructive cultural encounter” has to do with
“an acceptance of difference on equal terms”:
[T]he recent approaches have recognized that the strength of post-
colonial theory may well lie in its inherently comparative methodology
and the hybridized and syncretic view of the modern world which this
implies. This view provides a framework of ‘difference on equal
terms’ within which multi-cultural theories, both within and between
societies, may continue to be fruitfully explored. (36-37)
Bhabha recognises that intercultural contact in the postcolonial context
continues, in large part, to be controlled by the repressive metaphors of dominant
cultural values despite the recent theorisation of dispersal and the philosophical
displacement of centres. He argues that contemporary shifts in theory away from the
concept of presence or centrality (the existence of transcendent signifieds) give the
appearance of providing greater cross-cultural interaction while, in fact, continuing to
maintain control over the definition of cultural discourses.

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Bhabha goes on to suggest, however, that an alternative approach to the
interaction of cultural differences, which recognises the capacity for even the most
polarised cultural entities to develop a meaningful dialogic, is achievable. In his
theoretical argument Bhabha argues that where cultural meaning is recognised as an
outcome of social production and construction, rather than the metaphoric assertion of
a priori principle, the bases of cultural difference are released from the fixity of
epistemological points of anchorage, and enter a space in which precedence is less
easily established or demanded.
This focus on what Bhabha calls ‘enunciative practice’ (177) resembles, I
would suggest, John Frow’s attempt, in Marxism and Literary History, to reconstitute
the traditional conception of ideology by shifting it closer to a Foucauldian sense of
discourse. According to Frow’s argument (which I will outline briefly in order to
clarify my reading of Bhabha’s theory), the project of reconstituting ideology as
discourse can be achieved by recognising the subject as the outcome rather than the
source of utterance and situating it within the interface of the multiple relations of
power and knowledge rather than as the effect of a determinate ontology. In order to
resist the ontologising of ideology Frow theorises it as a “semiotic system” or “state
of discourse” in which the distinction between the real and the symbolic is displaced
by re-presenting the real as a product of discourse and thereby shifting social
contradiction and struggle to the surface of semiotic or discursive structure. By this
means the text (or the intertext) directs its analysis toward the differential of power
(the conflict between different structures of discourse) rather than the referential of
meaning (the text as the reflection of real struggle) (55-58). Accordingly, the literary
text takes on a political form, not merely as a tool for consolidation, but also as a
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means of political production; “not simply a second-order ideological expression or
model of a pre-given political subject” (Bhabha The Location 23) but an active
component and participant in the establishment of cultural value.
In The Location of Culture, Bhabha argues in a similar fashion for a
fundamental realignment of the methodology of cultural analysis away from
epistemological anchorage points toward the “enunciatory present” (178). Such a
shift, he claims, provides a basis for the negotiation of cultural difference rather than
its automatic repression or negation in the face of irreconcilable oppositions.
Bhabha’s emphasis on the enunciative production of meaning draws the site of
critical inquiry up to the level of representation or signification, and thereby produces
“a temporality that makes it possible to conceive of the articulation of antagonistic or
contradictory elements” (25).
This argument represents a critical attack on the Western production of binary
oppositions traditionally defined in terms of centre and margin, civilised and savage,
enlightened and ignorant. Bhabha removes the easy recourse to a consolidated
dualism by repudiating fixed and authentic centres of truth, suggesting that cultures
interact, transgress and transform each other in a much more complex and multiple
manner than a typical binary opposition would allow.
According to his view, hybridity and linguistic multivocality have the
potential to intervene and dislocate the process of domination and the state of
monology through the re-interpretation and re-narration of received discourse, and the
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re-focusing of critical attention away from the central metaphors of difference and
toward the ‘agonistic space’ (181) which exists on the borders of difference, along the
edges of alterity where cultures meet. Bhabha, drawing on the socio-linguistic theory
of Bakhtin, asserts that the control produced by binary oppositions can be
undermined and re-shaped by the natural interanimation of cultural heterogeneity and
the subversive effects of hybridisation.
Bakhtin and the Heteroglossic Universe
The foundation of the enunciative shift is located in the postmodern /
poststructural displacement of (in Derridean terms) “ a point of presence, a fixed
origin” (Structure, sign and play 109), or a centre around which structure can be built
and certainty maintained. Derrida argues that a genealogical inquiry into the source
of structure will invariably reveal that the anchored centre (be it essence, existence,
God or man) which fends off the threat of an endless relativism (or play), a centred
signified which transcends such metaphysical insecurity, is, in fact, absent and that
“the absence of the transcendent signified extends the domain and the play of
signification infinitely” (110).
The problem with such a conception of displacement is that it generates a shift
in which everything becomes caught up. Even the social / cultural context (i.e. the
contextual definition of meaning), which as Jonathan Culler points out in Framing
the Sign is frequently used as a critique of the Derridean notion of slippage (147),
cannot be used to halt the slide of meaning because, for Derrida, context is simply
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additional text. While meaning may be bound by context, context itself is boundless
and therefore unable to halt the play of meaning (148).
It is for this reason that Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory, which also deconstructs the
notion of centrality and monology, is a preferable critical approach in regard to the
production of an enunciative stress in cross-cultural discourse because of its re-
establishment of the social event (or as Bakhtin describes it “eventness”) as an
articulation of sociolinguistic multivocality and heterogeneity rather than
metaphysical play and slippage.
Bakhtin focuses on the social context of utterance in Speech Genres and
Other Late Essays not in an attempt to fix or anchor meaning, but rather to disperse it
into a myriad of socially generated events which displace the possibility of centrality
while providing moments of social congruence that he terms “speech genres”(60).
Thus meaning is able to be maintained within the social dynamic of the
sociolinguistic event, while the justification of cultural monology is resisted.
Bakhtin’s theory of speech genres is especially relevant to the complexities of
cultural alterity. According to Bakhtin, speech genres are an important form of
cultural memory and social wisdom which create a “natural” conduit for
communication. They carry within them a record of past uses (similar to the traces
of meaning within Derrida’s signifier but socially motivated) which may re-form
themselves in another setting, creating what Bakhtin calls “double-voicing”. Bakhtin
does not situate the source of speech genre in the context of grammatical syntax (the
sentence) but in the individual utterance which shapes a fluid structure within the
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social context. According to Bakhtin the formation of speech genres are “congealed
events” and “crystallisations”; “the residue of past behaviour, an accretion that
shapes, guides and constrains future behaviour” (Morson:290). It is within this zone
of communication that the shifts of cross-cultural interaction are felt and can best,
according to Bakhtin, be replicated by the novel, which has the capacity to sense and
recreate different speech forms and the subjective experiences.
Bakhtin’s theorisation of language represents a closely related tool in the
project of releasing cultural meaning from the fixation of non-negotiable ‘truth’ and
highlighting cultural constructedness. Bakhtin theorised the essentially heterogeneous
nature of language and argued that such heterogeneity the multiplication of the
metonymic and the devaluation of the metaphors upon which the cultural domination
of the centre are traditionally founded and justified. Such a dispersal or
deconstruction of centralised authority as an outcome of linguistic heterogeneity can
be understood from two perspectives: Giordano Bruno’s assertion that an infinite
universe, lacking a measurable circumference, can have no true centre or an infinite
number of centres (Todorov 192); and Derrida’s claim that the finite “nature of a
field…excludes totalization…because instead of being too large, there is something
missing from it, a centre, which arrests and grounds the play of substitutions”
(Structure, sign and play 118). Thus the universe of language (which is in essence
infinite), and the specific strata of language (which are finite and constantly
undergoing change and evolution as they interact with each other), disavow the
transcendent claims of cultural or linguistic centrality.

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Writing during the period of Soviet ‘Russification’, Bakhtin addresses the idea
of heterogeneity from the perspective of a massive historical project of linguistic
homogenisation. Within this context he emphasises the “ideologically saturated”
(“Discourse in the Novel” 271) nature of language, controlled by and reflecting the
worldview of dominant cultural value. Bakhtin sees the imposition of a singular or
unitary language as a crucial tool in the project of applying control and “insuring a
maximum of mutual understanding in all spheres of ideological life” (271). Thus a
unitary language gives expression to forces working toward concrete verbal and
ideological unification and centralization, which develop in vital connection with the
processes of sociopolitical and cultural centralization (271). The production of
linguistic and cultural singularity represents the imposition of order, the intervention
of hegemony, because it opposes itself to what Bakhtin describes as “the realities of
heteroglossia” (270).
Heteroglossia is an essential element of Bakhtinian reasoning which
approaches the problem of meaning through a sociolinguistic emphasis on the
stratification of language within different registers, dialects, and sociolects. Bakhtin
stresses that language is not simply separated and organised according to linguistic
markers but that it is also stratified by its “socio-ideological” form into, “languages of
social groups, ‘professional’ and ‘generic’ languages, languages of generations and so
forth.” (272). This counter force of dispersal, which Bakhtin calls “centrifugal” ( or
“unofficial”) force is posited against the homogenising, ‘normalising’ project of
cultural control. His emphasis on the social production of language, which is
inherently multi-vocal (heteroglossic) and unfinalisable, relativises any claims to a
secure and transcendent centre (a monology) while at the same time allowing the
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construction of positive terms of specific (limited) meaning within the context of the
“event”.
Hybridisation: the Conflict and Interaction of Registers
The effectiveness of the critical intervention of theorists like Bakhtin and
Homi Bhabha into the cross-cultural debate is derived from their strong sense of
multi-vocality but also from their theorisation of the interplay of registers or
hybridisation. Bakhtin posits two kinds of hybridity which generate quite different
outcomes. The first, “organic” or unintentional hybridity, is active wherever dialects
and registers interact, bringing about change and development within language forms
by the natural process of encounter and exchange. Bakhtin stresses the non-political
nature of this unconscious blending in which “the mixture remains mute and opaque,
never making use of constant contrasts and oppositions” (“Discourse in the Novel”
360). It is never intentionally parodic or subversive. This form of hybridisation is
not a critical or political force because it does not consciously perceive the existence
of difference or attempt to highlight it. According to Bakhtin this represents a natural
form of linguistic change:
[L]anguage and languages change historically primarily by means of
hybridisation (i.e. unconscious or unintentional hybridisation), by
means of a mixing of warring ‘languages’ co-existing within the
boundaries of a single dialect. (358)

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Intentional hybridity, on the other hand, (and here Bakhtin is enumerating the
characteristics of language within novelistic discourse) is inherently and purposefully
dialogic. It generates an awareness of difference and the constructed nature of
language by illuminating the presence of differing registers. This, according to
Bakhtin, is achieved most effectively in novelistic discourse because it is not directed
primarily toward the referent (therefore ‘reality’ or the world) as with the poetic
form, but rather toward language itself. The various stratifications of language
become the object of the novelistic representation. Thus the interaction, the conflict
and assimilation of registers and dialects which are set against each other, becomes
visible, and the textual work of stylisation or parody apparent.
Bakhtin claimed that the multi-vocality of the novel and its capacity to
manipulate speech genres and imitate social heteroglossia (through the double-voiced
utterance) made it a unique medium for the exposure and study of heterogeneous
social interaction. In the novel it is the continuous play between dialects and
registers, the insertion of the parodic or stylised voice, that resists the imposition of a
single worldview, the impression of a monologic reality. Intentional semantic
hybridity, therefore, represents more than the mere mixture of two voices, but rather
the “collision” of differing points of view which “come together and constantly fight
it out on the territory of the utterance” (360).
The hybridisation of language takes on a specifically inter-cultural
complexion in the writing of Bhabha, who assigns to it a powerful critical potential in
the displacement of cultural monology. For Bhabha, like Bakhtin, hybridity does not
merely describe the mixing of two language consciousnesses, nor is it a third form (a
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higher synthesis of the two) by which reconciliation is achieved, but rather it is an
articulation of difference which acts to dislocate the assertion of dominance based on
a conception of cultural transcendence.
Hybridity achieves this displacement of the centre through the exposition of
concealed cultural space or difference, which the centre disavows through the
production of symbols. In cultural exchange, the margin defuses this strategic
dominance, Bhabha suggests in “Signs Taken for Wonders”, by means of the
operation of hybridisation, which functions according to a principle he describes as
“less than one and double” (179). According to this process knowledge is
transmitted by the dominant culture and received, though differently understood, by
the dominated culture (therefore becoming “less”). It is then repeated within the
semantic space, and along with its own syntagmatic associations, in a way which
serves to “both estrange its “identity” and “produce new forms of knowledge, new
modes of differentiation, new sites of power” (180) (and is therefore, by this means
“doubled”). Thus the multiplication of signs (the metonymic) overcomes the
attempted imposition of the culturally universal (the metaphoric). As in Bakhtinian
theory, it is the space or distance that “difference” produces (linguistic and cultural)
which permits the critique of mimicry to resist and subvert the assertions of the
centre.
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Privileging the Enunciative: Alternative Ways of Speaking
For both Bakhtin and Bhabha the universe of language is made up of infinite
variation and exchange and is therefore inherently resistant to closure, or to use
Bakhtin’s term, is unfinalisable. Thus it can be argued that the twin assault of the
heteroglossic and the hybrid open irresistible textual spaces and contradictions within
the Western assertion of logocentricity (Eurocentricity).
Neither Bhabha nor Bakhtin are interested in merely describing the
heteroglossic/hybrid ‘reality’ which pits itself against the hegemonic project of
culture but are more especially concerned with theorising the political utility of a
hybrid, multivocal intervention. Such an intervention depends on a purposeful
transition in the Western apprehension of otherness away from ‘formal criteria of
rationality’ and towards the ‘human activity of articulation’ (“The Postcolonial” 177);
away from ‘theory’ and toward the ‘event’. This represents the privileging of the
signifier over the signified, the political over the essential (over ‘truth’) as Bhabha
describes it:
This emphasis on the representation of the political, on the
construction of discourse, is the radical contribution of the translation
of theory…Denying an essentialist logic, and a mimetic referent to
political representation is a strong, principled argument against
political separation of any colour, and cuts through the moralism that
usually accompanies such claims. (“The Commitment” 27)

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To achieve this subversion of centrality and continuity Bhabha stresses the
value of re-articulation, the deflection and redirection of focus toward the enunciative
condition of cultural and political production, which in Bakhtinian terms exposes the
temporal and contingent nature of authoritative discourse, the fact that it rests its
dominance on a fictional self-evidence. This redirection of analytical interest toward
the articulation of power in which “reigning language (dialect)” (“Discourse in the
Novel” 271) supplants, enslaves and incorporates the centrifugal tendencies of
heterogeneous language and culture within its dominance, shifts the focus of
signification from the epistemological to the enunciative. As Bhabha writes:
The epistemological is locked into the hermeneutic circle, in the
description of cultural elements as they tend towards a totality. The
enunciative is a more dialogic process that attempts to track
displacements and realignments that are the effects of cultural
antagonisms and articulations in subverting the rationale of the
hegemonic moment and relocating alternative, hybrid sites of cultural
negotiation. (“The Postcolonial” 177-178)
Bhabha wishes to rearticulate the discursive terrain in terms of the validity and
(theoretical) equality of alternative ‘realities’ which have the potential to break up the
ground of binary oppositions and the hierarchy of superior/inferior in which order is
achieved by substitution (the metaphoric intervention of the centre).
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The second prerequisite for the production of genuine cross-cultural dialogue
and transformation is the shift away from a theorisation or ‘thematisation’ of
otherness, towards a stress on the value of proximity or direct social engagement with
the other which allows liminal and agonistic interaction.
Bhabha’s transference of critical focus away from the centre, the calcified
heart of dominance, toward the embattled and highly contested borders or edges of
difference opens the West to a far more unstable and equivocal dialogic. In his article
“The Commitment to Theory”, he suggests that the relevance of “theory” is to be seen
in the way in which the scrutiny of post-structural/postmodern critiques have
demonstrated the capacity to displace centres of value, thereby releasing sites of
meaning production to the margins where the other presents itself as alternative,
rather than merely oppositional, value. Bhabha describes this as:
the process of emergence itself, the production of meanings that
construct counter knowledges in medias res , in the very act of
agonism within the terms of a negotiation (rather than a negation) of
oppositional and antagonistic elements. (22)
At the edges of cultural difference “an indeterminate articulation” (“The
Postcolonial” 179) emerges, which is not dominated by the repressive metaphors of
cultural certainty, but exposed instead to metonymic surplus. Contact at the
boundaries of difference has the capacity to generate what Bhabha describes as ‘time-
lag’ which enables the silencing of hegemonic discourse and opens the centre to the
subversive influence of alterity. This process represents a crucial aspect of a

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transformative cross-cultural negotiation of otherness which I will consider in detail
in Chapter7 under the heading “‘Time Lag’: Ceasing and Seizing / Unpicking and Re-
linking”. The main focus of consideration in this chapter in relation to the second
prerequisite relates to an examination of the value of proximity itself to the process of
inter-cultural negotiation.
As noted in the introduction Emmanuel Levinas develops a strong argument
for the intrinsic importance of proximity (face to face interaction) in his portrayal of
the oppositional antagonism between what he describes as “thematization” and
“sensibility” (115-119). Levinas views the universalising influence of a generalised
knowledge as the death of a genuine, individuated social ethic. Because of the
opposition between the two, however, the linguistic/cultural tendency to thematise
relations with the other (“the said”), is, according to Levinas, constantly interrupted
and dispersed by “proximity” (“the saying”):
here the saying and the said cannot equal one another. For the saying
in being said at every moment breaks the definition of what it says and
breaks up the totality it includes. (“Language and Proximity” 126)
Proximity is the key in regard in this aspect of Levinasian thought. While
“the said” and “the saying” are analogous to langue and parole in semiotic theory,
“proximity” introduces the face of the other into communication, making ‘the saying’
a necessarily interpersonal function of language. Thus : “The orientation of the
subject upon the object has a proximity, the intentional has become ethical. . .”
(“Language and Proximity” 116).

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The process of stressing cultural engagement at the borders of difference,
which is the focus of Bhabha’s theoretical interest, redirects attention away from
issues or outcomes of philosophical, ethical or political debate (which continue,
according to their metaphoric function, to substitute alterity with ‘true’ value) and
toward a more active dialogue or proximity with otherness, a movement toward the
threat of difference (or toward what Wilson Harris calls “the void” that exists
between between cultures).
It is argued here, in relation to the first prerequisite of cross-cultural dialogue,
that it is the shift upward to the level of discourse (into the enunciative), recognising
the politically and culturally constructed nature of ‘truth’, which precipitates or
enables a movement outward toward proximity. This is a movement toward a margin
capable of contributing negotiable alternatives.
The metonymic boundaries of different racial/cultural/national symbolics, in
the context of proximity, are able to interact, contradict, and produce combinatory
outcomes and cultural shifts. As a result, we are able to see the beginnings of cultural
hybridisation and the fragmentation of the hegemonic universal. A vital aspect of
such interaction in terms of Bhabha’s argument is the production of a more
immediate agonism, which the stress on the constructed nature of difference allows,
and the practice of proximity enables.

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The contestation of meaning and power, which according to this view is an
essential element in the production of dialogic exteriority enables self-evaluation and
change. This can only be facilitated where difference is allowed an agonistic space
rather than being cordoned off within the compartments of diversity which are
controlled and patronised by Western academic and political institutions. Bhabha’s
theoretical approach opposes disputation to definition, competition to comparison,
agonism to authorisation, and gives precedence to the former in each case.
The enunciative space recognises dominance as a manifestation of power
rather than meaning and introduces a multiplicity of alternative cultural meanings and
temporalities into the space of contestation and negotiation that this allows. But only
proximity, the actual encounter with the face of the other, exposes the edges of
identity to a critical entanglement with otherness.
Bhabha asserts that ‘emergent cultural identifications’ (“The Postcolonial”
178-179) are formed at the edges of identity, at the moment of the erasure of binary
oppositions. Thus, proximity freed from the demands of epistemology achieves a
liminal form of signification that creates a space for the contingent, indeterminate
articulations of social ‘experience’ particularly important for envisioning emergent
cultural identities (179). In other words, the re-focusing of critical analysis away
from the metaphoric/symbolic ‘truths’ of cultural identity generates an awareness of
the contingent/temporal production of signification. This, in turn, permits the
interruption of the metaphoric at “the point at which there is a loss of meaning in the
contestation and articulation of everyday life,” (“The Commitment” 34). Therefore, at
the borders of difference.

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(iii)“Material Change”: A Catalyst for Dialogue
The development of such a genuine cultural dialogic is extraordinarily
difficult, engendering as it does the displacement of long-held cultural certainties.
This difficulty necessitates the introduction of a third element or prerequisite of cross-
cultural interaction which will be described as material change. Wilson Harris coined
the phrase “material change” in Tradition, the Writer and Society, to describe the
extreme circumstances which are required before active negotiation of cultural
alterity can take place. Harris asserted that because of the cultural displacement and
psychological disorientation that is generated in the space between cultures, and the
enormous threat to self-identity that accompanies the negotiation of that space, the
divide between cultures can only be crossed via the trauma of a crisis in material
security. Material change, therefore, is intended to describe the strong pressure
derived from altered material circumstances which generates a willingness to
negotiate with difference or results in the decision to withdraw from it. This third
prerequisite represents the necessary catalyst of cross-cultural dialogue and the
motivating agent of the first two prerequisites described in this chapter.
Using this concept Harris argued persuasively that the extreme difficulty of
genuine cross-cultural dialogue would only be entered into by individuals and
cultures when the “material balance” of the world was seen to be altering, and
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political / economic necessity demanded the courage required to step out into the
unknown region of cross-cultural engagement. The reason that such extreme
circumstances are required before active negotiation can take place has to do with
what Harris calls “the void” which exists at the heart of cultural difference, “the fear
of corruption, the fear of alien diversity” (62) which can only be crossed via the
trauma of a crisis in cultural identity. The choice at this point is one of either
withdrawal into “fortress homogeneity” or a commitment to real dialogue with
cultural alterity which represents, in Harris’s words, “a genuine psychological
territory of disorientation (of the “death” of principle as each party sees it)” (61).
From the Western perspective, resistance to deep cross-cultural interaction is
particularly evident due to the Western process of preserving identity and security (as
discussed earlier in the chapter) and its limited experience of hybridisation (in
comparison with the colonised other). Applying this conception of resistance to the
proposal of cross-cultural dialogue some political and cultural theorists have argued
that the extreme nature of the differences in cultural background and expectations
between the symbolic structures of Asia and the West represent an alterity that is too
sharp for the achievement of a genuine or lasting interaction.
Samuel Huntington in a well-known article titled “The Clash of
Civilizations”, has argued that such insular and conclusive views of truth exist within
all cultural groupings or civilisations, generating virtually unbridgeable divides. For
this reason, he asserts, civilisational associations will dominate the formation of
economic and political alliances in the foreseeable future, and cause non-civilisational
(ideological) links to become more tenuous and open to fracture.

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The unstated assumption on which Huntington’s thesis rests, of course, is that
cultures are monolithic and unchangeable. It fails as an argument because it does not
take into account the heterogeneous and mutable nature of cultural identity. As
Edward Said is able to write in Culture and Imperialism: “all cultures are involved
in one another; none is single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogeneous, extraordinarily
differentiated and unmonolithic” (xxix). In this sense, the edges of culture can be
seen as porous and incapable of resisting the interrogation and interaction of
otherness, so that in the colonial context, the coloniser as well as the colonised is
subject to the hybridising effects of the cross-cultural encounter.
Other theorists and commentators on cross-cultural encounter, while rejecting
the monolithic conception of cultures propounded by Huntington, also have difficulty
identifying a realistic way forward toward radical dialogue with cultural difference.
The consideration of such a negotiation, according to this view, raises a number of
questions, not only in regard to the enormous task of redirecting Western thinking
concerning its place in the world, but also in terms of the consequences for its future
sense of identity once it enters into serious dialogic interaction with such extreme
cultural alterity. Diana Brydon, in summarising the concerns of Tzvetan Todorov in
The Conquest of America, asks:
How can we achieve the ideal of `heterology’ which makes understood
the difference of voices - what Wilson Harris terms the `harlequin
cosmos at the heart of existence’ - while avoiding the twin perils of
insipidity and self-parody? What is the discourse appropriate to this
heterological mentality? (30).

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For the West, with its crucial connection between identity and dominance
(argued earlier in the chapter in relation to Levinas’s ‘Philosophy of the Same’), the
task is perhaps more difficult than for an other already deeply and complexly
hybridised by the effects of ‘empire’ and modernity. 22 This I would argue is the
point at which material change becomes an essential ingredient in the Western
relationship to otherness if meaningful interaction is to occur.
The most obvious and profound occasion or example of material change in
modern history took place, of course, during the period of colonisation in which non-
Western cultures were forced, because of extreme material pressures, to negotiate,
assimilate and hybridise Western otherness. The outcome, as we see it today, is an
hybrid other entering an era of modernisation, nationalisation, capitalisation, and in
many cases, of democratisation which reflects the consequence of an active, ongoing
negotiation of the West and its values. Such a process is, of course, not easily or
willingly entered into and thus, as Harris suggests, it requires the irresistible influence
of extraordinary economic and political pressure.
From a Western perspective perhaps only South Africa and Rhodesia have, in
this century, been drawn into this void between worlds (albeit tentatively and by
peoples so long subjugated by Westernness as to in many ways perpetuate the
structure). Once again, the steps taken by liberal white South Africans (as far as they
22
Certainly, Australia has exhibited a definite resistance to the prospect of becoming a ‘part of
Asia’ as proposed by Paul Keating in the early 1990s. The comments of John Howard (early in the
governments tenure) concerning the European nature of Australian culture and its strong links with
the west have, of course, been prorogued by the difficult debate triggered by Pauline Hanson.
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have gone) have only been made under the most severe and prolonged political and
economic pressure.
A literary illustration of the capacity of “material change” to push cultures,
and individuals within cultures, toward an engagement with otherness, is articulated
(in a microcosmic form) in the Australian Bali novel Troppo Man. In the text, the
figure of Matt becomes a signifier of the Australian will to manipulate and control the
production of non-Western (Balinese) identity, against the flow of geopolitical reality
(i.e. the reality of an economically emergent, politically independent, postcolonial
Southeast Asia). The intersection of events (cultural shock and isolation, and
financial vulnerability) and his own flawed character (a weak sense of identity and
the fear of proximity), however, conspire against his attempts to reduce the threat of
alterity to an identifiable and controllable similarity. In the midst of his own cultural
disorientation in the context of the other, and the Balinese refusal to be dominated, he
is forced toward a cultural engagement which disarms his hegemonic pretensions and
drives him into a space between the same and the other (a discursive lull) which
exposes him , in turn, to the irresistible flow of Balinese alterity.
It is such a material shift and its effects that makes, I would suggest, the
argument of this thesis concerning the possibility of liminal interaction with the other
relevant to the Australian situation (i.e. something more than a theory). Many would
argue, and it will suggested later in this thesis, in relation to this idea of “material
change”, that Australia, due to its geographic separation from the West and its
increasing isolation from Western markets (with the rapid development of European
and North American trade blocs), faces (and is being moved toward) a just such a
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period of material and political pressure. Australia, it could be suggested, is entering
an unstable interregnum in which it will need to learn to negotiate a new cultural
authority or withdraw into greater and more costly regional isolation.
In the following six chapters I will apply the theoretical arguments of this
chapter to the close reading of a number of Australian and Indonesian novels and
short stories.
CHAPTER 2
In this chapter I will examine the way in which Australian fiction (in the last
twenty years) has applied the colonial strategy of control and concealment to its
construction of Indonesian identity. In support of my argument I will draw upon the
last clear example of an Australian colonial novel set in Indonesia: Christopher
Koch’s The Year of Living Dangerously. I will examine Koch’s novel as an example
of this first phase in the discursive chronology of Australian fiction as argued in
Chapter 1. This analysis will provide a starting point from which to observe
subsequent shifts in fictional discourse toward the postcolonial and the postmodern.
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Outlining the Chapter: a Chronology of Discourse
In the context of the twenty year period under consideration in this thesis, The
Year of Living Dangerously represents what I would suggest is the earliest phase of
the construction of Indonesian otherness in Australian fiction. By earliest I am not
referring to the chronology of publication but rather the closeness of Koch’s text to
the colonial (as opposed to the postcolonial) voice, in what might be described as a
chronology of discourse.
In terms of discursive chronology, Koch’s novel (published in 1978) appears
as a reiteration of largely colonial concerns, while d’Alpuget’s Monkeys in the Dark
(published in 1980 by a writer almost a generation younger than Koch) represents, I
will argue, an attempt to grapple with the difficulties of negotiating the Australian
relationship with cultural otherness in the postcolonial context. Inez Baranay’s The
Edge of Bali (published in 1992), which I will argue represents a subsequent stage in
the discursive chronology, generates a postmodern strategy of control. In Baranay’s
novel the recognition and celebration of cultural diversity is employed as a more
contemporary method for disavowing the threat of difference. Gerard Lee’s Troppo
Man (published in 1990) takes the enunciation of the process of discursive change a
step further in its far less dominant, more dialogic engagement with Indonesian
alterity.
Thus, it will be suggested that the Australian novels under consideration trace
important shifts in Australian cultural and political perceptions of Indonesia.
Through a convenient correlation between discourses and periods of publication,
these novels reveal a historical movement from colonial to postcolonial and then to
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postmodern and to dialogic ways of engaging cultural alterity. 23 In order to place
The Year of Living Dangerously in the colonial phase I will suggest a strong link
between Koch’s novel and British colonial fiction published around the turn of the
century.
Koch and the Colonial Phase
As the focus of analysis in this thesis is on the movement away from older
colonial forms, my examination of the colonial voice will, due to the constraints of
space, be brief and introductory in nature. I will limit my demonstration of the
relationship of The Year of Living Dangerously to colonial discourse by establishing
a generic connection between the Australian fictional constructions of Indonesia by
Koch and the English imperial / adventure genre of the late nineteenth / early
twentieth century (represented by the novels of Rudyard Kipling and Joseph
Conrad).24
This connection will be suggested in order to establish the extent of colonial
influence apparent in the Australian literary production of the Indonesian subject at
the time that Koch’s novel was published. My analysis will position The Year of
Living Dangerously, in particular, as a text which reiterates the colonial / orientalist
23
While the focus of argument in this thesis is directed toward discursive rather than
generational change it would appear from the rough chronology of discourses described above, that
the shifts from colonial to postmodern constructions of Indonesian alterity have tended to correspond
with the periods in which these Australian novels were published (the early 1970s, the 1980s and the
early 1990s). This discursive trend, however, is not unidirectional or unfailingly linked, in its
‘forward’ momentum, to the chronology of publication. Turtle Beach, for example, published a year
after Monkeys in the Dark, is more resistant to dialogue with otherness and less interested in
negotiating issues of postcoloniality. Similarly, The Edge of Bali is more authoritative (orientalist) in
its interaction with Bali than Troppo Man which was published two years earlier in 1990, which is
more dialogic.
24
The imperial / adventure tradition of English prose can be traced from eighteenth and
nineteenth century exploration and travel literature, through the fictional archetype of Defoe's
Robinson Crusoe, the richly characterised stories of Kipling, and the juvenile imperial novels of
Rider Haggard, G.A.Henty and R.M. Ballantyne up to the modernist ambiguities of Conrad.
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preoccupations that operated within the first phase of the Western strategy for the
concealment of its domination over otherness, which I have argued in Chapter1. This
phase positions the other as subhuman or evil (and therefore to be rejected). While
the second phase of colonial construction, the production of an inferior otherness, is
also apparent in the novel, it is less striking overall and, for the sake of brevity, will
be relegated to a brief comment at the end of this part of the chapter.
Imperial Adventure: The Australian Connection
Martin Green, in a book titled The English Novel in the Twentieth Century:
The Doom of Empire, traces the intellectual/romantic connection of contemporary
English prose from Rudyard Kipling through several generations of later English
novelists, including E.M.Forster, Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh. Green claims
that Kipling and his contemporary imitators were instrumental in the production of a
kind of prisonhouse of cliché in relation to the colonial other from which few of their
literary successors have been able to escape.25
According to this view the characters, sites and tropes of colonialism (and
“Kiplingism” in particular) have so dominated the Western imagination of the
twentieth century as to condemn subsequent writers to an endless repetition of its
conventions in the re-presentation of non-European alterity. Rather than actively
negotiating difference, the West has ensnared the other (and itself) for almost a
26
century in an unending repetition of the colonial stereotype.
25
As Robin Jared Lewis suggests, Kipling’s work “so powerfully shaped British perceptions of India
that many English people had little idea where art ended and began”. (54)
26
Graham Greene in his Collected Essays describes his own "unfashionable...debt of gratitude"
to Rider Haggard as "perhaps the greatest of all who enchanted us when we were young" and
explains the way in which "he fixed pictures in our minds that twenty years have been unable to wear
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While Green’s text focuses on the effects of Kipling on subsequent English
literature, in relation to my argument concerning the connectedness between
Australian literature and the imperial adventure genre, I have concentrated on the
literary influence of Joseph Conrad. While neither Koch nor d’Alpuget make any
direct attribution of indebtedness to Conrad27, Conrad’s style is clearly recognisable
in the lexico-grammatic, metaphoric and thematic selections of these writers. Such an
influence is also apparent in the ambivalent, at times anti-colonial attitudes
enunciated through the Australian texts. As a more ambivalent, and therefore
modern, contributor to the imperial /adventure genre than other colonial novelists,
Conrad anticipates more closely, I will argue, the literary voice of Australian writers
like Koch and d’Alpuget.28
It should be recognised and emphasised from the outset of this chapter that I
am not attempting to theorise Kipling or Conrad’s originary creative influences. For
the sake of brevity (and recognising that Kipling and English literature is not the
subject of this discussion), I have taken for granted the ideological and institutional /
away." (157)
27
Koch does indicate his sense of connection with Kipling a number of times in his collection
of essays titled Crossing the Gap in which he reinforces the claim that Kipling's influence was
pivotal to the Australian conception of Asia up to the period of his own writing. He describes, for
example, the way in which “India was always there for our imaginations to roam in; and for this we
largely have Kipling to thank. (16) And again, he writes: “It was the India of Kim I had looked for
and found on the Grand Trunk Express; and I tried to reproduce that delight when I put my characters
through a similar journey, in Across the Sea Wall (emphasis added 16). The words "I had looked for"
are particularly telling in the way that they suggest not only the effect Kipling's work produced in
Koch's imagination but the way in which that imagined world was in turn reimposed on the India
(and Indonesia) of Koch's literary production.
28
As Lynn Sunderland writes in describing the differing legacies of Kipling and Conrad:
It isn't difficult to see the impact of Kipling's sketches: he offered a whole
kaleidoscope of new images to absorb, answering the public hunger for gaudy
adventure stories as well as validating something of the need to believe in Empire.
Conrad, on the other hand, brought home from his voyage into the "heart of
darkness", all the problematic emotional cargo of politics, religion, morality - the
stuff of human aspiration and hope. After Conrad, the contact between cultures
could never again be viewed quite so simplistically as the Victorians had viewed it.
(22)
Both Koch and D'Alpuget's Asian novels share a number of these Conrad-like ambiguities and
contradictions in relation to their textual attitude to Asia.
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discursive effects that have shaped the literary outcomes which the work of Kipling,
Conrad and their contemporaries have embodied. As Said has written in Orientalism:
Kipling himself could not merely have happened; the same is true of
his White Man. Such ideas and their authors emerge out of complex
historical and cultural circumstances. (227)
The terms ‘Kipling’ and ‘Kiplingism’ (as well as ‘Conrad’ and ‘Conradian’)
serve as ‘shorthand’ representations or markers of different stages of the enunciation
of English colonial discourses.29 The writers themselves are, in large part, effects of
these discourses, the inhabitants and utilisers of subject sites within an established
discursive formation, and the agents of discourses which continue to exert control
over the production of knowledge in the West concerning the cultural/racial other. It
is proposed that the following examination of the generic connection between the
Australian novelists and the imperial/adventure genre (in its various forms) will open
the way to a clearer identification of this discourse, and the ideological structures
which underpin it.
Tracing Language to Discourse
In my analysis of Koch’s colonial approach to otherness I will concentrate on
those linguistic/metaphoric elements which suggest the connection between The Year
of Living Dangerously and the imperial/adventure genre. The analysis of this
suggested link will be based on a stylistic (or functional linguistic) reading of Koch’s
29
This approach to the articulation of the authorial voice (therefore as representative of
broader cultural forces) is equally applicable to the reading of Koch and d’Alpuget and the other
Australian writers in this and later chapters.
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figuration of otherness, and a comparison with Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.30
John Frow has proposed that “literary genres. . .can be thought of as
secondary stylizations of primary registers” (70), or as metadiscursive readings.
According to this view, registers or discourse genres act as normative systems
determining the limits and possibilities of enunciation in specific social situations:
The production of meaning is thus always highly specified by the rules
of the discourse of structure in which it occurs, and the structure of the
genres of discourse is directly correlated with the semiotic constraints
of the speech situation. (68)
In determining the “semiotic constraints” at work in the fictional stylisations
of the dominant registers it is useful to break down the linguistic components of the
discourse by examining the experiential, relational and expressive values that Michael
Halliday calls field, tenor, and mode. The field or semantic domain of the novel
under consideration here, is not directly concerned with the actual or ‘real’ referent of
Indonesia, but rather with the Australian discursive space which has come to surround
and define it. Drawing on Althusserian and structuralist theory Frow takes the view
that:
knowledge…never confronts a “pure” (real) object; it is neither
a reflection nor a representation of the real but a structure of
discourse which constructs its object through an ordered
transformation of pre-theoretical values. (24)
30
A number of arguments could be made, other than the sociolinguistic connection, to
highlight the relationship between Australian novels of the period and English colonial fiction,
however as I have already suggested space requires a selective approach.
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Whether dominant discourses or registers are resisted (parodied or
transgressed), or obeyed they remain the defining element in what can be said. As
Frow has noted:
In this model discourse is the crucial level at which meaning is
produced, and the lexical and morphosyntactic levels are
subordinated to their functionalization within discourse. . . .
(69)
It follows therefore that the methodological reversal of this model of meaning
production would involve the examination of subordinate lexical and grammatical
elements in order to access the overarching discursive identity of a text. The surface
expression or code of a particular discursive voice or ideological position, for
example, can be identified through an exploration of the ‘experiential value’ of the
selection and combination of key words and literary tropes. As Cate Poynton
suggests in Language and Gender: Making the Difference: “Genres are identifiable
by means of the particular linguistic choices” (9).
Such a linguistic methodology will be applied to Koch’s narrative descriptions
of Indonesian alterity, the experiential value of his word selection, metaphysical
transfers, and the collocation of classification schemes that these suggest. It will be
claimed that these, in turn, generate points of access to the identification of
underlying ideological discursive structures.
Poynton writes, in describing Halliday’s contribution to stylistic analysis, that
it clarifies the value of analysing linguistic choice in order to develop comprehension
of underpinning structures:
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What Halliday does here, and elsewhere, is to demonstrate how
the actual linguistic choices (at the levels of discourse, lexico-
grammar, and phonology) are realisations of acts of meaning
that are to be understood as, in the final analysis, the realisation
of choices at some higher level, somewhere in the semiotic
systems of the culture. (14)
In keeping with this analytical approach it will be suggested that the colonial
connection between Koch’s text and the late nineteenth / early twentieth century
English imperial / adventure novels (colonialism being the primary register of the
texts) can be traced through the identification and examination of the shared linguistic
paradigm which, it will be argued, is the common secondary stylisation: that of the
gothic / horror genre.
In The Year of Living Dangerously, Koch employs a starkly classificatory
language which generates an opposition between elements of darkness and light,
good and evil, civilisation and savagery closest to the binary imagery of Conrad.
The bluntness of Conrad and Koch’s figuration of otherness through the
terminology of darkness and evil suggests a singleness of attitude in relation to
cultural alterity. Any reading, however, of the rhetorical exaggerations of both
writers as monologically opposed to cultural / racial otherness and in favour of
Western predominance fails to take account of the complex ambivalence that
underlies their work. It is, in fact, the complexity and contradictoriness of Conrad’s
construction of cultural / racial alterity that makes him the most direct ancestor of
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modern Western fictional portrayals of the other. His literary legacy has been claimed
with equal fervour and certainty as representative of the imperialist and the anti-
imperialist positions, and critics continue to argue over the apparently contradictory
nature of his vision. As Said suggests in Culture and Imperialism:
Conrad’s narrators are not average unreflecting witnesses of
European imperialism. They do not simply accept what goes on
in the name of the imperial idea: they think about it a lot, they
worry about it, they are actually quite anxious about whether
they can make it seem like a routine thing. But it never is. (33)
In Heart of Darkness and Nostromo, Conrad’s narrators castigate the West for
its careless exploitation of Africa and "the East", and its monologic incapacity to
accept the existence of alternative economies of value. His narratives often lead the
reader along the familiar pathway of adventure, into darkness and the mystery of
foreign dangers while his use of irony and the unexpected juxtaposition of ideas and
images serve to defamiliarise and displace the accepted reading of the other and the
Western right to dominate it. The consequent split in Conrad’s construction of
otherness represents a distinct alteration in the literary voice of the imperial /
adventure novel.
Nevertheless, as Said comments, despite Conrad’s enunciation of moral and
political ambivalence, Conradian ambiguity is constrained by imperial discourses:
Conrad’s tragic limitation is that even though he could see
clearly that on one level imperialism was essentially pure
dominance and land-grabbing, he could not then conclude that
imperialism had to end so that ‘natives’ could live lives free

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from European domination. As a creature of his time, Conrad
could not grant the natives their freedom, despite his severe
critique of the imperialism that enslaved them. (34)
Benita Parry, along with a number of other cultural critics, have argued for a
much more direct connection between Conrad and colonialism, suggesting that
Conrad availed himself of some of the more blatant racial and ideological stereotypes
available to the colonial writer.
Equally pejorative depictions of the contrasting nature of Indonesian otherness
in Koch’s work are, of course, not unintended or innocent constructions of alterity but
reveal instead the novel’s relationship to the long history of Western discursive
control, a reiteration of the imperial discursive frame.
Stylising the Other: Alterity as Numinosity
The Year of Living Dangerously achieves the production of a spiritually dark or
evil Indonesia, which is its central motif, by collocating elements of the gothic and
horror genres with Indonesian identity through its utilisation of linguistic tropes of
darkness, evil and spiritual possession. The examination of Koch’s text in terms of
the secondary stylisation of the gothic / horror form, which will be carried out in this
part of the chapter, provides a strong connection between The Year of Living
Dangerously and the primary register of the imperial / adventure genre, therefore the
discourse of colonialism.
It is at the level of the broader examination of Western textual approaches to

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cultural / racial otherness, in regard to influential texts like Heart of Darkness, that
the consideration of the stylistic appropriation of Koch’s text (i.e. its tropological
relationship to the gothic / horror form) shifts from a secondary stylisation to the
primary register of culturally hegemonic discourse or colonialism.
Frederic Jameson, in The Political Unconscious, explores the Western practice
of constructing cultural / racial otherness as evil in order to position and dominate its
alterity. He examines Nietzsche’s argument concerning the way in which the
colonising West has historically exploited the issue of ethics in the cause of cross-
cultural domination through the linkage of evil with difference. In describing this
contradictory heart of ideology, Jameson writes:
Nietzsche’s analysis, which unmasks the concepts of ethics as the
sedimented or fossilized trace of the concrete praxis of situations of
domination, gives us a significant methodological precedent. He
demonstrated, indeed, that what is really meant by “the good” is
simply my position as an unassailable power center, in terms of which
the position of the other, or of the weak, is repudiated and
marginalized in practices which are then ultimately themselves
formalized in the concept of evil. (emphasis added 117)
Nietzsche, according to Jameson, redefined the approach to the production of
binary oppositions in the West, arguing that rather than an opposition based on
metaphysical truth (Derrida’s transcendent signified) and its erroneous/dependent
alternative, the conception of a positive and negative (centre and margin) dichotomy
was assimilated (translated) into the collective Western consciousness in terms of an
ethical construction of good and evil.

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The binary oppositions through which social meaning and self-identity have
been historically produced constitute a play of power, and a legitimation of
hegemony. In this form otherness, which appears to create “a real and urgent threat
to my own existence” is constructed as evil: it is not feared because it is evil but it is
made evil because it is feared; because it is “other, alien, different, strange, unclean
and unfamiliar”. (Jameson 115)
Conrad’s evocation of African tribalism and its effect on the European
intruder in the Heart of Darkness represents a striking and, in terms of modern
ambivalence, highly relevant example of this process in terms of its equation of
Africa with spiritual darkness and the horror genre. In this section I will examine the
influence of such colonial (particularly Conradian) tropes in Koch’s construction of
Indonesian alterity as the embodiment of evil.
Horror and Spiritual Evil
In The Year of Living Dangerously Koch appropriates and applies the
concepts of the gothic (such as, evil, corruption, darkness, fear, threat, and enigma) to
the encounter with alien Indonesian identity as a convenient and linguistically
accessible shorthand for the strangeness of the other. The invocation of the Western
vocabulary and imagery of the gothic/supernatural represents, I would suggest, an
attempt to bridge the gap which opens at the point at which the Western ‘universal’
encounters the unknown (i.e. a set of cultural and ethical particulars outside the
control of the Western absolute).

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The imposition of metaphysical/linguistic elements of the gothic genre onto
the other serves to fix and define the parameters of its alterity within the boundaries
of the known, to re-position Javanese or Balinese value within Western space, a
region of imputed comprehension.
A striking textual example of the collocation of cultural otherness with
spiritual otherness occurs in The Year of Living Dangerously when Cookie, the
novel’s narrator, listens to Billy Kwan’s pseudo-historical description of Java as “a
colony…of Hindustan” (97), a colony which continues to practice animism and to be
effected by its “demons”. In a significant passage in the novel, Cookie, who is
initially sceptical of Billy’s metaphysical extravagances, recognises a “core of truth”
in what Billy says, as he considers Billy’s words:
Java seemed always to promise some weird revelation; but it was
never quite seen. It was round a corner; in the next kampong; out in
central Java, perhaps; but never found. And the Hindu and Muslim
cultures here seemed superimposed; even the mosques were like flats
on a stage; it was all two-dimensional. Underneath, something much
older grunted or moaned,: a thing that lived in thickets or in drains,
something like the spirit that lurked near Billy’s bungalow. (emphasis
added 97)
It is useful to note the transference of metaphoric value from one
classificatory system, or generic paradigm, to another in this example. Java is
personified and spiritualised in this passage as a kind of animistic geist (or
poltergeist) which forms and informs the production of its identity. The linguistic
construction of a singular agency which exists “underneath” the appearance of social

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plurality generates the image of a unified force, a monologic evil underlying
Indonesian society.
It is a force which is subhuman (connotated by its apparent incapacity to
articulate beyond the most primitive phonetic expression). It is a thing which
‘grunts’, ‘moans’ and ‘lurks’. But, beyond this, it lacks the qualities of a true
humanity, being ‘something’ and ‘a thing that lived’. This description of a spiritual
subhumanity generates the textual ambience of numinosity, otherworldliness and
spiritual evil.
After Billy’s death, Cookie returns to Billy’s bungalow to retrieve Billy’s files
before the Indonesian police arrive. Billy, the text explicitly indicates, lives in the
‘real’ Java of the kampungs rather than the Western style hotels. When Cookie
reaches the bungalow, he becomes conscious of an inexplicable ‘presence’, a
numinous other in the darkness: “It was dark there, in the long grass, and somehow
frightening: I don’t think this was purely because of my state of nerves” (253). As he
enters the garden, he remembers Billy’s claim that a spirit lived in his garden, and
Billy’s words:
I hear it moving around in the garden. It came in one night, and
knocked some bottles of developer off the shelf… Where animistic
religion is still strong, you’re obviously going to have a lot of them
hanging about. Demons can’t come without invitation, can they? (97)
After collecting the files Cookie appears to encounter this malevolent spirit
(or is it Billy’s own spirit) as he leaves the bungalow:
As I went back through the garden with my burden, I thought I saw a

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figure out of the corner of my eye, in the pool of dark by the great
trunk of the banyan - an Indonesian or Chinese child, watching me
with a stricken expression. Electric terror shot through me; but when I
peered closely there was nothing there. (254)
This sense of terror generated by a perceived contact with numinosity in the
‘real’ Java is frequently referred to in earlier imperial / adventure texts and reflects
the common stylistic debt to the gothic form. In Heart of Darkness, for example,
Marlow experiences something that resembles Cookie’s “electric terror” when he
hears a sound in the jungle:
[A] cry, a very loud cry, as of infinite desolation, soared slowly in the
opaque air. It ceased. A complaining clamour, modulated in savage
discords, filled our ears. The sheer unexpectedness of it made my hair
stir under my cap. I don’t know how it struck the others: to me it
seemed as though the mist itself had screamed. (102)
It is instructive to realise that both Conrad’s and Koch’s passages could easily
be inserted into a text concerned solely with the supernatural (i.e. the gothic or horror
form) without causing any sense of generic displacement.
Throughout Koch’s novel the metaphors of evil and horror applied to the
description of Javanese alterity multiply. Java’s heat does not merely overpower it
“squat[s] like a malignant force”; the production of evil agency is manifest in the
personification of a Javanese spiritual malice which not only ‘lurks’, ‘grunts and
moans’, but ‘lies inert’ and ‘stirs to life’, squats’, and ‘waits’; and represents a
‘formless lechery’, and an ‘enormous hopelessness’, an ‘amalgam of hatred and

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danger’.
Koch also evokes the menace of supernatural possession in his description of
the threat that lurks in the region of cultural otherness. At the point in the narrative
where Billy starts to believe that Hamilton has let him down by surrendering to the
evil that inhabits Java, Cookie explains Hamilton’s trip to the cemetery (which
according to Billy is the site of sexual evil because it is the gathering place of the
city’s poorest prostitutes) in terms of an evil possession. He writes: “Sir Guy had
been invaded, since his trip to Tugu, by ‘Durga’s darkness’, by a mysterious lust”
(181). Using Billy’s terminology, but apparently expressing his own point of view,
Cookie attempts to explain Hamilton’s uncharacteristic behaviour in accompanying
Curtis to the prostitutes in terms of the evil influence which inhabits Java like some
the “god of the air”:
Healthy and personable men, who never lacked for women. . .and
would not normally have gone to prostitutes, were often visited by this
formless lechery in Jakarta. (181)
Terms like “invaded” and “visited”, made in connection with “Durga’s
darkness” and the “formless lechery” of Jakarta suggest a work of possession. This
element of possession, of spiritual control (the generation of a possessive evil) is also
apparent in Heart of Darkness when Marlow explains the destructiveness and the
destruction of Kurtz:
The wilderness…had caressed him, and - lo! - he had withered; it had
taken him, loved him, embraced him, got into his veins, consumed his
flesh, sealed his soul to its own by the inconceivable ceremonies of
some devilish initiation. (115)

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In both cases (i.e. Hamilton and Kurtz’s) the responsibility for reprehensible
behaviour is shifted to external influences on the inner man (possession) - the spirit of
evil that inhabits Java and the Congo. Koch’s passage juxtaposes the health and
decency supposedly inherent within the Western male against the disease and
decadence of Javanese / female otherness.
More than this, the atmosphere (the spirit) of Java is portrayed as a
personification of malevolence, which is intent on infecting and destroying Western
moral “purity”. Not only does Jakarta visit and invade the white man’s decency, like
a spirit or demon, animistic in its construction, but it is formless and mysterious, a
primitive throw-back to which the modern materialist is most vulnerable.
These passages which provide a figurative construction of Indonesia in terms
of an invisible, spiritual (animistic) cause or force suggest by this same figurative
means the obfuscation of agency. The atmosphere of Java, according to Koch’s
description, is shown as being permeated by a numinous and threatening presence
equivalent to the graveyard, castle, or the haunted house in the gothic novel, equally
mysterious and unsettling in its cultural otherness as the shock of spiritual alterity.
Koch’s (re)construction of Java as a generalised site of spiritual power and menace
represents the generic positioning of the other in terms of the gothic/horror form.
Language and the Rhetoric of Evil
The language in those passages which describe the spiritual evil at the base of
Javanese society is highly dramatic with a heavy emphasis on mythical allusion, high-
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flown rhetoric and hyperbole.31 As the Indonesian nation moves towards its moment
of political crisis, for example, Billy writes in his diary to Sukarno, shifting to the
paradigm of the Christian diabolical:
Terrible violence is simmering, simmering. Your country is sick with
the fever of evil; is it possible that the Beast has chosen Java as a
crucible? Is it possible that here is where those marked by the Beast
and those still struggling for the light must confront each other? Is this
your konfrontasi? (242) 32
Koch’s continual resort to what Norman Fairclough describes as
“overwording”, the heavy use of repetition and synonym, represents “a focus of
ideological struggle” (115). His use of a redundant hammering of the single idea or
image (taking the form of a rhythmic and primitive chant e.g. “daughter of Durga…
Drinker of Blood! Durga! Uma! Kali! You of many names: Time and Sleep, the
Night of Doomsday!”(184)) has less to do with description or exposition than with
rhetoric and emotion.
It should also be noted that the use of this style by Koch cannot be deflected
by simply attributing its appearance in the novel to the extremes of Billy’s
unbalanced mind, for we see the same style recurring at several other points through
the voice of the narrator. Late in the narrative, it is Cookie’s description of the post-
31
There is, in fact, much in Koch’s use of language which reflects the Romantic period of
English literature out of which the gothic literary form emerged in reaction to the rationalist
subjugation of language to reason. As defined by The Wordsworth Companion “romanticism” is “a
comprehensive term for a large number of tendencies towards change in European literature” that
separated it “from the philosophical rationalism and neoclassicism of the Enlightenment”. (The
Wordsworth Companion 795)
32
The slippage apparent in Billy’s paradigmatic shift from the figure of Durga to the Beast of
“Revelation” reflects, in terms of cultural eclecticism (or opportunism), part of the similarity that
Billy himself feels with Sukarno (“Sometimes I almost feel we share the same identity.” (99)).
Sukarno was the master of cultural expedience moving back and forward between languages,
histories and mythologies to suit his own purpose.
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coup massacres that produces the novel’s most sustained characterisation of the
Javanese explosion of mass-violence in terms of mythical/spiritual evil and the
presence of Durga (Maha-kali):
Out there, at this deepest hour of night, Maha-kali dances, she of
many names, all of which mean Time. In a few more weeks she
will caper in the paddy fields of Java: that curious island to the
south where India’s gods have turned into shadows. She will have
blood enough then to suit her, . . . In the circle of lanterns in the
paddy fields at night, the cane-knives will chop and chop at figures
tied to trees; and trucks will carry loads of human heads - all
pleasing to the dancer at the cemetery. (293)
This recurring reduction of Java’s political and social upheaval into a
spiritualised/generalised conception of evil as an ubiquitous force that cannot be
controlled, epitomises the Western attempt at collocating Indonesian cultural
difference with the Western idea of a threatening spiritual otherness.
Koch’s narrative style reflects less interest in reason or meaning than in the
sound of language for its own sake, its rhythms and the richness of mental imagery it
produces. (This is suggested by Koch’s willingness to employ hyponymy over
synonymy in the various names of Durga which represent no new attributions to her
character or contributions to our understanding). Koch’s narrative interest in these
passages is focused on dramatic impact which releases him from the rigours of
negotiating the values of otherness.
The linguistic style which contributes to this gothic quality of the text and its
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relationship to horror is also apparent in the archaic, biblical turn of phrase that Koch
employs here (as in many other places in the text). Phrases like, “she of many names,
all of which mean time”, and “she will have blood enough to suit her”, which by their
poetic / rhetorical style, romantic stress on extreme, and lurid form, reflect the
influence of a type of apocryphal / evangelical rhetoric, the use of language to
overwhelm and dominate.
The striking stylistic similarity between The Year of Living Dangerously and
Heart of Darkness, in regard to the agglomeration of images of spiritual darkness and
the mutual collocation of supernatural otherness with cultural/racial alterity, places
Koch’s text within the frame of colonial discourse. This is the construction of
Indonesia which most closely reflects the first strategy of concealment as argued in
Chapter1: the other as subhuman and/or evil.
While not as strongly represented as the imagery of darkness and evil, the
second strategy of colonial concealment, which constructs cultural / racial alterity as
an inferior other dependent on the civilising influences of the West, is sufficiently
obvious in Koch’s work to warrant consideration, in terms of its reinforcement of the
colonial connection. The contrast between the rationalist / materialist sophistication of
the West and the colourful, spiritualised philosophy of the Indonesian wayang kulit
(shadow play), represents a central metaphoric divide between modern and pre-
modern society in the novel.
One passage (of many) in the novel that reflects this separation into a superior
and inferior humanity occurs when Wally, the longest serving and most respected
Australian journalist in Koch’s Jakarta, tells Hamilton and Cookie of his plans to give
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up his Australian citizenship and stay on in Indonesia. Hamilton and Cookie
recognise the self-serving nature of Wally’s dream (which involves his access to
Indonesian boys) but decide that its most disastrous aspect is the deleterious effects
that such interaction poses to Wally’s grasp on his own cultural heritage:
Hamilton and I were embarrassed into silence; and I saw now that
great Wally had posed at his desk to gain our blessing for his dream of
a new Javanese life. I recalled his library outside: Plato’s Republic;
Aristotle’s Politics; Gibbon; Thackeray; Proust; E.M.Forster; Angus
Wilson; and an expensive volume dealing lavishly with Art Nouveau.
Art Nouveau: here! Outside, the immense heat squatted like a
malignant force, making these fragments of an alien civilisation seem
infinitely fragile; doomed. The books would gather mildew fast in the
equatorial humidity; and very soon the military, as well as the thugs
disguised as military, would be knocking with their gun-butts at the
door, demanding donations of money. And after that…If this was
Wally’s imagined home, he had no home in this world. (103)
The Indonesians, according to this conception, remain the barbarians at the
gate, the yellow or brown hordes at the edges of the empire, threatening to spill over
the borders of civilisation, and submerge it beneath their primitive anarchy. Against,
and outside, Wally’s study (the site of the infinite fragility of civilisation), is the
immense and malignant heat; the rot and mildew of the humid climate; the gun-butts;
the expected demands; and the open-ended, darkly suggestive threat of “after that…”.
Thus, the first two phases of Western colonial control, and the concealment of
bad conscience, argued in Chapter1, are played out through Koch’s reading of the
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Australian encounter with Indonesia in The Year of Living Dangerously.
CHAPTER 3
In this chapter I will explore what would appear to be a literary shift in focus
from a colonial to a postcolonial approach in the Australian construction of
Indonesian identity. It will be argued that the discursive strategies employed by
Australia, as we have moved into a period of recognising postcolonial realities, have
continued to reflect the Western deployment of the “philosophy of the same”, as
outlined in Chapter 1, but in a form adapted to the requirements of an altered
ideological context. As I suggested in the first chapter, Australia’s determination to
maintain a position of discursive dominance in an era of declared commitment to
global equality and universal ‘human’ values has created a crucial contradiction and
necessitated the development of a complex discourse of concealment.
In the first part of this chapter I will introduce the theoretical basis for my
examination of the primary fictional texts. Drawing on the arguments of Frederic
Jameson, Michel Foucault and Alan Sinfield I will suggest a framework for the close
reading and analysis of the novels in this chapter.

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In the second part of the chapter, I will analyse d’Alpuget’s first novel,
Monkeys in the Dark, and argue that it represents, in relation to The Year of Living
Dangerously, a shift away from colonial to postcolonial strategies for the negotiation
of racial / cultural alterity. In the process of this analysis I will consider the way in
which this text attempts to resolve the ideological contradiction upon which
Australian discourse concerning the other is founded in the postcolonial context.
D’Alpuget’s other Southeast Asian novel, Turtle Beach, will be briefly
commented on as an instructive example of the textual consequences of the
discursive failure to manage the actual encounter with cultural alterity outside the
supporting framework of direct hegemony.
In the concluding section of the chapter, I will give some consideration to the
interesting correlation between the ideological point of view suggested by these
novels and the recent regression in the popular ‘debate’ in Australia concerning
migration and race.
Overall it will be argued that the approach of Australia, reflected in
d’Alpuget’s novels, Monkeys in the Dark and Turtle Beach, to its relations with
cultural otherness since decolonisation has involved a gradual redeployment (re-
tooling) of humanist rhetoric as a crucial instrument for prolonging its ongoing will to
power within the postcolonial setting.

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This process of concealing (or repressing) the discursive incongruity, it will be
argued, has generated, in turn, profound anxieties in the Australian collective
consciousness concerning cultural / racial otherness, anxieties which have been
exacerbated and partially exposed over the last few years by a return to the politics of
blame.
Analytical Strategy: Jameson and a Focus on Production Rather Than Outcome
The analytical approach that I will take to the examination of these novels will
remain true to the overall strategy of the thesis which will be to focus critical
attention on what the Australian texts reveal about Australia’s own approach to
constructing the subject of cultural / racial otherness. I have chosen this contextual
approach in preference to the more typical focus on that which the content of the
novels reveal about their subjects (i.e. Indonesia and Malaysia). This emphasis on
self-reflection is in keeping with Robert Young’s suggestion in Colonial Desire:
Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race that:
a major task of postcolonial criticism must be the production of a
‘critical ethnography of the West’, analysing the story of the West
haunted by the excess of its own history. (163) 33
33
Abdul JanMohamed has noted, in relation to western novelists who have attempted to enter
the space between cultures in their writing, that such a process invariably leads them back to the
reconsideration of the role that their own culture has played in the process of contructing the identity
of otherness. In the development of real dialogue with cultural alterity the focus of primary interest
must invariably come back to the self:
Genuine and thorough comprehension of Otherness is possible only if the self can
somehow negate or at least severely bracket the values, assumptions and ideology
of his culture. As Nadine Gordimer and Isak Dinesen’s writings show, however,
this entails in practice the virtually impossible task of negating one’s very being,
precisely because one’s culture is what formed that being. (65)
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In keeping with this focus, therefore, the main critical interest will be directed
toward those elements within the texts that provide indications as to the mode of their
production, rather than those elements which could be described loosely as their
content. Frederic Jameson, in The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially
Symbolic Act, asserts that the limitations placed on “interpretive modes” generate an
expectation that analysis or interpretation be restricted to the content of the text. He
suggests that such an approach can and should be circumvented by re-focusing textual
analysis “not only on the content of the analysis, but the very method itself…[which]
comes to be reckoned into the “text” or phenomenon to be explained” (47). Such an
approach to reading achieves what Jameson calls a “radical historicization” of
subjective interpretation, drawing the implied “mental operations” and methods of
textual construction into the reading, and thereby suggesting an enlargement and
redirection of interpretation in terms of the ideological production which has
contributed to the textual outcome.
Applying this method of analysis to an examination of the structuralist
codifications of A.J. Greimas, for example, Jameson argues that (while a reading of
Greimas’s theory of structuralist homology may provide insights into his
interpretation of history) an exploration of his “apparently static analytical scheme,
organized around binary oppositions” reveals those elements of the production of the
text which would otherwise remain concealed. In Greimas’s case this approach
reveals the way in which the analytical scheme represents “the very locus and model
of ideological closure” (47).

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Such a radical re-reading of Greimas is achieved by focusing on the ‘semiotic
rectangle” (i.e. the method of interpretation rather than the outcome of interpretation)
which exposes and “maps the limits of specific ideological consciousness and marks
the conceptual points beyond which that consciousness cannot go, and between which
it is condemned to oscillate” (47). By gauging the extent and limitations imposed by
the text, “the relationship of tension between presence and absence”, insights can be
made into what Jameson calls the “political unconscious…the informing power of
forces or contradictions which the text seeks in vain wholly to control or manage”
(49).
It is this circumvention of the more direct interpretation of d’Alpuget’s
novels, in favour of an examination of aspects of its literary production, (i.e. the
analysis of textual content as a gauge to the means of its production), which provide
the analytical focus for this chapter.
This is not to say that content will not be discussed, but rather that it will be
read as a symptom of cultural attitudes. Content, character, plot etc. will be examined
as a way into the analysis of cultural production. Characters will be discussed in
terms of what they reveal about cultural attitudes, whether explicit or implicit, as they
are developed or exposed by the narratives. This chapter, therefore, will attempt to
read through the characters towards the narrative voice in Australian culture.
Foucault, Discontinuity, Hegemony

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My critical reading of the d’Alpuget texts as examples of the Australian
production of the Indonesian subject during the early 1980s, will utilise, along with
the Jamesonian re-direction of analytical interest onto the production of texts, a non-
progressive perspective on the historical changes represented in, and by, the texts.
This disjunctive approach will view historical changes in discourses as expedient and
strategic rather than idealistic or socially progressive.
As I have attempted to argue in the first chapter, the re-deployment of
Western humanist discourse as a means for extending its influence over otherness has
been achieved, primarily, by the re-positioning of its own system of political and
ethical standards as human or universal rather than standards specific to Western
cultures. Thus individualistic, competitive, democratic values, which are
predominantly Western in their origins and history, have typically been constructed as
the highest (“most human”) values / principles applicable to all cultural/societal
situations (and therefore, as universal values).
‘Free enterprise’ and ‘individual value’ have been portrayed as essential
components of ‘truly democratic’ and ‘free political systems’ and the ‘pursuit of
individual freedom and happiness’ has in turn been constructed as the highest (or
truest) human ideal. Such assertions of value, divorced from their origins in Western
cultures and histories and applied to human or universal existence, imply that a set of
social absolutes, an essential human state, akin to Plato’s concept of ‘the forms’,
exists, against which human society should measure itself, and toward which it should
strive.
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Foucault, taking an anti-positivist / anti-humanist approach to Western history
and the production of its social and political institutions rejects the Western
conception of an underlying universality, identifying instead universalisation itself as
merely another agent of hegemony. In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice he
writes:
Humanity does not gradually progress from combat to combat until it
arrives at universal reciprocity, where the rule of law finally replaces
warfare; humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules
and thus proceeds from domination to domination. (151)
Such an installation of hegemony within the appearance of legality is the
outcome of discursive production, the essential inter-relationship of knowledge and
power. The establishment of dominant discourses at certain historical moments,
Foucault suggests, produces a monologic conception of reality, an impression of self-
evidence, that genealogical perspectivism has the capacity to identify and dislodge.
For instance, in relation to the Western conception of the self-evident and irrefutable
nature of individual freedom Foucault suggests that:
genealogical analysis shows that the concept of liberty is an “invention
of the ruling classes” and not fundamental to man’s nature or at the
root of his attachment to being and truth. What is found at the
historical beginning of things is not the inviolable identity of their
origin; it is the dissension of other things. (142)

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It is this disparity, in the context of Foucault’s argument concerning historical
discontinuity, along with a Jamesonian approach to the re-reading of the strategies of
repression (concealment) in literary production, which will form another of the
frameworks for the critical approach of this chapter.
Such disruption and discontinuity emerges periodically in history, Foucault
argues, through shifts in the relations of power (either regionally or on a global level),
and historical changes typically emerge out of these political displacements. In
accordance with such a view, the responses or adaptations of participants in the
network of power relations should be considered to be strategic rather than
progressive. In order to achieve a critical re-reading of history by this method it is
necessary to emphasise moments of disjunction rather than connection. This involves
a focus not on origins but on events and a willingness to see history as a play of
power rather than the revelation of truth. As Foucault proposes in “Truth and
Power”, the determination of events and moments within history are the consequence
of “relations of power, not a relations of meaning” and proceed “in accordance with
the intelligibility of struggles of strategies and tactics” (114).
It will be argued that the shifts which are apparent in the Australian fictional
production of Indonesian subjectivity over the last fifteen to twenty years, reveal (or
highlight) a range of such important shifts/alterations in the relations of political and
economic power between the two countries.
The fictional texts in question can be read as expressions of Australian
strategic responses to the erosion of its perceived traditional dominance. The most
critical rearrangement of power between Australia and Indonesia occurred, of course,

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at the moment of, and as a consequence of, decolonisation, beginning with the
Indonesian independence in 1949. The real impact of decolonisation, however, has
only been felt in the last ten to fifteen years as the economies and political systems of
“developing” nations like Indonesia and Malaysia have been given time to establish
their economic / political independence.
The enormous shift in Australia’s relationship with Southeast Asia during that
time has required a continual re-assessment and re-arrangement of Australian
strategies of engagement and these are reflected in the complications and
contradictions apparent in the representations of otherness in d’Alpuget’s novels
Monkeys in the Dark and Turtle Beach.
A further stage in this transformation in relations has taken effect more
recently in regard to the emergence of American and European trading blocs and the
Australian economic realisation of its geographic isolation. Along with the growth in
the economic power of the Asian region over the last fifteen years (prior, that is, to
the recent financial ‘meltdown’ in the region34), this has generated a major
reconsideration and re-deployment of Australian strategies of control. The effects of
these alterations in the relations of power between Australia and Southeast Asia
(specifically Indonesia and Malaysia as the setting for these novels) will be
considered in the reading of d’Alpuget’s texts.
My analysis will also be aimed, in Jamesonian terms, towards the privileging
of literary method over literary content. This will take the form of a genealogical
search for moments of discontinuity, through a consideration of the altered strategies
34
The effects of the Asian economic crisis in the last year or so will be discussed in later
chapters.
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which have emerged out of those moments and become visible in the text. It is hoped
that such an approach, which runs counter to the demands of the dominant narrative
‘line’, will open up new possibilities in analysing the Australian production of
‘dialogue’ with its Asian neighbours during this time.
This application of Foucauldian constructions of reality, in this thesis, will
also entail a search for the contradictions that are momentarilly opened up by these
sudden shifts in discursive direction. William Spanos, in his examination of
Heideggerian theory titled Heidegger and Criticism: retrieving the cultural politics of
destruction, highlights the constructed nature of Western discourse. He argues that
the West maintains the semblance of continuity and progress through the constant re-
construction of itself in response to the contradictions which emerge from, what
could be described as, the momentary tears and splits in the garments of its
concealment (splits which will be identified and examined in this chapter). These
tears are the result of shifts (unexpected movements) made by the West and the non-
West in their relationship to each other:
The destruction [Spanos’s word for Heidegger’s ‘posthumanist’
philosophical approach] understands the constituted history of “the
Occident” - the onto-theo-logical tradition - as a process of
reconstitutions, a process characterized by periods of relative stability
all along the lateral field of discursive forces that undergo
destabilization when their internal contradictions surface as disruptive
events or, in Foucault’s phrase “discursive explosions”, which in turn
are accommodated by the substitution of another socially constituted
and comprehensive centre. (emphasis added 134)

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Such a conception of history as a series of discontinuities or ‘internal
contradictions’, to which the dominant network of power relations must respond by
re-deploying or adapting its strategies of control, is essential to the argument of this
chapter and the rest of the thesis. By tracking the shifts in discursive emphasis and
direction through the fiction texts under consideration I will attempt to trace a line to
moments of disruption or destabilisation in the cross-cultural relations of power in the
public / political arena. These moments of disruption will then be positioned as
triggers to the necessary rearrangement of strategies of control.
It is important prior to any analysis of the fictional texts in this chapter,
however, to also note Foucault’s theoretical stance in relation to regularity. In
particular I want to draw attention to his acceptance of periods of continuity, and even
of limited progress, which are ruptured or dislocated by moments of discontinuity,
and by shifts in the relations of power. The importance of distinguishing the
Foucauldian conception of disrupted continuities from a Derridean or Baudrillardian
conception of “an endless flux of signification” (44), has to do with the way in which
such a conception gives theoretical validity to the idea of identifiable ‘periods’ of
literary emphasis in Australian fiction concerning Indonesia. As Best and Kellner,
quoting Foucault in The Order of Things, suggest:
Foucault argues that rupture means not some absolute change, but “a
redistribution of the [prior] episteme” (345), a reconsideration of its
elements, where, although there are new rules of a discursive
formation redefining the boundaries and nature of knowledge and
truth, there are significant continuities as well. (44)

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Foucault’s sense of discontinuity presupposes and pursues periods of
regularity and relation which he argues are broken up or disrupted by irregular or
non-progressive moments of change. In this sense Foucault denies the possibility of
an overarching or grand narrative after the Hegelian or Marxist models. At the same
time, he also rejects the conception of an unchartable and uncontainable dispersal of
power. He argues that ruptures occur and these ruptures in the progressive
momentum toward the assumed telos redirect the flow and the meaning of historical
periods and moments. Such an epistemological re-direction or transition from one
episteme to another means that, in Foucault’s words, “things [before and after a
rupture or realignment in discourse] are no longer perceived, described, expressed,
characterised, classified, and known in the same way” (The Order of Things 217).
It will be argued in this chapter (and throughout the thesis as a whole) that
periods of regularity or discursive agreement about Indonesia can be identified and
that these are reflected in the recent Australian output of fiction concerning Indonesia.
Perceptible shifts have occurred, I would suggest, from colonial to postcolonial and
from postcolonial to postmodern, and from postmodern to dialogic readings and
productions of otherness in the last twenty years. I would argue that the first major
shift in the aesthetic construction of otherness and the resolution of internal conflict
are apparent in the fictional transition from The Year of Living Dangerously to
Monkeys in the Dark.
Unlike The Year of Living Dangerously, Monkeys in the Dark does not
represent an attempt to re-impose an overtly Western enlightenment on Indonesian
belatedness, but operates instead within the postcolonial paradigm of universals

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drawn from the assertion of the commonality of ‘human’ values. This follows the
third (postcolonial) phase of the Western strategy for the concealment of its ongoing
will to power over otherness (according to the model I constructed in the first
chapter).
Monkeys in the Dark was written at a time when Australia was feeling the
need to re-negotiate its relations with its Southeast Asian neighbours. Spectacular
economic growth in Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia during the 1970s,
the increasing willingness of Asian leaders, like Lee Kwan Yew, to criticise the West
(and in Lee’s case Australia in particular), along with the mounting anguish in
Australia concerning what was perceived to be an impending flood of ‘boat people’
onto Australian shores, pushed postcolonial realities into the Australian line of vision
at this historical moment. The corresponding movement in Australian fiction from
colonial to a postcolonial way of seeing and constructing Indonesian identity is
apparent, I would suggest, in even a cursory comparison between the novels of Koch
and d’Alpuget.
The shift that can be observed in d’Alpuget’s writing appears, on the surface,
to suggest an attempt by Australian fiction to reconsider or reinvent itself in order to
relate more truly to this postcolonial reality. I want to show, however, that it can be
read, quite differently, as an attempt to re-deploy its strategies of domination in ways
that appear acceptable or achievable in the new context of the relations of power.
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Monkeys in the Dark reflects the complex and unsatisfactory process that
Australian fiction (and society in general) faced (and in large part continues to face)
in attempting to maintain aspirations of cultural dominance in the face of postcolonial
emancipation and equalisation. The transition from colonial to postcolonial is,
therefore, far from complete in the sense of there being an internal congruence, an
ideological consistency or resolution of internal anxiety in relation to this apparent
contradiction. The effect, in fact, of the approach taken by the novels of this period,
which speak into the discourse of universal equality while revealing not only an
individual but institutional racial / cultural chauvinism, is the production of an aporia
or faultline in its fictional enunciation of otherness. In order to aesthetically (though
not actually) resolve this faultline Australian fictional texts are forced to enter a
complicated and inevitably futile play (or manipulation) of meaning.
Sinfield: Faultlines and Plausible Stories
Alan Sinfield in Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident
Reading explains that ideological faultlines emerge within cultures when the criteria,
or “conditions of plausibility”, which represent accepted ideological truth, are
confronted by alternative criteria which appear equally plausible. These conditions of
plausibility are, in the words of Stallybrass, “the voice of ‘common sense’, the
ceaseless repetition of the always-already ‘known’(qtd. in Sinfield 31)” by which a
society understands itself.
As Sinfield notes “the social cannot but produce faultlines through which its
own criteria of plausibility fall into contest and disarray”(45). Such challenges to a
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societal sense of truth will occur within single or related cultures almost inevitably
when they come into contact and are forced to negotiate cultural difference
(otherness). Colonised peoples, according to Sinfield , temporarily “lost their lands
and their lives because they lost out in the contest to establish plausible stories” (259).
One effect of the imposition of Western ‘truths’ on non-Western peoples has
been the interjection of ideological/philosophical differences which could not
immediately be assimilated into the structure of existing ideology. This frequently
caused a contradiction or splitting within existing social value, which resulted in what
appeared as aporias or sites of unresolved opposition.
In the postcolonial context the West maintains its partial authority over the life
of the postcolonial other not simply by means of economic or military advantage but
through its more effective strategy of deploying and re-deploying its own plausible
stories as universal discourses. The extension of Western enlightenment values of
equality and liberty onto the non-Western other has, however, in the postcolonial
context of an expanded or globalised equality resulted in the internal clash of
plausible stories, and the production of aporias or faultlines in the West’s own
discourses concerning racial / cultural otherness.
According to Sinfield, when aporias open within a social structure as the
consequence of conflicting social / cultural narratives, one way in which community
anxiety becomes manifest is in the frequency and stridency with which these
social/moral conflicts are raised within fictional narrative. The fictional reiteration of
issues in the form of aesthetic resolutions reflects the social preoccupation and the
difficulty of assimilating opposites which a particular society is experiencing at a

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particular time, and therefore the sites of its deepest ideological faultlines. For
example, the constant fictional references in mid-nineteenth century European
literature to the struggle between romantic love and social convention, like the early
twentieth century fictional concern with the clash between individual rights
expression and societal tradition, reflect sites of social instability, a stage of
incomplete synthesis between opposed assertions of plausibility or ‘commonsense’.
D’Alpuget, in setting her first novel in Indonesia is faced with just such an
apparently unbridgeable faultline in Australian ideology (mentioned several times to
this point) between the Australian liberal espousal of (postcolonial) equality and the
ongoing attitudes, utterances and practices of superiority and hegemony.
Unlike Koch, d’Alpuget makes no mention of an early immersion in colonial
literature. She was born in 1944 while Koch was born in 1932. At the end of World
War II and the commencement of decolonisation she was one year old, while Koch
was 13 and living in his early years through a period of relatively unchallenged
colonial domination. Koch mentions in Crossing the Gap the extensive influence of
colonial fiction on his early formulation of ideas concerning Asia. D’Alpuget, on the
other hand, in an article titled “Jakarta, Jerusalem and the Caves”, focuses on her
direct encounter with Asian otherness and the shock that it produced in her.
For Koch’s characters in The Year of Living Dangerously the gap between
Australian (European) modernity and Indonesian aspirations toward modernity are
much less complicated or fraught with apparent contradiction than for d’Alpuget’s
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characters. Asian backwardness is more clear-cut and unclouded by the globalisation
of liberal thoughts of tolerance and equality in the writing of Koch. The situation in
which the Indonesian other finds itself in the mid-60s is not devoid of ambivalence,
particularly from Hamilton’s point of view in relation to Kumar, but the resolution of
the inequalities that Kumar personifies will not be achieved, Koch’s text suggests, by
a critical reassessment of Western practices and attitudes in relation to the other.
Such a resolution can best be arrived at, instead, by the other committing itself more
determinedly to the task of modernisation, submitting itself to the educational and
developmental influence of Western modernity. In terms of my argument, Koch’s
text leans towards a colonial, therefore, less internally contradictory construction of
otherness.
In d’Alpuget’s texts the approach to these difficulties is different and more
ambivalent. The character of Judith, for example, in Turtle Beach, is a rather
lukewarm feminist, but nevertheless occasionally resentful and combative in regard to
male dominance in vocational matters and particularly the home. She is also
outspoken in defense of Australian Aborigines and the Asian boat-people. She is, in
other words, a non-radical bourgeois liberal, schooled in ideas of contemporary
political correctness, tolerance and equality, but largely inactive in regard to social
causes. Faced by Asia itself, she is rapidly made aware, in a way that generates a fair
degree of personal discomfort, that her willingness to champion the causes of a
downtrodden Asia represent little more than idealistic lip-service. As soon as she
arrives in Singapore she becomes conscious of her own innately racist attitudes, and
the more vocal racism of her compatriots. In this way, Judith, like Alex in Monkeys
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in the Dark, personifies the contradictory and divided heart of Australian attitudes to
Asia in the postcolonial context.
It is significant, as will be noted later, that this shock (both the external shock
of the other and the internal shock of moral conflict) is replicated in both the liberal-
minded central characters in Monkeys in the Dark and Turtle Beach, who travel to
Asia with liberal-humanist intentions but return embittered and alienated from
egalitarian principles. Such a displacement of liberal concern and principle creates
the crucial aporia that d’Alpuget’s texts attempt to make sense of.
Monkeys in the Dark: A Postcolonial Rearrangement
The narrative of Monkeys in the Dark depicts an affair between an Australian
journalist, Alexandra Wheatfield, and a Batak poet, Maruli Hutabarat. The figure of
Maruli, a Sukarnoist, is portrayed as actively working against the New Order which
has recently come to power after the failed coup of 1965. While Alex is shown to be
interested in Maruli romantically, she also sympathises with his attempts to resist the
New Order repression which has covert Western neo-colonial backing. In her
relationship with Maruli, Alex becomes something of a political pawn, exploited by
both sides. Inevitably the clash between Maruli and the Indonesian authorities leads
to his arrest . The Western intelligence doctoring of an interview manuscript
convinces Alex that Maruli was only using her for political ends. The narrative
concludes with Maruli’s imprisonment, Alex’s disillusionment and confusion, and the
depiction of Indonesian/Australian government complicity in the repression of the

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Indonesian population. By the end of the narrative, however, Alex’s rejection of the
Indonesian/Australian play for power is shown to extend beyond the
political/ideological to a more profound rejection of otherness itself.
In the first half of the narrative the text positions its central character in
opposition to the paternalistic / racist voices that abound in d’Alpuget’s construction
of the foreign diplomatic community in Jakarta. Alex fends off the enunciation of a
cross-cultural or racial binary opposition (i.e. a rejection of the other based on
cultural / racial factors) which would contradict her postcolonial, liberal-humanist
valorisation of the principles of equality. This is due, I would suggest, to the fact that
consideration of the survival of colonial attitudes of racial / cultural superiority in
liberal consciousness would in the face of postcolonial principles of human, rather
than specifically Western, standards expose the concealment (and, therefore, the
extant nature) of an ongoing cultural hegemony or colonialism in the postcolonial
context.
Like Judith in Turtle Beach, the character of Alex is forced to rationalise the
antipathy she feels toward otherness in the context of liberal-humanist values.
D’Alpuget effects this aesthetic resolution of the faultline in Australian discourse
concerning the other by redirecting or manipulating the two sides of the binary
opposition that form the original contradiction. No longer a colonial production of
West versus east (the typical positioning of Western modernity against Asian
underdevelopment and moral impurity), d’Alpuget’s text sets up an alternative more
politically acceptable binary opposition which reflects the postcolonial rearrangement
of Western discursive hegemony.

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According to this construction, I would suggest that the decent, moral and
politically engaged Australians and Indonesians in Monkeys in the Dark are portrayed
by d’Alpuget as those who pursue those values which have been constructed as
universal, while on the other side of the binary, despotic and immoral leaders, both
Australian and Indonesian, oppose their pursuit. Monkeys in the Dark obeys the
paradigmatic shift away from the east / West binary by moving its textual focus from
an emphasis on the differences between cultures and races (and therefore from the
pronouncement of the superiority of one over another), toward a portrayal of
character and narrative structured around the transcendent values of the universal.
This, I would argue, is merely hegemony by other means, a simple but profound re-
arrangement (or ‘curtaining-off’) of the bars on the colonial cell.
As an Australian journalist working in the embassy in Jakarta, Alex is
constructed as bourgeois liberal. Sinclaire, her cousin (an intelligence agent for the
Australian government working out of the embassy) notes, “She’s modern. She’s got
what’s known as a social conscience” (159). Despite an elitist family background in
Australia the text portrays her as being moved by feelings of outrage when she
encounters injustice and political oppression in Indonesia. Her moral anger rarely
translates, however, into action, except at those moments in the narrative when she
encounters the mistreatment of animals. Her shock in regard to the social/political
plight of the people of Jakarta is presented as genuinely felt but generally remains
unspoken and un-acted-upon. Nevertheless, when she sees the poor living on the
infectious canals and the cart men crushed by their labour she is disgusted by the
political corruption and inhumanity that allows such things to continue.

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The narrative directs the reader to the realisation that Alex’s contempt for
what she sees as the corrupt and cold-hearted application of power extends equally to
the Western community in Jakarta. The extravagance and moral decadence of the
diplomatic set (who represent the Australian political elite) becomes progressively
abhorrent to her. At the same time, her admiration for the fundamental decency of
the ‘average’ Javanese and the selflessness of the anti-New Order heroes, grows in
equal proportion. This leads her to a position in which she becomes sympathetic to
the hopeless idealism of Maruli’s cause, and to the struggle of the average Indonesian,
while becoming increasingly antagonistic to the venal expedience of the ruling elite,
both Australian and Indonesian.
The extravagant parties held by the various embassies which are occasionally
attended by New Order generals and their wives, and business men like the character
Sutrisno, gradually become a source of disgust for her:
It was no longer amusing and chic; it was ugly and disordered.… She
longed for Maruli; for decent people like Hadi and his wife. She
longed to be away from this smart party, with all its smart and
dishonest guests. …Alex was thinking of Maruli again as she accepted
some lobster and avocado salad. She pushed the pale, seductive flesh
about on her plate, wondering what he had eaten that day - probably
lumpy rice and vegetable soup, if anything. (144-147)

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The depiction of this fundamental opposition between the elite and the people,
between autocracy and liberalism, between self-serving corruption and political
idealism becomes the crucial binary through which d’Alpuget’s text flows. It is a
binary between the Old and New Orders, the people and political elite, the defenders
of the revolution and the exploiters of the nation, and so forth. But never, at least in
the first three quarters of the text, between Asians and Australians.
Monkeys in the Dark in this sense represents an attempt to resolve the crucial
post-colonial contradiction, between the production of a discourse of global equality
and the ongoing rejection and subordination of non-Western identity, through the
creation of an alternative (and distracting) binary paradigm; a binary which permits
the assertion of the universal ideal by separating it from the political practices of
cultural hegemony. This is achieved, as argued above, by smuggling Western values
back into the battle for control of otherness through its concealment in an espoused
universality (i.e. in a disguised and more ideologically palatable form). The criteria
which set Sutrisno and Sinclaire against Maruli and Alex are derived from Western
ideals of free speech, the value of the individual, the rejection of, and struggle
against, autocratic authority etc. These are, in turn, collapsed into, and concealed
within, the ‘neutrality’ of the ‘human’ universal.
The fixed binary of good and evil which novels like Monkeys in the Dark
generate (a binary which avoids the espousal of a cultural / racial divide while in
reality maintaining it) overwhelms the complexity of a genuine dialogic which might
otherwise emerge from an interaction based on cross-cultural equality. At the same
time, this transference of Western humanist value onto the Indonesian context
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overrides the possibility of alternative cultural criteria, and so reduces the capacity of
the other to speak from positions of difference or resist the assertions of cultural
superiority.
The production of supposedly universal ‘human’ standards means that the
issue of cultural production effectively disappears, or more accurately becomes
concealed. This, of course, ignores the impossibility of such values emerging of
their own accord and the hermeneutic process which enable their codification and
implementation. While the commonality of human characteristics is easily agreed
upon, the ethical and social outcomes of ‘humanness’ cannot be argued as a
consequence of some inherence or transculturality. To speak of individual freedom
as an inalienable right, for example, is to interpret human existence from a culturally
specific perspective.
As Robert Young suggests, in White Mythologies: “No one, of course, denies
that their are universal facts, such as birth and death. But take away their historical
and cultural context, and anything which is said about them can only be tautological”
(123). Making the same point, Chandra Talpada Mohanty observes that the fact “that
women mother in a variety of societies is not as significant as the value attached to
mothering in these societies” (qtd. in White Mythologies 123).
Aesthetic Resolution: Papering Over the Cracks

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A clear expression of this imposition of the ‘universal’ onto the other is
apparent in the ‘enlightened’ views shared by d’Alpuget’s central Australian and
Indonesian characters. The qualities of sacrifice and idealism are focused most
acutely through the character of the Indonesian activist Maruli who joins the fight
against what he sees as the betrayal of the Indonesian revolution by New Order
corporatism. He is described as a Sumatran poet of national renown who fought
against the Dutch in the revolution, and completed his education in Europe. On his
return to Sukarno’s Indonesia he is no longer able to accept the traditional values and
beliefs of his people, seeing his father, an important chief in North Sumatra, as “a
willful old man whose ears were blocked to new ideas” (113).
He finds himself “horrified by traditions that had seemed before as normal as
the rising of the sun” (113). He adopts instead a political mentality (“I was a
stranger among my own kinsmen. So I came to Djakarta and politics.”), first
supporting Sukarno and then doggedly opposing the regime of the New Order. The
shift in Maruli’s allegiance represents a transference of belief and commitment from
community and family traditions to the ideals of nationhood and revolution. “ ‘I was
a Sukarnoist, I am a Sukarnoist, I will be a Sukarnoist. That fact is enough’ (63)”.
After Sukarno’s removal from power, Maruli’s commitment leads to a ban on
his writing and his being branded an enemy of the state. “As a political writer I can
do nothing. Volcano has been banned since March. I have been silenced” (58).
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The text invites the reader to recognise the sincerity of Maruli’s revolutionary
commitment and his social compassion early in the novel when he takes Alex to a
favourite eating-place near a Jakarta rubbish dump in which the poor are scavenging
for a livelihood (“He preferred the eating places of the masses. If alone, he would
have talked to the betjak boys”(47)). When a crippled beggar appears at the entrance
of the restaurant, Maruli recognises the man: “Maruli looked up. He made a noise in
his throat, a sigh of pain. The beggar was gazing at him directly. Maruli began
pulling notes from his pocket…” (48).
Afterwards he explains to Alex, that the man had his right arm and left leg
struck off because he was involved in the coup attempt.
“It was a kind of madness,” he said. “But its over now. Don’t look so
pale. That man is just an advertisement - a warning to others.” He
thought, What will they do to me, if I am discovered? A man of forty
-three, who can think and talk and write? They will kill me. He
supposed he had realised this before, and before, as now, it seemed
quite unimportant. (48)
Not only is this passage in the novel productive of a characterisation of Maruli
as compassionate, courageous and willing to sacrifice himself for a cause, but it
positions the ruling elite and their representatives as unrelentingly repressive.
The construction of the New Order regime as ruthless in its repression of
political opposition is well-supported by the historical documentation of the last three

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decades, and has been represented in a number of Australian novels. D’Alpuget’s
portrayal of Maruli, as the central Indonesian character in the novel, however,
represents a less direct and more carefully concealed narrative critique of Indonesian
repression. Maruli is characterised as artistic, independent, outspoken, a critical
thinker cynical of authority, committed to the ideals of free speech and ready for
martyrdom for the sake of his cause.
The New Order, as the negative side of the opposition (along with the
Australian elite), is represented primarily by the figure of Sutrisno, a Javanese
businessman. His fortunes have been revived by the new regime which provides an
ideal environment for his tough, street-wise wheeling and dealing. He is the
antithesis of Maruli: calculating, manipulative, softly-spoken and ,
uncharacteristically in a Javanese, crude. Sutrisno’s style of doing business (and the
Suharto era and style of doing business generally) is encapsulated in the scene in
which he courts the favour of General Jaya in order to win from him a lucrative
forestry concession.
Maruli, on the other hand, as the character with whom the reader is clearly
invited to sympathise, is depressed by the future that the New Order represents and
determined to save his country from the violation of its revolutionary principles.
After he and Alex spend an afternoon at a Bandung bathhouse, he contemplates the
distant volcanoes. When he turns back to Alex, ‘his eyes, she saw, were filled with
tears. “My poor country,” he said’ (83).

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In large part, the binary between Maruli and Sutrisno is a personification of
the more fundamental historical opposition between the Old Order and the New.
Sukarno and his followers as the representatives of the Old Order, are constructed in
this novel (and in many other Australian texts) as the torch-bearers of revolution, in
love with the ideals which have brought their country to the brink, and representative
of a deep vein of idealism which continues to run through the community. 35
The binary opposition between the Western characters in the novel follows an
equivalent or mirroring pattern, to that of Maruli and Sutrisno, the New Order and the
Old, for the purpose, I would suggest, of distracting the reader from underlying
35
It would be interesting to insert into this binary of good and evil (which represents a frequent
characterisation of the Old and New Orders within Australian prose and journalism) Indonesian
prosaic accounts of the Sukarno era, In the novel Debu Cinta Bertebaran, for example, Achdiat
Mihardja critiques the Sukarno leadership style for its repression of individual freedoms and the
promotion of the cult of personality. Ajip Rosidi in the 1985 novel Anak Tanahair: Secercah Kisah
recalls the dictatorial approach that Sukarno took to decisions of national importance. And of course
Mochtar Lubis in the famous Senja di Djakarta viciously caracitures the endemic corruption and
nepotism of the Guided Democracy period of the Sukarno political era. These texts obviously
represent political and ideological preferences: Mochtar was detained under house arrest and
imprisoned for a number of years for criticising Sukarno’s political ideas; and the other two novels
were written and published during the New Order period of political dominance (although most of
Achdiat’s work was written outside Indonesia and his political affiliations were with the PSI (Partai
Sosialis Indonesia) during the Sukarno years). These texts suggest, nevertheless, that a number of
Indonesian writers, who lived inside the republic during that time did not develop an idealised view
of the period of Sukarno’s leadership. On the other hand, Pramoedya, who shares many points of
agreement with western commentators and critics of Indonesia, said in a 1995 interview:
I admire Bung Karno. He was capable of creating a “nation”, not a “bangsa”,
without shedding blood…in the national struggle, Sukarno was really number one,
he was a great man. ( “Tutup Buku Dengan Kekuasaan” 28pars)
The greater complexity and diversity of view represented by the introduction of these and
many other Indonesian texts raises interesting questions about the simplistic and monologic state of
most Australian textual constructions, not only of Indonesian political life but of the Indonesian view
of itself. It is instructive, for instance, to note that the only Indonesian prose texts which have been
received into the Australian literary geography (i.e. appear on Australian non-academic bookshops)
and have received almost total critical endorsement from the west, have been the recent post-Buru
Island novels of Pramoedya Ananta Toer which reflect and reinforce the west's critique of New Order
authoritarianism and Javanese hierarchism. Pramoedya's critical re-evaluation of the emerging
nationalist voice, and (indirectly of) its current political outcomes, is work of immmense value and
insight which will be considered in detail later in this project. However, it is one thing, as
D.M.Roskies notes, that Pramoedya has "placed in parenthesis ideas of order and deference at the
heart of his background, class, and Javanese upbringing" (31) and another that Australian writers and
critics, ignorant of these sames values, should attempt to draw Indonesia into its own moral and
political paradigm in order to evaluate it. The absorption of Pramoedya's radical critique into the
Australian literary geography contributes to an identification of the dominant Australian discursive
strategies in relation to Indonesia.
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cultural / racial preoccupations in the text. It is primarily arranged between Alex and
her cousin, Sinclaire. Like Sutrisno, the character of Sinclaire represents the ruling
elite in terms of his wealth and his government position as an Australian agent
working, along with the CIA, in support of the Indonesian status quo (i.e. New Order
dominance over Sukarno). He is self-centeredly hedonistic, politically and
philosophically conservative and, like Sutrisno, cynical in relation to the
revolutionary aspirations of the Old Order Sukarnoists. Issues of human rights and
dignity are far removed from his scope of interest or expertise. When Alex defends
her relationship with Maruli, which Sinclaire has just discovered, she accuses him of
toadying to the ruling elite (“You go sniffing around listening to what those New
Order creeps tell you and believing their paranoid stories about conspiracies, how
everybody who is slightly left-wing is making a revolution. . . You’re turning into a
fascist” (105). To this he gives a standard economic-rationalist response:
“If things go bad here we have got to know what they might do,” he
said. “If they were to close the Sunda Straits and the Malacca Straits
to our ships, for example, the arse would fall out of our trade in Asia.
Do you get that point, Alex?. . .Don’t sniff, pet. You and I wouldn’t
have as much money to spend… .” (105)
By this means the text compares Sinclaire’s character with that of Maruli in a
way that is clearly designed to arouse the antagonism of the reader. Along with
Sinclaire, the diplomatic community follows its decadent trail of official parties (and
in-crowd racial abuse: calling the locals “nig-nogs” and “kokis” and dragging out
such cliché’s as “For them life is cheap”), Alex longs for “decent people” like Maruli,
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and Hadi and his family. 36 The character position of Alex, on the other hand, as I
have already explained, is one that the reader is invited to accept as being
representative of Australian decency and fair-play.
This is the stark opposition that drives the text : elite political corruption and
brutalisation of individual human rights versus the basic decency and humanity of
those who have been victimised by “the system” on both cultural / racial sides. It is
an opposition that transcends (and in effect invalidates) cultural difference on the
basis of a universal that is highly culturally specific but is disguised in order to appear
to be trans-cultural. Thus, the axiological binary opposition works globally in the
way that it once worked within the colonial West, through the transference of Western
ideals of right and wrong, good and evil (only without explicit reference to the West
as source in the postcolonial context).
It is my contention that this generates a strategy which achieves a more
complete and invisible control of global standards. The characterisation of the
Australians in the novel produces a paradigm which positions decent, liberal-minded
Australians as egalitarian, fair-minded and sympathetic in regard to Indonesian
aspirations and values (therefore non-racist, anti-colonial and supportive of the
politically repressed), while their political masters, inextricably linked to power
relations and guided by outdated hegemonic criteria, betray Australian decency for
rationalist political purposes.
36
At the house of Hadi, an artist who paints “the people starving while the generals lie rotting
in gold”, she finds a warmth and normality, a sense of family and fellow-feeling that she has lost
amongst the hedonism and corruption of her fellow westerners and the ‘New Order creeps’ (105).
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By this means d’Alpuget achieves the appearance of resolution (in regard to
the split between hegemony and equality) through the fictional redirection of blame
which focuses responsibility for continued attitudes of racial superiority and the
ongoing practices of political hegemony away from the average liberal-minded
Australian onto the political elites within Australia and Indonesia. Rather than
battling with the complexity and contradictoriness of Australian racial ambivalence,
the text sidesteps it, separating the old story of colonialism out from the new story of
equality by providing alternative subject sites for the villains and the heroes.
The resulting textual binary can be represented in the following way:
NON-RACIAL / CULTURAL BINARY
ELITE VS OPPOSITIONAL
HEGEMONIC EGALITARIAN
CONSERVATIVE LIBERAL
VS
MATERIALIST IDEALIST
New Order vs Sukarnoists
Sutrisno vs Maruli
Sinclaire vs Alex
Foreign community vs Hadi and wife
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It is the experience of cross-cultural antagonism and shock that d’Alpuget
manages to hold at bay through the production of this binary of re-direction. The
shock of the other is channeled away from the surface of the text but remains a
disturbing force beneath it, one which eventually splits open the binary construction
in the last part of the narrative when Alex is no longer able to maintain the artifice of
tolerance or justify her claims concerning cross-cultural equality
Proximity: A Contradiction Challenged
The last chapters of Monkeys in the Dark are perhaps the most interesting in
the context of the argument of this chapter, in that they narrate the exposure of the
faultlines, and the tearing open of the narrative’s attempted resolution. As the
narrative moves to its conclusion, d’Alpuget portrays Alex as entering a phase in
which the experience of otherness overwhelms her capacity to maintain the
superficial resolution of discursive contradiction. This does not (either from the
central character’s or the author’ perspective) redirect blame for this failure in
tolerance back to the unresolved nature of colonial attitudes in the West , but instead
leads Alex to blame (in an overtly racist resolution) Indonesian racial / cultural
otherness itself.
D’Alpuget’s narrative tries to resolve the incompatibility of universal equality
and the ongoing Western hegemony of the other but lapses, under the immense strain
that direct contact with the other can so easily generate, back into direct intolerance.
The writer takes the myth of equality and universality into the experience of alterity
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and it is her character’s encounter with what Levinas calls the “absolute other”
which points up the falsity, the thin tissue of lies from which this postcolonial
project is made.
From the outset of the narrative, seen through the eyes of Alex, the novel
constructs Jakarta as an inexplicable ambiguity. While the beauty and corruption of
Indonesia forms a disturbing contradiction in Alex’s mind, initially she does not give
herself up to either side completely. Rather, like Said’s orientalist split between
contempt and delight it appears to her as part of the exoticism of the place, and her
outrage is resolved by relating its cause to political evil. When she first arrives in the
city she is fascinated by the faces which were:
so beautiful that her heart lurched. She thought of the bird-like cries
of street vendors, the smiles people caressed her with, the coloured
mounds of fruit on the pavements. . . (12).
But she balances this observation by noting that:
for every delight there was, however, a dialetic, an outrage: the beggar
children; the soldiers with their stupid, brutal faces; the detainees
whose screams could be heard sometimes at night coming from the
police stations; the blood that had gushed out of Java and Bali when
the coup was being crushed. . . (12).
Towards the end of the novel, this tension between disgust and pleasure
begins to collapse into a singular anger toward cultural/racial otherness. Observing
the local people washing in the stagnant canals of the dry season she thinks
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there were enough soldiers in the city to clean the silt from the canals
so they would flow and the poor would not catch cholera; instead the
soldiers swanked around with their sub-machine-guns, lolling in the
shade or shouting at girls. And as for the beggars, Islam said one
gained virtue by giving alms to beggars . . . At the time she had found
that an agreeably mystical statement of the way of the world. Now it
only made her angry. (133)
The tone of this passage suggests that the bureaucratic failure and callous
disregard for human suffering that she witnesses is derived from a cultural
backwardness, a moral deficiency specific to Indonesia (or the non-West). It is no
longer the repressive forces that alone are to blame but something deeper within the
society, a something that produces racial / cultural overtones. It is not merely the
authoritarian nature of the regime but the ordinary individuals who make up its army,
thus suggesting that the deficiency is to be found in the culture itself and the tendency
of the race. The words used to describe the young soldiers - “swanking” and “lolling”
with “stupid, brutal faces” - suggest racial inferiority and savagery. 37
Beyond this, the narrator’s reference to the association of Islam with the woes
of the poor, shifts Alex’s critique back into the colonial east / West binary. From
viewing the religious motivations for giving to the poor as an “agreeably mystical
statement” her attitude shifts to outrage at what to her has come to represent a
religious reinforcement of appalling social injustices and an indictment of the belief
37
Applying a semiotic commutation test to such a passage by replacing the Indonesian soldiers
with their Australian equivalents would generate, I would suggest, a sense of displacement that
focuses the direction of blame back onto race or culture.
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structure that substantially defines the nature of its followers. This passage, emerging
late in the narrative, signals Alex’s change in attitude, her frustration with the struggle
to maintain a rational equilibrium between the liberal voice of equality and her
perceptions of cultural/political/racial inferiority in the other.
In the final section of the text d’Alpuget’s description of Jakarta and its people
lapses directly back into an ‘us and them’, ‘West and east’ binary of stylistics. While
shopping for durian (to give to Maruli in gaol) the language of racial denigration
emerges in the text. Alex observes the city scene: “the cart-men with their dumb,
crushed faces” harnessed like oxen to their carts, “bent parallel to the melting
roadway as they strained against the weight of their burdens”, the parking boys who
“carried knives inside their purple satin shirts”, the market men “with iron-bladed
parangs across their knees” their vocabulary “clichéd with innuendo…leer[ing] at the
housewives and the servant girls”, the street children whose “grubby, thieving fingers
pinched at Alex’s arms and legs as she climbed into the front seat and slammed the
door” (166-168).
Her growing distaste for Jakarta and its inhabitants reaches a culmination
when Alex sees a horse with broken legs being taunted and beaten by a crowd of
children. She finally snaps rushing toward them and slapping one of the offenders
across the face. D’Alpuget describes what follows:
The children had separated for a moment, from surprise, but they
quickly collected their wits. Several grabbed at Alex’s shoulder bag.
others were jumping up behind her back, snatching at the rings in her
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earlobes. They were squealing with excitement as they grabbed at her
clothes. Alex could see nothing but the burning sky and the child’s
face burning with fury. (169)
By this stage Alex appears to have completely exhausted her capacity to
struggle with the contradiction of moral judgements. When Sinclaire rebukes her
behaviour, after rescuing her from the children, she turns her anger on him:
“I hope I’m not brutalised by this place, the way you seem to be. Two
years ago you’d have done something yourself for that poor wretched
creature. It’s a disgrace, and you’re a disgrace. . . .” He looked at her
coolly. “Local rules, sweetheart. I live by the rules. You, however,
are trying to stand in no-mans-land. You’ve rejected the foreign
community and now you’re rejecting the Indonesians.” (emphasis
added 170)38
Alex responds by making the statement that defines her changing attitude: “They’re
both vile.”
These last words enunciate the drastic shift that has occurred, or at least been
exposed. After reading the transcript of Maruli’s interrogation, (the narrative makes
it clear that it has been doctored by Sinclaire in order to make Alex believe that
Maruli merely used her for his own political purposes) she appears to shift even
further in her intolerance of Indonesia. In describing her reaction d’Alpuget writes:
“Clearly too, for her, the mystique of the place, of the Indonesians, had worn off
38
Later, when Sinclaire takes her to a party, after Maruli’s arrest, she tells him that she is
getting progressively more “fed up with things that go on here.” “Are you really?” he responds. “I
thought you only disliked the foreigners and the New Order.”
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quickly.” Alex stops indulging what she had considered the culturally different
perspective on time, demanding that her co-worker, Poppy, who is consistently late
for work, be dismissed. Her growing rejection of Indonesia and its exoticism is
obviously a defense for her severely wounded psyche, but it also represents a
collapse of her liberal-humanist pretensions of egalitarianism. She capitulates to a
monologic, more manageable reading of otherness which requires no complexity of
resolution but can be accepted more directly.
In the last lines of the novel while she sits drinking with Sinclaire in the
Ramayana Bar in the Hotel Indonesia, a place she formerly detested as a bastion of
Australian chauvinism, we read:
She had the feeling something had happened to her, that there had
been some self-deception, a collapse of will, perhaps. But it was only
a vague uneasiness. Before it could become a thought it flitted from
her into the dark, like a bat. (176)
Her closure of the negotiation with otherness is complete. The contradiction
between the politically correct assertion of equality and her own inclination to reject
the culture of otherness is no longer resolved by the re-direction of blame. Instead,
she surrenders to racism.
This exposure of underlying value is a product of what Levinas describes as a
shift from distance to proximity. He describes the essential nature of the relationship
between actual face to face encounter and transforming knowledge:

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To approach is to touch the neighbour, beyond the data apprehended at
a distance in cognition, that is, to approach the other. This turning of
the given into a neighbour and of the representation into a contact, of
knowledge into ethics, is the human face and skin. (Language and
Proximity 125)
Alex’s former reading of Indonesian alterity is facilitated by distance, a
distance which Levinas would call “thematisation” (or “the said” as opposed to “the
saying”). In the first half of the narrative she has not truly and finally encountered
the “human face and skin” and has therefore escaped the shock of the other.
However, as the narrative progresses her liberal espousals of tolerance, her attempts
to conceal (from herself and the other) racist and hegemonic predilections, are
gradually exposed by her encounter with extreme and shocking difference which she
cannot contain within the space of an espoused equality. In the face of this otherness
she perceives (or is confronted by) the look, the returning gaze, of a heteroglossic and
shocking alterity which refuses to submit to her discursive dominance.
Turtle Beach: Repression and Release
D’Alpuget’s second Asian novel, Turtle Beach, carries on this more direct and
racially defined approach to the resolution of contradiction from the outset of the
narrative.
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At three pivotal moments in the narrative of this novel d’Alpuget’s central
character, Judith, experiences a deep sense of displacement in her encounter with
Asia that causes her to bring her negotiation of cultural alterity to a rapid and
premature closure. These moments arise when Judith is confronted by the
unmediated reality of otherness, a contradictory system of symbols and truths that
threatens the monology and authenticity of her own values. Closure is typically
achieved by characterising Asian difference in terms of a failure to attain basic
universal/human standards of decency/morality. This, unlike Monkeys in the Dark, is
achieved very early in the narrative by directly by focusing on a traditional binary
construction between eastern and Western values.
Despite the main characters assertions of tolerance and egalitarianism at the
outset of the novel, Judith, from the moment of her arrival in Malaysia, fends off any
negotiation with Asia alterity. The contradiction between her politically correct ideas
(prior to her arrival) and her response to the actual encounter with racial / cultural
otherness is resolved with out the inner struggles experienced by Alex, but only by
means of exclusion, a reversion to an older, more monologic explanation of
difference. As she is shocked and horrified by the face of the other which has laid
down the challenge of an alternative way of seeing and dealing with the moral
universe, she responds to each challenge to her values (as she has throughout her visit
to Asia) by affecting the rapid closure of dialogue and the reversion to easy answers.
The foundation of those judgements made by Judith are, to her mind,
universal standards of behaviour and ways of thinking. Issues of tolerance, equality

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and political and social engagement are conclusively overridden by the character’s
sense of moral precedence, the self-evidence of Western truth.
By this means d’Alpuget constructs in both novels an Asian alterity which is
savage and belated rather than as genuinely alternative, or truly other. It is therefore
outside the scope of any conceivably mutual engagement. As Judith perceives it,
Asia represents a social/cultural failure to advance, to move toward the higher (i.e.
universal) standard. It is this conception of a belated other which exposes the failed
project of postcolonial tolerance. In this sense it is a realisation that Asia does not
(and cannot) possess an equally valid existence in its own right. It remains instead
the victim of imposed universal criteria and continues to be the subject of Western
disapproval, rebuke and re-education.
In an article titled “Jakarta, Jerusalem and the Caves” d’Alpuget reveals that
her conceptions of Asia elaborated in Monkeys in the Dark, Turtle Beach, and her
third novel, Winter in Jerusalem (set in Israel) can be traced back to her own
encounters with Asian difference (which testify to the power that direct engagement
with otherness has to dislodge liberal rhetoric formed at a distance). The novels
d’Alpuget explains were drawn:
from the shock and outrage I experienced more than twenty years ago
when I first saw, in the streets of Jakarta, people searching through
rotting and stinking garbage for something to eat. They are stories of
survival. (76)
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Such a declaration reveals less about the sufferings of the Indonesians than the
anguish that their suffering produced in the observing foreigner - the shock of the
other as seen through Western, or specifically Australian eyes. 39 At the conclusion of
her travels through Asia her attitude toward these locations of cultural alterity
becomes more explicit and the means of resolution less complicated and
contradictory:
Somehow, by journeying through these horrible places - vile Jakarta,
dangerous Malaysia and violent Israel - my imaginative life has been
cleansed and realigned to a brighter, sunnier, more playful and
optimistic dimension. (emphasis added 76)40
D’Alpuget’s main characters, Judith and Alex, through their experience of the
‘face’ of otherness, come to share her strongly pejorative and uncompromising view
of Asia. In one important passage in Turtle Beach, Judith, after being kissed
aggressively, and without her consent, by Kanan, an Indian-Malay academic, exposes
this latent sense of foreboding and disgust when she extrapolates a flurry of
Orientalist ideology:
This was the real Asia: infant girls abandoned on rubbish dumps;
women murdered for losing their virginity; wives divorced by the
repetition of three words; villagers stoned to death helpless people
because they were Chinese. No mercy here for the weak. You’d be
kissed in public whether you were embarrassed or not. Kissed, killed -
39
A perspective which produced in d'Alpuget herself (during a period in which she lived in Asia) an
impression of "discomfort, seduction and fear" and a strong sense of displacement (74).
40
In the light of d'Alpuget's response to her own experience of Asia, Broinowski's note that "Blanche
d'Alpuget believed a `a new human race' was being formed, and that Australia would be the world's
first Eurasian country" sounds more like a warning than a promise (199).
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it was a matter of degree only, the source was identical, disregard for
the unimportant. Playing cricket was important, and being tolerant,
being an unpollutable Hindu. . . . (208)
This regression toward a ‘purer’ Orientalist stereotype, apparent in the closing
section of Monkeys in the Dark and d’Alpuget’s second novel Turtle Beach,
Australian popular discourse has, with the appearance of Pauline Hanson and the so-
called ‘political correctness debate’, become similarly outspoken in the assertion of
its ‘right’ to more openly criticize and assert its dominance over minority and
marginality in Australian society.
Such a shift away from the political correctness position has been justified by
its proponents in the name of freedom of speech, the need in a free society to shrug
off the restrictions that have been imposed in order to maintain a liberal racial and
multicultural stance in relation to race and culture. This so-called freedom has, in
reality, translated into the greater capacity for mainstream (Anglo-Celtic) Australians
to repress difference.
What I am suggesting in this reading of the d’Alpuget novels is that, as with
Alex and Judith, it is the sense of enormous strain produced by the requirement to
keep contradiction hidden or repressed in the name of postcolonial equality (through
the discourse of political correctness) that has been the primary trigger for the recent
social upheaval in racial / cultural issues in Australia.

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In conclusion I would argue that the strongly negative reactions to ‘political
correctness’, which have rippled through Australian society since mid-1996, have less
to do with the racist declarations of Pauline Hanson or John Howard’s pre-election
criticism of the dangers of ‘PC’ than the pressure which has been building around this
fissure, the central contradiction in Australian discourse concerning the other. That
racism and the old colonial will to power, which have never been eradicated from
Australian consciousness (but which have, in reality, only been sidelined as
ideologically unfashionable) should re-emerge periodically should not surprise
anyone. The sudden and fervent racial resentment that has surfaced in broad sections
of the Australian community in the last few years, reflects the strain of holding
together two plausible but diametrically opposed stories: the old story of Western
41
superiority and the new story of global equality.
41
Turtle Beach, unlike Monkeys in the Dark, represents a transgression of the discursive
concealment of contradiction and an elaboration of a more fundamental Australian intolerance in
relation to Asian values which reflects the similarity of mood and expression in large segments of the
Australian population today. (An indication of the breadth of popular feeling that Hanson has let out
of the bottle might be guaged by the fact that after an impromptu attack on Hanson’s attitudes toward
race by Charles Perkins on the Channel 9 Midday Show “something like” 55,000 telephone calls were
received from viewers with 94% agreeing with Hanson.)
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CHAPTER 4
This chapter will consider some of the cross-cultural problems raised in
d’Alpuget’s novels, in Chapter 3, from an Indonesian literary perspective. The
introduction of Indonesian fictional texts in this chapter (as well as chapters 6 and 7)
is intended to provide space for an Indonesian response to the Australian fictional
construction of its identity. The theoretical purpose in this will be, using Todorov’s
approach, to add alternatives to the single text, to multiply the possibilities (whether
they be acceptable or not), and to attempt to provide sufficient material to break up
the totality. Seeking out the voice of otherness is an attempt to overcome
monoglossia42 by providing space for (permitting the voice of) the heteroglossic to be
42
Monoglossia represents the socio-political and linguistic opposite of Bakhtin’s theory of
heteroglossia (which I defined and described in chapter 1). It is the outcome of cultural and political
pressure brought to bear on the naturally multivocal universe with the purpose of gaining and
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heard and thereby to generate a dialogue (albeit a somewhat artificial one) between
Australian and Indonesian literary texts.
A core idea that resonates from d’Alpuget’s reading of, and reaction to, Asian
otherness (and one which the Indonesian texts in this chapter respond to directly) is
the role of individual responsibility and freedom in the construction of a “modern”
society. In the face of Asian traditions d’Alpuget’s Australian characters are driven
to feelings of outrage at what they consider to be the belatedness and social injustice
of the other’s world, particularly in relation to the failure to recognise the value of
individual rights and freedoms.
The ‘abomination’ of the pierced children, caught within what is perceived to
be an outmoded and evil framework of superstitious tradition, evokes an Australian
response, drawn from Western philosophical and moral traditions, which is a call to:
“…change the system …make it bearable” (155). Judith is appalled at seeing Minou
being slowly (and in the end literally) destroyed by the demands of her familial
responsibilities, and the Confucian sense of love and duty that drives her to expend all
her energy, her dignity, and her opportunities for personal happiness in order to free
her family from communist Vietnam. Minou’s death appears to Judith to be the futile
expression of an outdated tradition of social enslavement.
As Judith witnesses Kanan’s passivity, his tranquil acceptance in the face of
Minou’s demise, it strikes her as the final blasphemy against the innate value of the
human individual. D’Alpuget tells us, in this part of the novel, that Kanan was
maintaining control over it.
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amused by “the play” that he saw enacted in Minou’s drowning, the unfolding of the
divine narrative:
Kanan felt the pull, the irresistible inward drag as the wave sucked
back to itself that which was its own, and the great wheel turned over,
spinning individual consciousness, that woman, up and back into the
eternal revolving force. (265)
“Don’t look sad,” he says to Judith. “She is doing what she wants to do. Just watch”
(264).
It is the ‘just watch’ that crashes into Judith’s cultural consciousness, her
belief in the value and fragility of the individual, and fills her with contempt: “Who
would stand by while a human being destroyed herself” (273). Kanan sees the
“spinning individual consciousness”, in his mind’s eye, returning to the whole,
travelling to a new consciousness. Judith sees only destruction and loss. The
communal identity of the other, the sense of place and participation in the social and
cosmic order, is utterly alien to her, and mortally offends her sense of the
preeminence and preciousness of the individual life.
At this point the edges of cultural identity repel each other. They cannot cross
over or negotiate their differences without transgressing crucial symbolic (i.e. core)
cultural values. This is the metaphoric imperative, the substitutionary voice of self-
identity which opposes and attempts to replace, rather than negotiate, or connect with,
otherness. It is the point at which dialogue with otherness appears to be impossible.

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In introducing an Indonesian ‘response’ to this Australian perspective it is
important to understand that this thesis is not suggesting the existence of an Asian
authenticity that transcends Western criticisms or offsets the Australian perception of
a belated other. It is not an argument extolling ‘Asian values”. Such an approach
would represent the inversion of stereotypes and return the other to the cage of
colonial control by delimiting the scope of its counter-characterisation to a mere
reversal of Western absolutes.
As will be seen in the remainder of this chapter, there is instead an insistence
on the richly hybrid reality of Asian identities, which have drawn on Asian and
European traditions to develop a sense of self which is both individual (capitalist) and
communal. Thus the argument that follows will not be a reiteration of the ‘Asian
values’ line, but a recognition of the value of the negotiated sense of the other which
43
has been largely, to this point, resisted by the West. Most importantly the primary
fictional text under examination in this chapter, Achdiat’s Debu Cinta Bertebaran,
reflects the complex and culturally negotiated nature of modern Indonesian
identification with both its own traditions and the intervention of modernity.
This chapter will draw on several Indonesian texts which engage with the
issues raised in d’Alpuget’s novels concerning individual and communal rights,
43
Allan Patience in his article “A Clash of Civilisations? The values of Asia: a change for
universities”, suggests that “the advocates of ‘Asian values’ are equally ignorant of venerable
histories of cross-cultural contacts between civilisations … Their condemnation of ‘western
individualism’ is, in effect, a blinkered form of orientalism: It is crassly ignorant of Asian
individualism and individualities”. (10)
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modernisation and traditional value, in order to generate a sense of dialogue between
Australian and Indonesian literary voices. The analysis of these texts will be divided
into three main parts.
In the first part I will consider the crucial focus in Indonesian literature in this
century on the twin demands of Indonesian cultural traditions and Western
modernisation. I will develop a brief synopsis of the historical background of this
recurrent fictional concern through the identification of a series of stages in
Indonesian literature in this century. These stages begin with Indonesian novelistic
and short story critiques of traditional values and obligations in the early part of the
century, followed by a period in which there was a shift toward the re-evaluation of
what was considered the too rapid acceptance of modernisation prior to the second
world war. Later, in the period after Indonesia’s declaration of independence in
1945, the debate concerning the effects of modernisation was overshadowed by
national concerns.
In the final part of this historical overview, leading up to the present day, it
will be argued that the apparent dichotomy between Indonesia and the modernising
West has not, at least in this century, ever represented a binary between truly
opposite cultural positions and that it is more fruitful to read this difference in terms
of an ongoing interaction and synthesisation of opposites, a process of dialogic
negotiation.
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In the second part of the chapter, several Indonesian short stories will be
examined which reflect, and illustrate, the history of the struggle to come to terms
with the displacement of traditional values and rituals and the incursions of
modernizing Western influences, seen from the Indonesian perspective. These stories
reflect, in particular, on two periods of major political and social upheaval which
occurred during the independence struggle, and in the wake of the abortive coup of
1965.
In the third and final part of the chapter I will examine Achdiat Mihardja’s
hybrid novel Debu Cinta Bertebaran which, set in Sydney in the mid-1960s, reflects
the difficulties of developing a workable dialogue between Indonesian traditional
values and the effects and demands of the modern. The analysis of this novel will
represent an attempt to respond directly to issues raised in Australian fiction
concerning Asian attitudes to individual freedom and rights. Achdiat’s text
challenges some of the assertions made by the West that its own values represent the
universal. At the same time his novel reveals the ongoing willingness of Indonesia to
dialogue with modernity.
Prior to examining these texts I will reiterate and expand on my reasons for
including Indonesian texts and the critical value of juxtaposing Indonesian and
Australian fiction as a way of generating an element of exteriority.
The Juxtaposition of Difference: Bakhtin and Butor

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In this section of the chapter I will consider the contribution that the
juxtaposition of Indonesian texts with the issues raised by the Australian novels
makes to the overall argument of the thesis. In order to do this I will draw on Michel
Butor’s heteroglossic approach to travel writing, and the theoretical arguments of
Bakhtin and Todorov, to suggest that the positioning of Indonesian fictional texts in
(‘normally’ unrelated) proximity to the Australian novels has the capacity to provoke
new insights into cross-cultural (mis)understandings. Thus, in keeping with the stated
purpose of the overall thesis, the inclusion of Indonesian novels and short stories
which engage with issues raised by the Australian texts is intended to provide a means
of interrogating the Australian discursive voice in the cross-cultural relationship.
As I have argued extensively in this thesis, the West has attempted to maintain
the dominance of its own voice over an heteroglossic other from its position of
strength and out of its philosophy of needing to control those differences which might
complicate or subvert its own identity. I will suggest in what follows, that the act of
juxtaposing texts, that represent the clash of cultural value and the multivocality of
cultural ways of seeing, is itself a way of suggesting the possibility of alternative and
subversive ways of speaking those “truths” which the West considers to be singular
and transcendent.
In an article titled “Travel as Dialogic Text: Butor’s Renditions of America
and Australia”, Stacey Burton employs Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of novelistic
language to examine the experimental travel writing style of Michel Butor. In a brief
overview of his work, Burton theorises the inventive and experimental writing style
that Butor has developed in relation to travel literature. The new approaches that
emerged from Butor’s experimentation were cultivated, according to Burton, in order

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to release the text from authorial dominance, and to release the other from the
panoptic of the Western traveller, “the domination of reality by vision” (Said,
Orientalism 240).
In his earliest travel text, Mobile, Butor explores the complexity and diversity
of his experience of travel through the United States. In his attempt to write more
polyphonically he produces apparently arbitrary lists of information, experiences, and
facts about the United States: “an assemblage of fragments without a narrator to
impose coherence” (22). This approach, of course, generates its own difficulties in
relation to Butor’s espoused purpose, in the way that the very selection and
juxtaposition of categories and catalogues implies political associations in the process
of choosing and aligning material. Nevertheless, what is interesting in this idea, and
the manner in which Butor applies it to his American observations as traveller, is the
way in which the juxtaposition and interweaving of normally unallied, seemingly
unrelated, texts (applied to the American experience by an outsider 44) opens new
avenues for reading its subject. As Burton explains it:
By pointed juxtaposition and sheer abundance, the text of Mobile
works dialogically to subvert discourses that claim to be authoritative.
Jefferson’s assertion that all men are self-evidently created equal
comes up against the realities of twentieth-century American racism
(segregation, lynching, racist commonplaces) - and against Jefferson’s
own comments on African moral and intellectual inferiority in Notes
on the State of Virginia. The “American European” myths embodied
in “the sacred city of Washington, where the principle temples and the
44
Butor is French.
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essential government organizations” … are interrogated by various
texts about the abuse of Native Americans. . .”. (25)
While such a re-selection of textual relatedness implies a distinct political
positioning, a constructedness of its own, it also represents, in the context of travel
writing, a perspective from the outside, a conscious re-narration of national myths
made by an other. In this way Butor’s text provides a reading of its subject which
could be described as, to some degree, culturally dialogic.
This reading / writing strategy ties in closely with Bakhtin’s theory
concerning exteriority and the assertion that inter-cultural dialogue is an essential
component in the maturation and enrichment of individual cultures. For, he has
argued, only interaction with “other” cultural truths can expose and critique cultural
monology. Bakhtin explains the necessity of a cultural exteriority that can only be
achieved through the opening of an intercultural dialogue when he writes:
In order to understand, it is immensely important for the person who
understands to be located outside the object of his or her creative
understanding - in this case to stand outside one’s own culture. For
one cannot even really see one’s own exterior and comprehend it as a
whole, and no mirrors or photographs can help; our real exterior can
be seen and understood only by other people, because they are located
outside us in space and because they are others. (qtd. in Morson and
Emerson 55)
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This is achieved not by attempting to theorise “outsideness”, what it might be
like to look back at self, but rather by an actual interaction with the external values
and visions of the other. According to this conception of exteriority the individual’s
own culture is objectivised and de-privileged through the experience of the
heteroglossic critique of alterity which, in turn, exposes the individual to cultural
hybridity, the uncertainties of the centrifugal.
Taking a similar approach, I will suggest in this section of the chapter that the
juxtaposition of Australian and Indonesian texts, while not explicitly exploring
internal contradictions in the manner of Mobile, nevertheless represents a potential
interruption of self-evident truth, of monologic certainties by the exposure of
singularity to the relativising effects of heteroglossia. The proximity of alterity to
familiarity in the cross-cultural encounter provides an exteriority, a fresh eye in the
reading of cultural truths by allowing a conversation between uncommon
interlocutors who speak from very different positions.
Australian dialogue concerning Indonesian ethical or political values typically
draws on a Western frame of reference. In regard to issues of human rights and social
responsibility, Australia refers predominantly to its own philosophical / moral
tradition and to Western-based institutions and discourses to make judgements about
Indonesian social and political practices. The outcome of such a supposed
“dialogue”, I would argue, is non-dialogic, non-interactive, representing instead an
endless reiteration and reinforcement of the monologue of Western domination. This
reiterative approach, in turn, denies Australia the critical intervention and enrichment
of an exterior perspective.
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In order to avoid such a re-production / re-positioning of Indonesian identity
as provided by the West, the Indonesian texts in this chapter will, as far as possible,
be allowed to ‘speak for themselves’. At the same time, however, interpretation will
not be completely eschewed nor will the texts be left to reconcile or complicate
difference on their own. Todorov explains this approach when he describes his
critical method in Conquest of America in which he includes quotations from the
Aztec chronicles alongside the European accounts of conquest:
I have sought not a terrain of compromise but the path of dialogue, I
question, I transpose, I interpret these texts: but also I let them speak
(whence so many quotations) and defend themselves. (emphasis added
250)
In Conquest of America Todorov supplies the Aztec account of historical
events which have traditionally been shaped by the Western academic gaze, in order
to provide “multiple determinations which condemn any attempt to systematize
history to failure” (252). By giving equivalent space to the Aztec chronicles and the
juxtaposition of the Aztec recounting of events Todorov provides an approximation
of dialogue45 not as a prologue to the definitive response of the Spanish histories but
rather as texts which rest on an equal footing to the European accounts.
45
Neither the Spanish nor the Aztec histories were written for cross-cultural audiences. Similarly the
Australian and Indonesian texts under consideration in this thesis do not address themselves to
audiences outside their own cultures. Mikhail Bakhtin’s theoretical assertions concerning the
fundamental role of the addressee in the construction of the utterance and the value of exteriority (or
outsideness) in the development of a dialogic suggest the artificial nature of dialogue as proposed by
Todorov in Conquest of America (and by myself in this thesis). Nevertheless in the absence of the
truly dialogic or hybrid literary text it is hoped that the juxtapostion of voices will provide at least the
semblance of dialogue and thereby contribute something to a better cross-cultural awareness.
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Because of the long hermeneutic dominance of the West, Todorov also takes
less time to critique and interpret the Aztec accounts than the Spanish histories. Thus,
the equal representation of the voice of the other, along with Todorov’s lightness of
critical touch, provides the Aztec point of view with a somewhat greater opportunity
to be seen as providing an alternative perspective to the established ‘truths’ of the
European historians. A similar approach will be taken in these terms in relation to the
Indonesian short stories and novel introduced in this and subsequent chapters. 46
The purpose, therefore, of including the Indonesian prose texts in this chapter
(as well as Chapter6 and 7) is twofold: firstly, to allow the generally silenced voice
of otherness to respond to the assertions of the ‘universal’; and secondly, in order that
the alternative view of ethical/social meaning that they incorporate may raise new
questions about Australia’s way of seeing itself and cultural / racial otherness.
The Battle for Minds: Tradition Versus Freedom
Before examining the Indonesian texts themselves I will in the following
section of the chapter briefly outline the Indonesian response in prose fiction to the
46
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s suggestion concerning the essential, and largely absent or
denied, contribution of the subaltern history can, and should, be added to the argument for an
opening of textual space to the voice of otherness. In criticising the complicity of western
poststructuralist academics in the ongoing subjectification of the cultural subaltern, Spivak writes:
Although some of these western intellectuals express genuine concern about the
ravages of contemporary neo-colonialism in their own nation-states, they are not
knowledgeable in the history of imperialism, in the epistemic violence that
constituted / effaced a subject that was obliged to cathect (occupy in response to a
desire) the space of the Imperialist’s self-consolidating other. It is almost as if the
force generated by their crisis is separated from its appropriate field by a sanctioned
ignorance of that history. It is my contention that, if the subaltern studies group
saw their own work of subject-restoration as crucially strategic, they would not
miss this symptomatic blank in contemporary western anti-humanism. (209 In
other Worlds)
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social and political pressures which have contributed to the hybridised but as yet
unsettled form of modern Indonesia.
Western colonial and postcolonial discourses have had a prolonged and
profound influence on the Indonesian sense of its own identity in this century,
particularly in regard to Indonesia’s movement away from strict attachments to
traditional local culture. The modernist / traditionalist debates which have emerged
from this influence have centered on the concepts of individual rights versus an
emphasis on community value and obligation.
Indonesian cultures have been characterised by the West as traditionally
communal and hierarchical and the emergence of prose literature in Bahasa Daerah
and Bahasa Indonesia reflects these preoccupations in both urban and rural settings.
Indonesian novels and short stories, at the same time, also chronicle the profound
effect that the introduction of Western ethical and philosophical values such as
equality and individual freedom have had on the thinking of the small educated, and
large peasant, classes from the early part of the century onwards.
It is important to note that in the pre-revolution period (from the first decade
of the century up to 1945) the heavy engagement with, and readiness to negotiate,
Western values in the Indonesian novel did not result in the wholesale replacement of
traditional culture with modern alternatives. In fact, the clash and attempted
negotiation of Western alterity generated intense debate and disagreement throughout
the first half of the century. In this regard, Clifford Geertz, in The Interpretation of
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Cultures, describes the way in which “‘archaic-magical’ and ‘developed-rational’
theories of power” (in broader socio/anthropological terms) have existed side by side
throughout the century in developing countries:
There is in such matters, no simple progression from ‘traditional’ to
‘modern’, but a twisting, spasmodic, unmethodical movement which
turns as often toward repossessing their emotions of the past as
disowning them. . . . A tense conjunction of cultural conservation and
political radicalism is at the nerve of new state nationalism, and
nowhere more conspicuously so than in Indonesia. (emphasis added
319)
Nevertheless, the influence of Western thought, during this period,
particularly on the priyayi class47 has been prolonged and widespread. This influence
was an understandable consequence of the control of Indonesian space during the
colonial period.
In addition the Indonesian willingness to interact with foreign influences,
despite the social dislocation that has accompanied it, has been recognised as a
cultural characteristic specific to Javanese society. 48 The development of the
Javanese attitude of adaptation and interaction with otherness is described by
Benedict Anderson in Mythology and the Tolerance of the Javanese as an outcome of

47
George Quinn defines the term priyayi, which I will examine in relation to the novel Para
Priyayi later in the thesis, as:
Traditionally, a high-level Javanese official in the old Javanese states and the Dutch
colonial administration of Java; also used to refer collectively to these officials and
their distinctive pseudo-aristocratic lifestyle; in more recent times often used to
refer to persons descended from priyayi families or with an upper-class lifestyle
reminiscent of the priyayi of former times. (294)
48
In contrast with the western propensity to oppose and dominate difference that we have
already considered in relation to Levinas’s theorisation of the philosophy of the same.
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the Javanese reference to the characters of the wayang kulit49 which represent ideal
models of behaviour. Several of the Indonesian stories under consideration in this
thesis draw on this tendency to model the self on, or understand others though, the
diversity of wayang characterisation.
This approach to character emulation highlights an important difference
between Western and Javanese attitudes to diversity and difference. Benedict
Anderson sets up his description of the Javanese tolerance of cultural difference by
explaining the origins of Western intolerance in the context of the emergence of the
Western demand for universality. Like Levinas he argues that the propensity to
dominate is inherent in the fabric of Western thought:
. . .the abstract principles of the Near Eastern religions and the
rationalism which has succeeded them in Western society, are
applicable, by implication to all men regardless of social position
and social function. (emphasis added 25)
The standards generated by the Western system of thought (emerging from
the Platonic conception of forms) apply universally and without regard to
psychological or social difference. This universality of application, according to
Anderson, is a consequence of the destruction of feudal society and the rise of
modern capitalism and secular individualism. The assumptions of a competitive and
egalitarian society, Anderson suggests, are basically that a gigantic race is being run,
in which all should have an equal opportunity to take part, within a unified
framework of success (25). Such a generalisation of ethical standards (i.e. one
49
The Javanese shadow theatre, with narratives frequently based on the Javanese-Hindu stories
of the Mahabharata and Ramayana.
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standard for all) clearly stands in the way of genuine or easy negotiation of
difference.
In contrast, according to Anderson, the Javanese tradition offers the young
Javanese “a wide choice of models for his own personality; which he can be sure will
win approval anywhere in Javanese society” (25). The Javanese approach to the
achievement of value, therefore, is not a reductive cutting away of every alternative
‘truth’ (by designating it as false or evil) in order to achieve a single or universal
truth. On the contrary, it is expansive and plural, offering a range of potentially
achievable truths of equal value and thereby opening a variety of routes to the
achievement of social meaning. This prepares the way for a stress on community
rather than competition, which in turn provides the basis for a greater tolerance of,
and capacity to assimilate, difference:
Where there is no race, the animals can live together in harmony.
Since Arjuna, Wrekudara, Judistira are all held in honour, both the
heavily-built, active, but inarticulate boy and the delicately-boned,
introspective child have acceptable ways in which their personalities
and physical traits can evolve without unnecessary spiritual violence
being done to them. (25-26)
In theory at least, this capacity to view and accommodate multiple and even
contradictory cultural values provides, from a Javanese perspective, the flexibility
needed to more readily engage with cross-cultural alterity.

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The Indonesian Novel: Integrating the Opposites
In the next section of the chapter I will outline those broad areas of literary
interest that have characterised the Indonesian novel and short story in this century.
In the first part of this analysis, under the heading “Indonesian Prose:
Negotiating the Modern”, I will briefly consider Indonesia’s novelistic discourse from
the appearance of the prose form at the beginning of the century to the formation of
the independent nation in 1949. The central emphasis in this overview will be the
effects of Westernisation on Indonesian literature and the consequent literary
preoccupation with the relative merits of tradition and modernisation.
In the second part, under the heading “Nationalism: a Silencing from Within”,
the effects of the ideology of nationalism will be considered in relation to the prose
fiction of the post-independence period and the modernisation / tradition debate.
In the third, and final, part of this broad-brushed historical outline I will look
at the literary negotiation and hybridisation of the dichotomy between West and east,
modernity and tradition. In this context it will be suggested that Indonesia’s
contemporary literary approach has concentrated on the interaction of cultural voices
rather than their divergences.

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Pre-independence Indonesian Prose: Negotiating the Modern
From the time of its emergence in the 1920s the Indonesian prose form was
involved in the complex process of negotiating the challenges of colonisation /
modernisation. As Nidhi Aeusrivongse notes, in Fiction as History: a Study of Pre-
war Indonesian Novels and Novelists (1920-1942), Indonesian novelists and short
story writers were rarely engaged in the simple promotion of one side or other of the
traditionalist / progressivist dichotomy. The writing itself reveals a highly ambivalent
attitude to the inroads being made into traditional Indonesian cultures by modernity.
This is manifested both in a celebration of its promise and an aversion to its threats.
Nidhi charts the influence of Western thought on Indonesia in the pre-
independence period of this century through a reading of its more important prose
texts. She argues that the emergence of the Western novelistic form in Indonesia was
not simply an attempt to mimic the West but rather a determination to make use of a
highly appropriate form to express the radical social and political changes that were
beginning to take place in Indonesia in the early part of the century:
Western education taught them to cherish individual freedom and the
value of particular facts. They found in the novel a literary form that
was the most suitable medium to convey their message of individual
freedom . . ...the crises of choices between satisfying one’s own need
or fulfilling one’s traditional duty under the adat law. (77)
Nidhi argues that in the 1920s the Indonesian novel had already started to
promote the message of modernisation as a crucial means for liberating Indonesia

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from the unexamined effects of its traditions. Focusing on fundamental social issues
such as arranged marriages, polygamy, and restrictions on the social advancement of
women, the Indonesian novel and short story often portrayed traditional Javanese and
Minangkabuan values as anti-modern interferences in the life of the individual, and a
stumbling block to the progress of the society as a whole.
Most of these same Indonesian texts, however, reflected some hesitation at,
and ultimate rejection of, any suggestion that the way forward would entail the simple
replacement of traditional culture with that of the modern West. While the novels
and short stories were typically sympathetic to those characters that attempted to
oppose the limitations of tradition, their attempt to resolve the conflict generated by
the east / West dichotomy often aroused a narrative ambivalence which was derived
from the perception of ideological / ethical contradiction. In the early stages of the
Indonesian novel’s development, for example, the conflict between the individual
choice of a partner (with love as the new basis of selection) and the traditional
negotiation for suitable partners between parents (mendapatkan jodoh) usually
resulted (where the young people decided to make their own choice), in tragedy or
despair. Thus, the narrative indirectly reinforced the value of tradition which, it was
implied, protected the individual from poor or impulsive choices. Despite the
typically tragic denouement of these narratives, however, Nidhi asserts that “in
proclaiming love as the absolute condition for marriage, the novelists declared in
effect the significance of an individual and the principle of social equality” (192).
As already noted the re-evaluation of tradition, during this phase of
Indonesian fiction, did not lead to an ongoing divestment of adat values or their
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replacement by the ‘superior’ Western standards of individual choice. Rather, as
Nidhi shows, the initial surge toward modern Western values, in this and several
other areas, became problematic in the next decade. This brought the value of
progress and the Western ethic into question and forced a reassessment of the
importance of local tradition.
In the 1930s and early 1940s, as the Dutch retreated from their commitment to
the Ethical Policy, Indonesian novelists (influenced to some degree by Indonesian
political thinking) began to reconsider the utility and superiority of Western liberal
humanist values (in a way that Islamic Modernists had done throughout the twenties).
Western anti-religiosity, lax moral standards and social independence were portrayed
as destructive in the lives and social setting of the ‘east’. (Asian leaders and
academics in the postcolonial setting of the 1990s have frequently echoed this view.)
Issues of hierarchy, arranged marriages, and female submissiveness were
characterised in the novels of the pre-war period in a more positive light as providing
the stability of a mature social order. While the value of greater individual choice
and egalitarianism were not rejected, greater balance was applied to the portrayal of
each side with a “tendency to make a compromise between modernity and
tradition”(291).
Indonesian novelists and short story writers of this period pushed the idea of
compromise by including concepts of (that which Sukarno later portrayed as)
traditional Indonesian resolution - musyawarah (consultation) and mufakat (consent) -
rather than the Western traditions of debate and confrontation which were perceived
as being unnecessarily divisive. As Nidhi suggests in this regard:

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Either by implication or by direct statement, novelists seemed to favor
cultural synthesis. . .. Western science was never to be the sole model
for progress . . .. The emphasis on native culture and what was
deemed as national identity became more dominant in novels of the
second decade. (emphasis added 297-298)
A new and important emphasis in the concept of community and social
responsibility during the 1930s and 40s was the emergence of a sense of nation and
‘Indonesianness’. The individual, while more free in relation to the traditional ties of
extended family and village adat (village law), was made progressively aware of
belonging to and serving the nation, especially through the burgeoning of twentieth
century political and social organisations.
In the period from independence to the late 60s there is a much clearer
concentration in the texts on individual experience and alienation from the social
structure. These texts show less interest in engaging with the alternative of a more
traditional communal orientation, or even in criticising it. The novels of this period
frequently explore personal psychological journeys, divorced from identifiable social
contexts. At this point in Indonesia’s history the pause in the ongoing debate
concerning tradition and modernity was, I would argue, largely motivated by the
sudden entrance of Indonesia into the unstable context of war and revolutionary
struggle which was productive of social displacement and alienation.

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As Mulder notes in Individual and Society in Java: A Cultural Analysis the
extreme experiences of war, revolution and post-revolution politics:
constituted an absolute rupture with the colonial and predictable past.
When the revolution had run its course society and political ideals
became vague with a clear future ever further receding beyond the
horizon. It is against this situation of confusion and hopelessness that
the Javanese self-indulgence and self-centredness of its creative fiction
may be interpreted. (76)
The political and social turbulence generated by the Second World War and
the revolutionary and post-revolutionary periods (up to and beyond 1966) drastically
accelerated the process of social change within traditional Indonesian cultures. While
Western cultural values had, as already noted, made deep inroads into the various
Indonesian world views prior to this period, especially amongst the more educated
and political classes, the sudden retreat of the Dutch and their replacement by the
Japanese, along with the post-war battle for independence and the post-independence
struggle for a workable political identity, produced massive social and cultural
dislocations throughout the population.
The extreme divergence and clash of ideological views throughout the
revolutionary and post-independence period up to 1965/66, contributed to a growing
sense of suspicion and fear within the community itself. When mass violence erupted
in Java and Bali after the 1965 coup attempt normal standards of communal respect
and restraint were momentarily displaced by long-held and deeply-felt community

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trepidation and distrustfulness. The ferocity and scope of the post-coup eruption
revealed the intense nature of ideological divisions within Indonesian society. Geertz
has written in this regard:
At an enormous cost, and one which need not have been paid, the
Indonesians would seem to an outsider to have now demonstrated to
themselves with convincing force the depth of their dissensus,
ambivalence, and disorientation. (The Interpretation 325)
In the wake of this enormous social and political upheaval ideological /
political debate concerning tradition and modernisation was largely silenced. Rather
than stimulating public discussion the social upheaval of 1965-66 appeared to have
made ordinary Indonesians more determined to retreat from the sites of previous
community conflict. The focus of concentration at this point in Indonesia’s history
appeared, in Keith Foulcher’s words, to be on “the problem of alienation and
reintegration, the attempt by both individuals and community to re-establish lives
disrupted and ravaged by political polarization and political imprisonment” (“Making
History: Recent Indonesian Literature and the Events of 1965” 104).
At the same time, and largely as a result of this sense of cultural dislocation,
several important writers, particularly in the latter part of this period, returned to the
earlier unresolved debate concerning modernity versus tradition with renewed energy.
Short stories about the revolution years, like Pramoedya’s “Dia Yang Menyerah”,
highlight the way in which the competing pressures of political ideology, and the ebb
and flow of military conquest (Javanese, Dutch, Republican, Communist, and

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Hizbullah) fractured social stability and the traditional structures at the level of the
desa which had been the base upon which peasant society had depended for its
livelihood and identity. As villages and nuclear families became divided by a range
of political allegiances many Indonesians were made aware of the dangers inherent in
being identified with specific social and political groupings, which led in turn to a
retreat from traditionally important social structures.
Nationalism: A Silencing from Within
In this part of the chapter I will look briefly at the effects of Indonesian
nationalism on the tradition / modernity debate in the New Order period. Two
contradictory perspectives have emerged in recent years that suggest the period of
New Order rule has in some ways revived the debate and in others repressed it. I will
mention both positions in order to introduce a third perspective which proposes that
this perceived dichotomy has always generated dialogic literary responses to the twin
demands of tradition and modernisation.
William H. Frederick in an article titled “Dreams of Freedom, Moments of
Despair” suggests that the establishment of ‘stability’ and a sense of continuity under
the New Order regime encouraged the gradual re-emergence of the pre-war debate
concerning tradition and modernity. He argues, in keeping with this view, that “1940
to 1965 represent[ed] little more than a wrinkle in time…a difficult (but in the final
analysis historically parenthetical) era” (67)

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The literary aspect of this re-emergence of public and aesthetic discussion
concerning tradition and modernity is apparent, Frederick suggests, in the writing of:
authors as divergent in other respects as Pramoedya Ananta Toer,
Mochtar Lubis, and Umar Kayam [who] have either continued with or
briefly taken up [these] essentially dichotomous themes or lines of
inquiry. (68)
The persistent focus of novelistic interest on the issue of modernisation and
tradition, even into the present decade, reveals the difficulty inherent in the task of
resolving contradictory stories. The eventual shape of such resolutions, the hybrid
outcome of Western and Indonesian values, is, in many areas, still open to conjecture.
Taking an opposite perspective on New Order influence, other political and
social commentators have suggested that while such a debate has re-surfaced to some
degree, in the last few decades it has had to struggle against the powerfully repressive
demands of the discourse of the nation which has been enunciated and enforced with
added vigour by the New Order regime.
Dr Sudewa, in the introduction to Linus Suryadi’s Dari Pujangga ke Penulis
Jawa, describes the shift which took place in the focus on the modernisation /
tradition debate from an energetic discussion in the pre-war / pre-independence
period (epitomised by the Polemik Kebudayaan debate between Sultan Takdir
Alisjahbana and Sunasi Pane) to the near banishment of the subject from mainstream
discourse after independence:

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Since the reins of development and modernisation have been placed in
the hands of the Indonesian nation, discussion concerning the fusion of
modern culture with traditional/primordial local culture has not been
heard again, as if discussion concerning regional, local culture has
come to constitute something which is taboo. (viii-ix) 50
This shift away from debating issues of modernisation and tradition in the
post-independence period, in large part, has been the product of two factors: the
social and political disruption of the post-war period, dramatically realised during the
revolution and the 1965 abortive coup and its aftermath (which was outlined in the
previous section of this chapter); and secondly, the post-independence emphasis on
national unity which has largely overridden regional concerns.
It is important to note that while the traumas of 1965-66 highlighted, for large
segments of the Indonesian population, the degree to which modern ideology had
fragmented Indonesian communities and displaced traditional systems of value and
authority, it also introduced new pressures on traditional culture to conform to the
national agenda in the name of unity and stability. While stress on the concept of
national unity over regional divergence was strong after the revolution, it became all-
consuming under New Order rule. As Sudewa writes, rhetoric concerning the
identity of the nation overwhelmed the tradition / modernity debate after
independence:
50
The translations of Sudewa and Suryadi in this section are my own. See Appendix 3 for
passages in the original.
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The debate which was at times tense, employing sharp words, never
emerged again after independence and the control of our national
future was fully in the hands of our own people. Even in the New
Order period, the debate concerning the national cultural character of
the Indonesian nation has scarcely - in fact in no sense - been
concluded thoroughly. (x)
Linus Suryadi in another of his books titled Nafas Budaya Yogya describes the
actual repression of regional traditions by the national culture under the leadership of
the New Order. The heavy-handed censorship of regional artistic and cultural
expression was, he argued, an outcome of the New Order’s demand for conformity to
an ideology of nation which foregrounded concepts of unity, order and stability, and
disallowed regional or ideological alternatives.
The success of this imposition of national culture over regional identity has
been partly an outcome of the ideology of independence but in its New Order form it
is also an effect of what Suryadi calls the “post kesenian syndrome 1965” or the post
1965 artistic syndrome: a reference to the government suspicion, and control, of
artistic expression since the 1965 abortive coup under the the New Order regime. In
this form the production of a national identity was less likely to be defined in positive
terms of inclusion than through the terminology of intimidation which excluded what
the New Order viewed as potential challenges to the stability of the national
discourse. As Sudewa explains, in Dari Pujangga ke Penulis Jawa:

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problems which were based on national existence were deliberately
covered up by government officials and politicians … with the
justification that it was unsafe to disturb national stability. (ix)
The ideological threat which allowed the government to demand a national
commitment to political monology took the form of a New Order warning (repeated
endlessly) that the PKI (the Indonesian communist party) would return if the nation
was not united and vigilant. This produced a situation for over twenty years where
the contribution of the artist was constantly being surveyed and restricted by the
Indonesian army and police.
Keith Foulcher, in the article “The Construction of an Indonesian National
Culture: Patterns of Hegemony and Resistance”, reiterates the repressive effect that
the New Order’s insistence on promoting a single national voice has had on the
expression of regional cultural identity. He argues, however, that the regional voice
has not been completely silenced but has, in part, been channeled by the New Order
toward a form which protects the regime’s political interests: “Tradition and the
region are incorporated and disempowered, rather than denied, because they function
to contain the foreseen excesses of ‘modern’ cultural values and practices.” (302) In
this form regionalism is promoted in its visual and decorative, rather than its
discursive, aspects and utilised as a counterbalancing influence to the extremes of
Western value. This post-independence, post -1965 process of nationalising and
incorporating regional cultural traditions into the broad economic development and
corporatist philosophy of the New Order has, nevertheless, contributed to the loss of
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an emphasis on community values and traditions as the expression of valid
alternatives to modernity.
The New Order production of what Goenawan Mohamad refers to in Seks,
Sastra, Kita as “superkultur metropolitan Indonesia” has not taken Indonesia through
the debate which occupied the literary and academic discussions of the first half of
the century, but around and away from it. By actively repressing or diverting the
heterogeneous voices (the heteroglossic) of Indonesian cultural diversity the
necessary negotiation of difference has been temporarily postponed. Identity has
been imposed from the top, so that what Richard Robison has described as
“authoritarian corporatism” (46) has been offered as a total substitute for micro-
community values of identity, obligation and shared value.
Nevertheless, in the face of this opposition, in the 1990s writers like Suryadi,
in Dari Pujangga ke Penulis Jawa and Nafas Budaya, and Umar Kayam in his novel
Para Priyayi, have raised the questions again, albeit in a vastly altered, perhaps
unrecognisable, social climate, and it is clear from the debate that surrounds them that
these continue to be questions that require community attention and collective
resolution.
Synthesis: Dancing with the Dichotomy
The idea of an ongoing opposition between old and new cultural perspectives
(tradition versus modernity) has been questioned by some commentators who insist
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that from the earliest days of colonial intervention Indonesians have always taken the
path of cross-cultural dialogue and hybridisation. William Frederick, in Imagining
Indonesia: Cultural Politics and Political Culture, highlights the importance of the
process of synthesis in Indonesia’s twentieth century engagement with modernity.
Focusing on the novelist Armijn Pane’s51 attitudes toward change in Indonesia,
Frederick argues that any conception of the Western influence on Indonesia as a
competition between authenticities fails to understand the inescapably transformative
process of cross-cultural experience. Forwarding Armijn as the archetype of cross-
cultural dialogism in Indonesia in this century, he writes:
With those, even among close colleagues, who persisted in seeing
tradition and modernity as opposites, locked in eternal combat, Armijn
had little patience. For him, one could no more abandon traditional (or
regional) culture than avoid the influence of modern (or national and
international) culture; the two were not mutually exclusive, and
whatever modern Indonesian culture might turn out to be, it must be
allowed to develop organically-that is, freely and naturally, not in the
context of choosing between one extreme and another. (63)
In the arts Armijn welcomed the amalgamation of Western and other Asian
influences into the Indonesian musical, theatrical and literary expression of its
identity. His was not a postmodern voice raised as an advocate of cultural
heterogeneity but rather a voice which enunciated the Indonesian (and perhaps
human) tendency toward “homogenization and synthesis” (76). He rejected the idea
51
Armijn Pane was, along with Takdir Alisjahbana, one of the founding members of the
literary and cultural periodical Pujangga Baru, and author of the important novel Belenggu
(Shackles) published in 1940.
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of authentic cultural tradition, suggesting instead the constantly adaptive and dialogic
nature of continual cultural development and change.
Frederick suggests that a vast proportion of modern Indonesians hold a
similar, if less erudite and carefully considered, view of Indonesia’s relationship to
the influences of Western modernisation:
They neither know nor, truth be told, care very much about the
historical niceties of their multifaceted cultural heritage. This is not to
say they do not care about having a tradition to be proud of; to the
contrary, they want it understandable, polished, and brought up to
date. Whether it is a pure or accurate reflection of the past is of no
consequence; what matters is how it looks today. In their eyes
bastardization of tradition is unimportant and, often, quite
unrecognizable; even where it is evident, it may not be considered
unacceptable. (77)
The synthetic playfulness of anti-realist novelists in the 1980s and 90s such as
Yudhistira Ardi Noegraha, Putu Wijaya and Danarto, who have re-woven the wayang
stories into the fabric of modernised Indonesia, reflects the malleable and (at the same
time) assertive nature of an emergent nation, unwilling to remain submissively
‘authentic’, or throw off the past completely in order to enter its global ‘inheritance’.
In chapters 6 and 7 of this thesis the potency of this synthesising voice in modern
Indonesian cultures will be considered, particularly in relation to the most invaded of
all post-independence Indonesian cultures, that of Bali. Later in this chapter Achdiat
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Mihardja’s Indonesian characters in Debu Cinta Bertebaran will be analysed in
relation to the way in which they reflect the Indonesian determination to draw out the
best from both worlds and shape it into a future which is, to quote Bhabha, “neither
one nor the other” (The Location 25).
Speaking Over Silence: Indonesian Short Stories
In the next section of this chapter I will briefly examine two well-known
Indonesian short stories that reflect the mid-century political and ideological
upheavals that occurred in Indonesia from 1945-1965. These will be analysed in
order to understand the effect of this period on Indonesian cultural / social identity
and the modernity debate in the last half of the twentieth century. The last part of the
chapter will concentrate on a reading of the novel Debu Cinta Bertebaran in order to
consider its dialogic response to the pressures of modernisation at the time of
Indonesia’s post-independence political trauma of 1965-66.
“Dia Yang Menyerah”
In the short story “Dia Yang Menyerah”52 Pramoedya describes the social
dislocation and near destruction of a single East Javanese family when its members
commit themselves to the differing ideologies of the day. The story is set in the
period of the Indonesian struggle for independence. The father, an active nationalist,
is killed by the Communists who have taken over the village. Is, the oldest sister, is
implicated in the father’s death in the minds of the family because of her zealous
52
It is translated by Harry Aveling as “The Vanquished” but in literal terms it means “She (or
he) who surrenders”.
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membership of the communist party (the PKI) and is forced to flee the nationalist
army along with the other ‘Reds’. Sri, as the next eldest is forced to take over the
care of the children after her father and sister have abdicated responsibility in favour
of political involvement. After holding the family together in extremely trying
circumstances, she is impelled to join the Communists in order to save her younger
sister Diah from conscription. Sri later suffers rape and injury when Hizbullah
soldiers capture her.
Later, toward the end of the story, one of the family’s older brothers, Sucipto,
who was taken by the Japanese before the Revolution to work in Burma, returns to
the village as a soldier in the Dutch army. The sisters, Sri and Diah, try to make him
leave the house before his truck is seen by the nationalist forces, but it is too late and
their house is burnt down when he is discovered.
Finally, with the Dutch once again in control, Sri and her younger sister and
brothers are reduced to living in a cardboard shack. These consequences of the ebb
and flow of conquering forces sweeping over the village highlights the extreme risk
of ideological affiliations at this time in Indonesian history. The dangers inherent in
showing your ideological hand in such an uncertain political context generates the
desire to avoid any social commitments which may bring disaster in the future.
The traditional communal spirit of the peasant slametan , the extensive round
of social obligation expressed in ritual gatherings, which once contributed to the
individual’s sense of security and belonging is displaced by the perception of threat,

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betrayal and community suspicion which affects all community life. In the end, Sri,
traumatised by the recent past and terrified by the uncertain future, decides that she
will withdraw from the ideologically fraught social fabric into a world of surrender to
the tide of events:
“Often Sri told her rebellious heart and family: ‘Let it all happen. Let
it be. We must lose ourselves, imagine we no longer exist. And it
will be all over quickly.” And often Diah added “Let the wicked
remain wicked and the good. We must surrender to whatever comes.
Surrender. There is no point in fighting”. (105)
In different forms this kind of social agonism and dispersal continued after the
Revolution, through the ‘Democratic Period’ up until 1957 when Sukarno along with
the army implemented ‘Guided Democracy’. Sukarno’s political approach, however,
was productive of similar political and ideological antagonisms. The social
disruption and consequent alienation of the period is described in a number of short
stories and novels during the post independence period up to 1965. A key text which
vividly reconstructs the social ‘atmosphere’ in Jakarta prior to the coup (and towards
the end of Indonesia’s first decade as an independent nation) is Mochtar Lubis’s
Senja di Djakata which, in the words of D.M. Roskies, “epitomises the confusion
and catch-as-catch-can selfishness which had come to characterise large sections of
public life in the Republic” (24). Another well-known example of the effect of
Western ideological influence on the rupture of community is Umar Kayam’s short
story, “Bawuk”, which is set in the period of the political upheaval of 1965 / 66 .
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Pramoedya’s short story, in the context of this chapter’s argument, offers a
narrative example of the social and political pressures which in Mulder’s words,
generated a “situation of confusion and hopelessness”, against which the “self-
indulgence and self-centredness of [Javanese] created fiction may be interpreted”
(76). This shadow of political turbulence and community conflict produced an
environment of insecurity and suspicion that deterred the continuation of the
modernity / tradition debate with which these events were inextricably entwined.
“Sri Sumarah”
Umar Kayam’s longer short story “Sri Sumarah” represents an important
example of an Indonesian prose text which narrates the historical experience of
shifting community emphasis from a world of clear-cut social expectations and
obligations toward the greater influence of individual freedom and dislocation. Set in
a remote village in central Java, it tells the story of Sri, who is raised according to
priyayi traditions by her grandmother. The grandmother has committed herself to see
Sri educated and well-married before her own death. Umar explains that the
grandmother “saw her own obligations and sacrifice in terms of the glorious, happy
suffering of Kunti, the mother of the five Pandawa brothers” (105) which refers to
key characters from the wayang kulit.
She tells Sri stories from the Javanese wayang legends, the text informs us, in
order to guide her behaviour and shape her character. Sri whose name, Sumarah,
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means one who surrenders or adapts readily,53 submits to this teaching to the degree
that “the tales had become part of her being” (105). When the grandmother chooses a
husband for her and begins to negotiate the betrothal, Sri gladly submits. The
wayang figure, Sembadra, becomes the model around which the grandmother builds
her instructions on how Sri should please her future husband. In the wayang stories
Sembadra, who is married to the hero Arjuna, represents an ideal wife in the Javanese
mind, being “faithful, patient, sympathetic”.
Sri successfully applies these lessons to a twelve year marriage which is cut
short by the death of her husband, Mas Marto. Sri, who has a daughter to the
marriage, called Tun, then takes on her grandmother’s wayang model, the suffering
Kunti, and determines to raise and prepare her daughter according to the same
tradition. In this, as in several other stories and his novel Para Priyayi, Umar shows
how the wayang narratives and characters provided a traditional Javanese culture with
a pantheon of ethical and aesthetic role models. As Benedict Anderson explains in
Mythology and the tolerance of the Javanese :
The heroes of wayang were the consciously approved models by which
a child grew up. . . . The Javanese child learns from the models and
examples of behaviour the philosophical teachings which will later
orient him to the outside world. (24)
The text reveals to the reader, however, that Tun both inhabits and draws on
the spirit of the era of Indonesian independence. Like Sri she is sent away to school
53
The grandmother notes that “that doesn’t mean passive, child. To surrender is to be open,
to understand and not to reject”. (106)
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in the nearby town, but is strongly influenced by the more modern world she
encounters. Observing the development of Tun, Sri becomes disturbed that she does
not appear to respond to the traditional methods of parenting such as the tactile
relationship between mother and daughter which takes the form of kelon (lying down
together) and the searching for lice. Tun does not seem to see the importance of the
wayang stories or the traditional Javanese songs that Sri sings to her in order to instill
a Javanese morality and worldview. She is not rebellious but rather distracted by her
wider experience of the world and the hybridising influence of the modern age.
When her mother tries to pass on the grandmother’s practical advice regarding
the use of herbal medicines to keep the body sweet smelling and firm, and the
administration of the massage, all of which are intended to keep a husband satisfied
and faithful, Tun seems unresponsive. The text clearly indicates that Tun does not to
value the characteristics of submissiveness and service as a true child of Sembadra
should.
Sri thinks this is because she is too young to be interested in men until Tun
returns home from school to inform her mother that she has become pregnant. She is
shocked but typically responds by planning how she can save her “egg, from spoiling
in the nest”(119). She mortgages half of the small amount of land that she possesses
in order to organise a quick wedding and set up the new couple in the nearby town.
Yos, Tun’s new husband, with a degree behind him and a leadership role in
the local left wing student organisation, appears to have good prospects. His attitudes
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and ideals, however, run counter to Sri’s traditional outlook and when he promises
that his organisation will ganyang (crush) Mohammad, the landlord, who (quite
rightly in Sri’s view) takes over Sri’s land when she can not repay her debt, she is
deeply disturbed and confused:
Mohammad [the landlord] was a good man; she had never understood
what Yos and his friends saw as evil in such a kind, pious person. The
present conversation upset her and made her feel worried. (130)
Sri is encouraged by Tun and Yos to move away from the village into their
house in the town, where she can be near her new granddaughter, Ginuk. At their
home she witnesses the constant gathering of the young communist activists whose
discussions and passionate debates she does not understand. In the subsequent years
both Yos and Tun become heavily involved in the politics of the left. Tun even joins
the Gerwani women’s group which would be the focus of national hatred after the
1965 abortive coup. When Tun informs her mother one day that because of a coup
that occurred in far away Jakarta she and Yos must escape to the east and leave Ginuk
with her, Sri is unable to understand the scope or meaning of these events.
Six months later Yos is executed and Tun, on Sri’s advice, has given herself
up to imprisonment. With Yos and Tun gone, and her land and home in the village
confiscated by the army due to her daughter’s ‘subversive’ behaviour, Sri must find a
way of providing for Ginuk and Tun. In desperation she seeks “advice from the other
side” (revealing her connection to mystical Javanese beliefs) and after a brief period
of fasting receives a wisik (inspiration) from her dead husband in a dream. He tells
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her that she should use the massaging skills she learned from her grandmother. Her
style of massage proves popular and she is able to earn a living from it.
Towards the end of the story while massaging a wealthy and handsome young
man in his hotel room she submits to his embrace (a thing that she had not done
before). Prior to her second visit to the young man she tries to make herself more
attractive without allowing herself to think why she is doing it. Again the man
caresses her and Sri struggles with her confused sense of desire and guilt. Eventually,
she pushes him away and notices a look in his eye which Tun and Ginuk had “when
they wanted her to kelon with them at night” (156). The kind of relationship the
young man is seeking is unclear in the text. As Sri again allows him to embrace her
he tells her he will come for her tomorrow to take her to a cottage in the mountains
where “we can hold each other all night long, me naked, you dressed in your beautiful
clothes” (157).
Of particular interest in this last section of the narrative are the scenes in
which Sri observes herself in the mirror after being with the young man. In
describing what she sees, Umar clearly intends to create a sense of space, of
separation between the observer and the observed, between Sri and the reflection of
herself that she sees in the mirror. This is particularly clear in the way that Umar
emphasises her name in a manner that separates her from her own image, creating a
sense of splitting: “She saw Sri in the mirror. . . She stared at the figure of Sri
dressed in a chemise that she saw in the mirror” (148).

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While looking at herself she begins to think of the comments recently made
about her beauty. These thoughts, which she has previously dismissed as foolishness,
now take on an importance for her. As she watches her beauty she realises that she is
supporting her breasts and rebukes her behaviour because, in Umar’s words, “she
suddenly caught sight of herself in the mirror” (148).
Sri’s reaction to her image at this point of her life is reminiscent of
V.S.Naipaul’s character Santosh in the short story “One Out of Many” from his
collection In a Free State. The similarity is worth exploring for the way in which it
exposes the experience of alienation, and identity loss, and the emergence of
individuality, apparent in the Umar Kayam story.
Santosh, in Naipaul’s story, is a young Indian cook in Bombay who is so poor
he sleeps with his friends on the street outside his place of employment. One day he
is taken by his employer to Washington where, because of his fear of the outside
world and his lack of money, he becomes a prisoner in his employer’s apartment.
After a time he begins to experience an acute awareness of the futility in his life away
from his social circle in Bombay. In his search for purpose he notices that American
women are attracted to him and he begins to observe himself in the mirror:
I cannot easily believe it myself now, but in Bombay a week or month
could pass without looking in the mirror. . . Slowly [in Washington] I
make a discovery. My face was handsome. I had never thought of
myself in this way. I had thought of myself as unnoticeable, with
features that served as identification alone. The discovery of my good

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looks brought its strains. I became obsessed with my appearance, with
a wish to see myself. It was like an illness. (39)
The more he is absorbed into, and succeeds in, the modern world of
Washington the more he is shown to long for his life on the streets of Bombay.
Eventually at the prompting of his new boss he marries an American woman. But his
decision to marry, despite his “wife and children in the hills back home”, is portrayed
as a defeat. Torn from the place where he was part of something bigger than himself
and in which he shared a common understanding, he is driven toward isolation and
loss. In Washington he feels that he has become singular, and unconnected to the
world he inhabits:
I was a free man; I could do anything. . . I could run away, hang
myself, surrender, confess, hide. It didn’t matter what I did because I
was alone. (58)
In the final lines of the story his condition, brought on by the sudden
displacement from community to individuality, is made concrete in the mirror image
which represents nothing other than lack:
I was once part of the flow, never thinking of myself as a presence.
Then I looked in the mirror and decided to be free. All that my
freedom has brought me is the knowledge that I have a face and a
body, that I must feed this body and clothe this body for a certain
number of years. Then it will be over. (61)

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While Sri is not so completely alienated she too is in the grip of dislocation as
the cultural ground has shifted under her feet and she suddenly sees herself standing
on air, without foundation or community connections. One Western writer has
applied a “positive feminist reading” to the story’s ending, by stating:
When Sri submits (menyerah) to the young man’s caresses, she puts
herself and her sexual feelings first. Menyerah/sumarah to the young
man ends up turning the old values upside down. . . The choice Sri
makes for herself cannot coincide with the faithful, submissive
Sembadra and self-sacrificing Kunti. (Hellwig:105-106)
Sri’s act is exactly this, a decision for the self (the individual) over the
demands of social stricture. But whether the action provides a positive outcome for
Sri is less clear. Brought up in the stable world of the wayang, the repetition of
stories, the rigidity of precise social expectations, the clarity of role within a
patriarchal system of social obligation and continuity, a world in which she had
learned the secret of surrender, she is progressively cut loose by circumstances into a
difficult and uncertain future. Her village ties have been broken with the confiscation
of her house and land by the government and the warning that she should refrain from
visiting her old home. Her husband, Mas Marto, who acted as the focus of her
submission and surrender, is dead. Her daughter who took Marto’s place as the
object of service has been removed from her care. She is no longer Sembadra, the
ideal wife, and now she can no longer be Kunti in a complete sense.
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Because of her ‘failure’ to fulfil her purpose of raising Tun in the way her
grandmother raised her, she feels she must be more diligent in her service. Before
visiting the young man again she thinks about her preparations for the next day’s trip
to the prison which has become the unnatural context of her mothering. In her
thoughts we can see the split that has opened in her sense of identity:
Tun was almost the only thing she owned. Had she done as much as
she could so that the child would be happy? She measured her success
on the basis of the provisions and her readiness for the trip. Had she
managed to buy everything Tun and Ginuk asked for? If there was not
enough money, she blamed herself or her fate. She regretted not
having made greater efforts to find more clients so that she could earn
more. (150)
Her service to Tun is intensified by the impossibility of giving her what both
she and Tun need from the relationship. Even her identity as Sembadra the faithful,
which she has clung to in the face of proposals and hints of proposals of marriage, has
been taken from her in the moment she surrenders to the young man’s embrace.
What she has left of her life is Ginuk and herself. The comments others have made
concerning her long lasting beauty and her separation from her role in her
community, draw her into a recognition of her individuality that she has not
previously known. She sees herself in the mirror as Sri, no longer Sembadra or
Kunti. Yet this passage from social meaning into sensual individuality, from the
Symbolic to the Imaginary, fractures her sense of self, making her image into that of
a stranger: “In the mirror she could see a tired old woman with tangled hair. The
woman smiled. Or did she? Sri didn’t have time to ask her (158).”
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These short stories play out, in a fictional manner, the enormous
destabilisation of traditional values experienced by rural Java during this period in the
early history of an independent Indonesia. They also reveal the price that the
negotiation and incorporation of otherness extracted from the Indonesian community
in terms of its experience of the cultural void between identities, the loss of belonging
and purpose. Finally, the stories all make clear the risk involved in negotiating the
intervention of rapid modernisation, and provide a powerful explanation for the
silencing of the debate at, and after, that time.
Negotiating the Extremes: An Indonesian Novel
In the final section of the chapter I will, through a close reading of Achdiat’s
Debu Cinta Bertebaran, examine a single novelistic example of the Indonesian
struggle to negotiate, and develop a hybrid relationship with, the Western values of
individual freedom and identity in a rapidly developing nation. The passages quoted
in the discussion of this novel are, due to the absence of an English translation of the
text, my translations from the Indonesian. 54
“Debu Cinta Bertebaran”
Achdiat’s novel explores the Indonesian attempt in the mid-1960s to interact
with an otherness, in a postcolonial context, which expected, and frequently

54
The original Indonesian versions of the larger quotations are included in Appendix 3 and can
be traced according to page numbers.
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demanded, that the values and institutions of modernity be adopted wholesale and
without discussion. As reflected in this text, Achdiat shows an Indonesia which has
largely resisted this demand, preferring to generate a dialogue with Western values
and institutions that has produced a range of agonistic responses and hybrid outcomes
in relation to the influences of the modern West.
Published in the early 1970s, the novel represents both an important historical
stage in Indonesian thought (the mid-1960s) as well as many ongoing preoccupations
and difficulties still relevant to the debates of the 1990s. The main determining
factors in the selection of this novel were its setting in Australia, the historical period
which is its context and the overt nature of its dialogue with Western social values.
The heart of Achdiat’s focus in Debu Cinta Bertebaran (which could be
translated as “The Dust of Love Scattered”) is the negotiation of the perceived tension
between a traditional valorisation of communal responsibility and the Western
celebration of individual rights. The preoccupation with this issue is reflected in a
number of attitudes, incidents and debates within the narrative that revolve around the
benefits and dangers of ‘free speech’, ‘free sex’ and drug usage in Australian society
in the mid-1960s.
While Achdiat sets up a pattern of extremes in relation to this theme, between
Javanistic patriarchal authoritarianism and an excessive version of Western
individualism, he directs his narrative attention toward those characters who represent
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the Indonesian struggle to come to terms with a negotiated position between these
extremes.
The temporal space of the narrative is Sydney in 1965 just prior to and after
the abortive coup in Jakarta. Rivai, the central character, is a freelance journalist who
has lived outside Indonesia, travelling and working in Europe and the United States
before his arrival in Australia. Australian society, as the site of Achdiat’s narrative
and the ideas and actions of its several Australian characters (Dr Thomas, Janet,
Christine, Fred and Josephine) acts as a recurrent point of reference and comparison
with the hybrid values and thoughts of his main Indonesian characters, Rivai,
Hermanus, Amin, Maslan and Rajiman.
Individuality Within Community: A Mutual Dependence
The text constructs Rivai’s attempts to balance the Western focus on personal
freedom against the traditional Indonesian demands of social obligation. This leads
Achdiat’s central character to grapple with the difficulties of his own negotiated
position as an Indonesian in a Western society. The character’s first encounter with
this issue occurs when he hears Pak Hermanus, an Indonesian liberal academic,
telling a group of Indonesian young people at a gathering in Sydney:
. . . we have a right to be different than other people, we have the
right to deviate from popular trends and opinions. This a human right,
which is coupled with the right to choose according to our own will,
taste and desire. (21)

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Rivai’s thoughts concerning this speech depict Hermanus’s notion of
individual rights as neither straightforward nor simple (as this statement might
suggest) but, on the contrary, as clearly complicated by the contradictions of other
(particularly traditional Indonesian) values in relation to individual rights. Achdiat
directs the reader to consider the three distinct responses that are triggered in Rivai as
he listens to Hermanus: admiration, concern and perplexity. He admires Hermanus’s
willingness to openly criticise the Indonesian authoritarian regime (which at the time
of the publication of the novel is Suharto’s New Order, but in terms of the narrative’s
chronology is the “guided democracy” regime of President Sukarno), seeing this as
the true role of the intellectual55; he is concerned however that such keberanian
(bravery) carries with it 56 great risk (“people have been thrown into prison and
branded traitors”); and finally he is somewhat perplexed by the ambivalent nature of
Hermanus’s idealism. This ambiguity is apparent to Rivai in its disparity with the way
in which the extension of such rights to Hermanus’s own teenage children,
appeared to be very difficult to put into practice. Perhaps because he
considered his children to be immature, or perhaps also, because the
things his children chose and followed represented things that were too
negative and dangerous. For instance, involvement in Hippie customs
and smoking marihuana and taking other drugs. (21)
55
“Jalan yang setia dan patuh kepada tugas dan hati nurani sendiri sebagai intelektual yang
menwajibkan untuk menyelidiki segala persoalan dengan otak yang kritis tapi dengan berdasarkan
fakta-fakta yang nyata dan kemudian berani mempertahankannya sebagai keyakinannya, sekalipun
bertentangan dengan ‘kebenaran resmi’ yang dicekokkan oleh pihak berkuasa?” (22)
56
“...risikonya besar; orang dapat dijebloskan ke dalam penjara dan dicat pengkianat
bangsa” (22)
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Such a split in the application of these values in the text is, of course,
unremarkable, in that at one level it represents a typical parental response to
perceived familial responsibilities. However, I would argue that it also represents the
first crack in a much larger faultline between opposing social values and a narrative
pre-occupation with the struggle to balance social obligation against individual
freedom.
Later in a conversation with Rivai, Hermanus comments concerning his son
and daughter’s rather willful disregard of their parents’ wishes:
Children in this era are different. They have their own desires. Before
when I was still young, right up until I was past twenty, the desires of
my parents still represented the law [or laws] for me. I was not bold
enough to just disobey. (282)
Rivai responds by agreeing that children today are more free. “Too free. [Hermanus
says] Without responsibility” (282). 57
While Hermanus is portrayed as stressing the value of democratic freedoms,
the right to speak or act according to “kehendak sendiri” (one’s own will), he
recognises at the same time the need for ideological structures as a necessary
environment for “free choice”. For Hermanus, “free choice” can never be purely
subjective but must be derived from a sense of social/ethical commonality, a broadly
agreed set of standards.
57
“Terlalu bebas. Tanpa tanggung jawab. (282)”
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In relation to this Achdiat develops a scene in which Rivai’s friend, Maslan,
suggests to Hermanus that the production of ideologies generates unnecessary
divisions and that an individual sense of “keadilan” [justice] is sufficient for the
process of safeguarding individual and communal rights. In response to this
suggestion, Hermanus asks, “What do you use to measure your understanding of what
justice is?” Maslan replies “Common sense.” To which Hermanus asks, “But who
can ensure that your common sense is healthy?” (111). 58
Achdiat elaborates and employs Hermanus’s point when he introduces a
conversation Hermanus has had with his wife, Corrie, concerning a neighbour who is
trying to destroy a group of feral cats which have taken up residence in his yard.
Hermanus and Corrie are a little dismayed by the neighbour’s plan. Later, while
Hermanus is eating with Maslan and Rivai, Corrie tells him that
“Those cats have all been captured. The exterminator himself came.
They’ve all been taken away in bags to be gassed at the abattoir. What
a pity. . .” [Glancing at Maslan’s face and giving a little laugh
Hermanus says,] “That’s just [“adil”}. According to our neighbour’s
‘common sense’. . .”. (112)
This sense of structure behind freedom is further explored through the text
when Hermanus asks Rivai to talk to his son, Eddie, about the dangers of drugs, after
finding he has been smoking marijuana. The discussion that ensues between
Hermanus and Rivai reveals the underlying ambivalence which acts as the core of the
narrative’s concern in regard to the potential extremes of Western individualism. The

58
“Tapi siapa yang menetapkan bahwa akal mereka itu sihat (sic)?” (111)
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Western stress on individual freedom has, Hermanus and Rivai agree, contributed to
social/communal breakdown in the West. Rivai meditates on his conviction that this
problem is:
. . . reflected again in the foundations and methods of their (Western )
education which greatly favours individual freedom and academic
achievement as well as material prosperity alias progress. (284)
Rivai agrees to talk to Hermanus’s son, suggesting he meet him along with
Maslan, who has had some experience with drugs. While Rivai and Maslan wait for
Eddie to arrive a further discussion takes place on the issue. They jokingly imagine
what the consequences would be if Western societies took Timothy Leary’s advice,
alluded to in a friend’s paraphrase of Leary:
“Capitalist societies that have become degenerate like America and
Australia can only change if their entire populations get in the habit of
taking LSD. Imagine, the entire population becoming confused,
because every person is seeing his/her own personal hallucination.
[Says Maslan] One sees a tree as a dragon, another sees the Empire
State Building as a giant. . .Imagine it. Disorder (or Chaos).”
“Especially traffic control, which would no longer be possible,” Rivai
adds. (290)
It is this image of social disorder, the breakdown of community cohesion into
a cacophony of independent, uncoordinated voices which characterises the central
cross-cultural concern of Rivai and several of the other Indonesian characters in the
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narrative. Despite their apparent desire for greater individual rights and freedoms in
their own country they appear transfixed by the threat of social upheaval which they
see lurking beneath its surface, visualising the West’s individual freedom as a
political and social Pandora’s box.
This commitment to guarding against the threat of anarchy by foregrounding
the social values of stability and order has been a consistent preoccupation of
Indonesian consciousness since 1966 and the emergence of the New Order regime.
Government officials visiting the communities in the outlying districts where I lived
in Indonesia constantly reiterated the mantra of order and stability in their speeches
(ketertiban and stabilitas). Reference was repeatedly made to the disorder and
rebellion (kekacauan and pemberontakan) that rocked the country in the periods of
representative and guided democracy under the presidency of Sukarno.
Virginia Matheson Hooker has noted the linguistic emphasis that the New
Order has placed on ideas of continuity (kesinambungan), development
(pembangunan) and progress (kemajuan) (277-278). The field and tenor of former
President Suharto’s speeches continually and unrelentingly stressed the priority given
to ideas of social cohesion and order. Quoting Suharto, Hooker echoes the attitudes
that are expressed by Rivai and Hermanus concerning the threat that individual
freedom is seen to pose to social stability, when she reiterates the New Order view
that , “without direction and order, kebebasan hanya berarti kekacauan (freedom
only means chaos)” (279). The constant references in Suharto’s speeches to the need
for koreksi also imply that a monitoring body must “exist to direct, evaluate and
assess the state of society” (279).

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Lateral not Lineal Orientation
According to Achdiat’s narrative, however, the resolution of the difficulty in
balancing freedom with order is not to be achieved by returning to hierarchical
structures with their lineal (or vertical) orientation.59 Achdiat goes to some lengths, in
fact, to critique the more traditional Javanese conception of patriarchal authority
through his characterisation of the egocentric Pak Amin, a visiting Indonesian
government official, and the subservient Pak Mustakim, a petty diplomat.
At the informal gathering of students, which Pak Amin and Pak Hermanus are
addressing, Amin demands that seats be set up for him and his guests at the front of
the hall, in accordance with the normal Javanese practice of “hormat” [honouring
important guests]. When asked if he would be willing to take another seat he
responds, “Tidak mau. Saya bukan tamu sembarangan” (31). [“I don’t want to. I’m
not just any guest.”] Later, Amin reprimands Maslan for writing a short story which
he believes contains insulting characterisations of Indonesian leaders (including a
none too subtle portrayal of someone like himself). Amin is, in this way, presented as
an ambitious conservative who has it both ways by attaching himself to power despite
his frequent references to his revolutionary credentials.
59
To use Javanese anthropologist Koentjaraningrat’s terminology (459).
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Achdiat’s parodic characterisations of Amin (who is constantly offended by
the younger generation’s failure to recognise his social standing) and Mustakim (a
sycophantic official who uses his spoon to fight off a hungry student because he
breaks social etiquette by starting to eat before Amin has finished serving himself)
represents a clear rejection of the traditional Javanese emphasis on a blind respect for,
and submission to, those higher up the social ladder.
The text refers in several narrative episodes to Rivai’s revulsion in regard to
Amin’s ideological expedience and repeatedly affirms his own belief in the modern
values of egalitarianism and free speech. Claiming that he is against all forms of
injustice and political/social repression, Rivai is explicit at various points on
Sukarno’s misuse of authority. Further, Pak Hermanus, who is the object of Rivai’s
admiration, is outspoken in his condemnation of political repression and his call for
social justice. In fact, all of Achdiat’s more sympathetic characters, Rajiman (an
expatriate Indonesian socialist), Kafufu (a black South African student), Hermanus
and Rivai, are portrayed as supporters of the broadly Western ideals of greater
equality and justice.
Rivai and Hermanus’s rejection of enforced Javanese hierarchism and their
commitment to the values of equality and free speech reflects the novel’s focus of
interest which has less to do with the clash between differing lineal value orientations
than it does with contradictions apparent in collateral values, the confrontation
between individual and communal rights and obligations.

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Freedom within Boundaries
In this latter clash between individual and communal rights the figure of the
Australian academic, Dr Thomas, represents an undesirable extreme (at the opposite
end of the ideological spectrum from Amin) in terms of his belief in freedom and
individual rights to the exclusion of any form of social accountability. Dr Thomas
personifies the most extreme outworking of Achdiat’s depiction of the Western
philosophical position through his epitomisation of the dangers inherent in the West’s
unqualified acceptance of individual rights, as the Indonesian characters in the novel
perceive it. This is spelled out in the text when Dr. Thomas argues that individual
freedom in sexual choice is no different from any other area of personal rights.
Through Dr Thomas’s arguments Achdiat parodies the extremes that his
central characters believe will emerge if the demands of individual freedom and
human rights are given full rein. During a public debate held on a university campus,
Dr Thomas asserts that it is because people have failed to understand that complete
freedom in all areas of life is a core right of the individual that:
. . . they build boundaries which completely contradict those human
rights that form the central and most important principle of democracy,
that is freedom of choice, in this case, the freedom to choose a partner
with whom to have sex either before or after marriage. (327)
According to his argument, there should be total freedom in the marriage
relationship for both partners to explore extramarital sexual relations without
undermining the basic husband / wife relationship. He arrives at his position by

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extending the discourse of individual human rights to encompass marriage and
sexuality.
There is a strong element of satire in Achdiat’s collocation of sexual license
with human rights. Particularly when Dr Thomas asserts that any attempt on the part
of a wife or husband to interfere “in the personal affairs of an individual is against
personal freedom, even representing a tyranny of one over the other” (329).60 The
innate rights of the individual are, according to Dr Thomas, preeminent and
indisputable and therefore override any social demands implied by the marriage
contract.
As Dr Thomas elaborates on this theme, in the public academic debate, Rivai
becomes aware that even the predominantly Australian audience is somewhat shocked
by his extremism. When a young female academic, Dr Ingrid Fry, suggests that the
young girls in the audience should throw off their outmoded inhibitions in relation to
those moral restrictions imposed by society and do whatever they feel like doing both
Rivai, and his girlfriend, Deanne are horrified.61 Rivai thinks:
Was she really serious with this advice of hers? Or, was this possibly
the consequence of individual freedom without any restrictions at all?
People are told not to care about other people’s opinions, even the
opinions of their own parents? Don’t care if your mother is sad, your
father is angry? . . . (emphasis added 334)
60
“Dalam urusan hidup peribadi masing-masing adalah menentang kebebasan peribadi
masing-masing bahkan merupakan suatu tirani yang satu terhadap yang lain.” (329)
61
Deanne’s father is Danish, her mother Lebanese, while she was born in Australia. She has
studied Indonesian at university.
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Nyonya Gunther, an ex-high school teacher and social worker turned
politician, takes an opposing view in the debate. She argues that sexuality without
love or responsibility transgresses the essential nature of human being and reduces
them to the level of animality. Her a priori assertion of human essence becomes the
basis of an argument which focuses on the idea that individual sexual freedom over
societal ‘good’ has represented, historically, a key causal factor in the decline of
societies and even civilisations. She challenges Dr Thomas’s claim that, contrary to
traditional historical accounts, civilisations have not been adversely effected by
sexual license. Dr Thomas argued that ancient Greece was a crucial example of a
great civilisation which
. . . made sexual appetite and worldly pleasures the basis of its ethical
and highly aesthetic lifestyle and yet succeeded in creating a culture
and civilisation which continues to provoke people’s admiration to this
day. (328)
In rebuttal, Nyonya Gunther argues that it was during the period in which
sexual freedom began to prevail as the dominant social ethic that Greek civilisation
actually went in to rapid decline. “At the time of its collapse, this uncontrolled
sexuality was rampant.”62 She quotes Polybius’s claim that individual sexual freedom
(“nafsu untuk keplesiran-keplesiran” “an appetite for pleasures”) was responsible for
the breakdown of Greek social structure and the weakening of its national resolve.
62
“[P]ada masa ambruknya, sex yang liar itulah yang sangat merajalela.” (335)
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Her argument then travels forward to the early days of the Russian Revolution
during which, according to a citation she deploys from a Prof. Pitivin Sorokin,
marital and familial values came under attack as being feudal and bourgeois. As a
consequence, total sexual freedom was encouraged by the party as the truly
revolutionary alternative. The resulting increase in separations, the appearance of
uncared for and unhoused children, the number of sexual diseases and abortions, led
Sorikin to describe the consequences of this social experiment as “the most extreme
threat to the Soviet society” (337).63 According to Nyonya Gunther, when the
government recognised “how negative and destructive sexual freedom without
boundaries was for the development of a healthy and proper society” (emphasis
added 337) 64 they immediately branded such license as “kontra-revolusi”.
Nyonya Gunther concludes her attack by suggesting that the sort of sexual
libertarianism which Dr Thomas advocates could only compound the social woes of
Western society and contribute to its decline. Her views are important because they
appear to represent a statement of the largely unformulated views of Rivai and
Hermanus concerning the threat of individual freedom without responsibility in
regard to community standards.
With the debate concluded, Rivai comments to an Australian professor that he
found the discussion:
63
“satu ancaman yang hebat terhadap masyarakat Uni Soviet sendiri”. (337)
64
“Betapa negatifnya dan destruktifnya kebebasan sex yang tanpa batas untuk perkembangan
masyarakat yang suhat dan wajar”
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. . .very informative. Very useful for us [i.e. we Indonesians]. We are
also a nation seeking new values more appropriate to the modern era.
But hopefully it will not involve us in these negative elements. (340)
Thus, this extended academic debate concerning unlimited freedom of sexual
expression, and its social consequences, is deployed by Achdiat as a metaphor for the
dangers inherent in a philosophy that advocates of the extreme rights of the individual
over a commitment to the needs of the community, when pushed to the extreme.
The Consequence of Unbounded Freedom
While Dr Thomas and Dr Fry are entrusted with the didactic or diegetic
function of arguing, and thereby exposing, the perils of this position, Achdiat
provides Janet (Dr Thomas’s wife) to explore the mimetic narrative outcome. Janet is
deployed as the character who illustrates or embodies the dangers of an excessive
stress on individual rights.
Janet is herself an outspoken and sexually liberated Australian woman who
manifests her husband’s theories concerning the sovereignty of the individual by
constantly pushing the boundaries of the accepted social ethic. Her attitudes and
actions are as uncompromising as her husband’s theories. When Rivai once asks if
his casual attire is appropriate for a particular restaurant she responds:

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Ah go to hell with your manners. . . Here we have individual freedom.
Don’t worry. Every person is guaranteed the right and freedom to act
differently from other people. The right to deviate is guaranteed.
(137-138)
Later, when Janet informs Rivai (on their way to an art class they attend) that
she has promised to model nude, Rivai is shocked and asks if she has her husband’s
permission [izin]. Janet reacts angrily to this suggestion. Rivai responds by insisting
that “for eastern people you wouldn’t dare stand stark naked as a model, just to go out
of the house a wife has to ask permission, or at the very least tell her husband first”
(144).
“What if the husband won’t give permission?” Janet asks. In a disagreement,
Rivai explains, the wife must always lose [“harus mengalah”] (144). When Janet
tackles him on this point he eventually agrees that there are some women who are
obstinate enough to oppose their husband’s will, but not in moral matters or the
husband would divorce them:
. . .this wife would certainly think a hundred times before carrying out
her plan. She would usually give in for the tranquillity and mutual
concern of the family. Because, for Indonesians, the family is a living
institution which is most important most preferred, most fundamental,
its even regarded as holy. (145)

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This kind of attitude to marriage, Janet responds, is nonsense. The real
reason, she implies, relates to Indonesia’s moral and social backwardness, its failure
to reach acceptable international (i.e. Western ) standards. She does not use these
words but her meaning is clear when she retorts that Rivai’s explanation in terms of
honouring and prioritising family concerns is not the real reason:
The real reason is that Indonesian wives, generally speaking, are not
free individuals who can stand on their own, who can live on their own
in the way that men generally do. (145)
In this way Janet sweeps aside difference as a valid alternative, constructing it
instead as a general belatedness typical of cultural / political otherness or non-
Westernness. In the tradition of Enlightenment progressivism the text constructs
Janet as unable to negotiate any other cultural value than the most recent, with the
idea of ‘progress’ always demanding a forward momentum. If the nuclear family is
represented as sacred then it masks chauvinism. Janet presses her point further by
asking: “Isn’t it possible for the family to be considered important, considered as
primary, supreme, exalted by a husband and wife who are each living in freedom as
individuals?” (145).
As the narrative later makes clear it is Rivai’s conception of family and the
ideal relationship between husband and wife which is mimetically reinforced. Janet’s
philosophy of freedom leads her into a life of loneliness and vulnerability. Rivai is
forced, while Dr Thomas is away, to protect her from the jealous reaction of a
drugged-out boyfriend and he is shown to consider Dr Thomas’s ultra individualistic

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stand to be the cause of Janet’s predicament. Dr Thomas is, in Rivai’s view, weak
and irresponsible for cutting loose his wife from the protection of the family ethic.
Contributing to the Universal
Throughout Debu Cinta Bertebaran, Achdiat juxtaposes cultural alternatives
in order to generate a dialogic space in the Indonesian encounter with Westernised
modernity. While the West positions its own version of modernity as the universal,
Achdiat’s text suggests, through the experience and enunciation of its characters, that
universality is something that should be arrived at through the interaction of different
cultural / civilisational perspectives within the pale of the multicultural universal.
Achdiat takes this critique of the Western universal even further by casting
doubt on the superior capacity of fundamental Western values to produce the most
universal or human outcomes. This critical re-reading of Western values is channeled
to the reader through Rivai’s narrative perspective as he observes the alienation and
individual suffering experienced by Australian and Indonesian characters who act on
Western principles of individual rights. When Achdiat narrates the abandonment of
Janet, and earlier in the novel the suicide of Christine (a woman who is seen as
another victim of sexual license) he is attempting, in effect, to subvert the Western a
priori claim to true ‘human’ knowledge.
Another example of this narrative deconstruction of the Western social ethic
occurs when Rivai observes an old man who lives alone on the same floor of his
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apartment building. The man reads all day sitting at the guest room window through
which he can see the girls on the beach with his binoculars. As Rivai has never seen
anyone visit the man, he decides he must be childless, but when he asks him he
discovers that he has several children. “Why don’t you live with them?” (4-5), Rivai
asks, and the man explains that he doesn’t want to put them out and anyway he
prefers the freedom to do whatever he wants. This narrative interrogation of a system
which, the text suggests, effectively isolates the elderly from their own families in the
name of freedom generates questions about the capacity of Western ideals to provide
an effective social context for the maintenance of human dignity and personal
fulfillment.
While the West takes for granted its own right to speak in the name of
universal / human ‘truth’, Achdiat’s text disputes and eventually refutes the idea that
Western ideals represent, or are synonymous with, ‘universal’ values. The text
challenges the emphasis on individual rights over social obligation by asking whether
it represents an approach which engenders a more complete and fulfilling human
experience or detracts from it. As noted at the beginning of this section, Achdiat’s
novel also challenges the notion of a universality that denies alternative cultural
voices the right to contribute to the production of universal / human meaning and
value.
These two challenges or objections to the Western domination of the discourse
of ‘universality’ are argued by Johan Galtung in his book Human Rights in Another
Key, in relation to the Western monopolisation of the human rights ‘debate’. Galtung
suggests that the Western ideal of individual rights and endeavour, which represents
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the foundation of contemporary capitalism as well as the theoretical base for the
discourse of human rights, can in certain important ways undermine values that it
claims to promote. Galtung suggests that those points at which Western social values
harm the cause of human rights occur, largely, as a consequence of the fragmentary
effects of individualism. Thus he argues the socio-psychological imbalances which
promote and protect individual values tend at the same time to demote and endanger
social cohesiveness and identity.
Galtung points to the appearance of the alienated individual in the modern
capitalist state to illustrate his argument concerning the imbalances generated by the
Western emphasis on individuality and argues for the development of a multicultural /
dialogic universal, in order to remedy those problems which he associates with it. As
examples of the ways that Western modernity threatens human value, he alludes to
the fact that all nations, as party to the International Covenant of Economic, Social
and Cultural Rights, have stated that they “recognise the right of everyone to the
enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health” (Article
12) and that “the widest possible protection and assistance should be accorded to the
family, which is the natural and fundamental group unit of society. . .” (Article 10)65.
Keeping these commitments in mind, he suggests that the Western assertion that
individual human rights and freedom should form the highest (universal) means of
enhancing human dignity and happiness is productive of negative consequences in
relation to the issue of social cohesion and mental health in Western societies.
65
See Newman, Frank. and David Weissbrodt. International Human Rights Cincinnati:
Anderson Publishers, 1990.
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The Western emphasis on “large vertical alpha structures” (i.e. a capitalist
economic form which generates a ‘promethian individualist, competitive ethos”)
(126), and the concurrent “weakening of small, horizontal beta structures” (i.e. the
community / social microcosm) have, according to Galtung, been in large part
responsible for these outcomes. These latter horizontal social structures, which
protect the individual through the communal context of mutual obligation and
support, have suffered from the imposition of individualist / competitive social
emphases, which have in turn contributed to the emergence of psychological zones of
alienation.
The consequent displacement of the individual in the social context of competitive
individualism, he suggests, has produced an increase in mental disorder, along with
an upturn in the manifestation of “modernisation diseases” like cardiovascular disease
and malignant tumours, and the weakening of fundamental community structures. He
forwards the argument that “mental disorder seems to accompany economic growth”
(126) and that “to the extent that mental disorder is socio-culturally induced” that it
emerges out of a concurrence of a strengthening of “large, vertical alpha structures”
and a weakening of “small horizontal beta structures”(127). He describes this overall
process as “Westernization” (127).
The displacement of micro social structures through the emergence of the
modern capitalist state (and also the modern socialist state which similarly functions
in the vertical, segmenting role) could be seen as an unavoidable flaw in a noble, and
overwhelmingly positive enterprise, an annoying though understandable side-effect of
modernisation. Western novelistic discourse, however, in keeping with the findings

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of psychological and sociological research, suggests more profound and disturbing
consequences in the lives of modern individuals. A large proportion of ‘serious’
novels and short stories written in this century have dealt with issues of alienation and
social displacement. They reflect the perception that such maladies represent a
fundamental source of suffering for the Western subject in modern times.
If an overemphasis on individual rights and freedoms has contributed to the
erosion of social cohesion and psychological health (as many psychological and
sociological studies have also suggested) it could be asked whether such a perspective
truly represents the most effective means of protecting and engendering human
dignity and happiness, or whether an overemphasis on the individual has generated
crucial imbalances within Western society. At the very least such considerations
should leave the Western construction of the universal values open to critical inquiry.
Indonesian literature, particularly in the post-independence period, has stressed
(perhaps beyond any other issue) the disruptive effects of modernisation /
Westernisation on the Indonesian individual and communal psyche. This focus is
apparent in the texts examined in this thesis by Umar Kayam and Pramoedya, and is
equally evident in the work of virtually every other prose writer since independence,
from the realist prose of writers like Achdiat, Sitor Situmorang, Ajip Rosidi, and
modernists like Idrus, to the satiric anti-realist writing of Putu Wijaya and Danarto.
It is fair to say that early conservative anxiety concerning the rise of
individualism in the West was no less intense in the eighteenth and nineteenth
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centuries than we are seeing in Southeast Asia today. Edmund Burke, the English
defender of human rights, for example, suggested that the emergence of individualism
could cause “the commonwealth itself [to] crumble away, be disconnected into the
dust and powder of individuality” (Watt 239). On this basis Indonesian anxiety
could be seen as merely a symptom of the early stages of its development. The
problem, however, is that some of these early fears have been realised in Western
societies in the latter half of the twentieth century. Social cohesion and discipline
have been weakened to some degree, the individual’s sense of belonging and
existential value have been challenged, and, if Western literature or daily news
reports are any guide, at some levels severely disturbed. This may be the price that a
modern society has to pay in order to achieve a democratic political structure which
defends individual rights. Tocqueville argued that an unavoidable outcome of the
practice of democratic principles is not only that it causes every man to:
forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his
contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself
alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the
solitude of his own heart. (Watt 240)
If, however, the alienation of the elderly from meaningful social participation,
or a diminution in the sense of belonging to family and community (for young and
old), or the increase in mental disorder, are unavoidable outcomes of modernity, then
it might be suggested that the stress on individual freedom and free enterprise which
are crucial elements of democratic freedom do not necessarily guarantee greater
human dignity or fulfilment to the individual.

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Equally it could be suggested that the human rights stress on individual rights
over social obligation has the capacity to contribute to the production of individual
alienation which reduces quality of life and promotes feelings of meaninglessness,
and therefore an environment for mental and social disorder. Certainly, these
outcomes are implied in the experience of the characters in the short stories of Umar
Kayam and Pramoedya. 66
Galtung suggests at the conclusion of his argument in Human Rights in Another
Key that the imbalances encountered in both Western and non-Western experience
can only be redressed by the development of a truly universal discourse which
incorporates a range of cultural perspectives (which relate to my analysis of Achdiat’s
novel). 67 In keeping with Bakhtin’s theory of dialogic interaction Galtung argues
that true universality cannot be the outcome of a single, culturally specific,
perspective imposed on cultural diversity. It should rather represent an expression of
a universal dialogue, an interaction of differences encapsulating the whole.
66
The contradictory situation within which Indonesia finds itself in relation to this argument is
derived from its overwhelming emphasis, in the last twenty five years, on “vertical alpha structures”
(127) in its construction of a corporate, oligarchic system of free enterprise driven by the market
place and directed by state bureaucracy, while at the same time it has pressed the people to retain or
regain their local values and traditional standards. The west, itself, has been instrumental in
Indonesia’s wholesale shift toward alpha top-down structures of economic development and
institutionalisation by means of its lending policies and periodic political interference. It is out of
this context, of Indonesia wanting to eat the cake as well as have it, that the western criticism of East
and Southeast Asian expedience emerges. Nevertheless, despite this suspicion of the motives of
Asian leaders, for the west to continue to insist that the other “go the whole hog” by uncritically
absorbing the social evils (long experienced by the west) that come with capitalism would appear
perverse.
67
At the conclusion of Galtung’s argument in Human Rights: in Another Key, he asserts that
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights came into being as a reflection of “Judeo-Christian
culture, including the tendency of that culture to see itself as universal” (154). It could be suggested
in the light of this statement (and previous arguments I have made concerning individual rights) that
the contemporary form of the ‘universal’ human rights discourse and the western tendency to reject
non-western references to cultural rights and community obligations, represents another attempt by
the west to reclaim and reinforce its own values and institutions in relation to the postcolonial other.
It could be seen, in effect, as another demand that human rights values be simply followed rather than
negotiated, contributed to, or hybridised by the alternative thinking, history and tradition of
otherness. (For an extended argument concerning the western application of the discourse of human
rights to the postcolonial other see Appendix 2)
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In an imagined dialogue between “four persons” (a Western capitalist, a
Western socialist, a Western environmentalist, and a non-Westerner of unspecified
ideology) Galtung illustrates his argument concerning the development of cross-
cultural dialogue in the production of universal values by putting the following words
into the mouth of the non-Westerner:
All three of you assume Western nineteenth, even late eighteenth
century, nation-state structures to be identical with human society; and
you assume Western culture, and for that reason the Western debate, to
be identical with world culture. You forget that in the world there are
other societies that also might like to develop. We are all humans, we
are all inspired by the values of our civilizations. But we all see
human rights also in terms of our cultures, not for that reason
neglecting Western contributions. (155)
Galtung argues on this basis that an alternative metaphor for the future of this
discourse on universal values (rather than its mere imposition) might be described
as
an ever deeper and broader dialogue des civilisations. Each culture is
grateful that others have something to contribute. Each culture feels
that “If you accept something from me, I’ll reciprocate”. And as the
journey progresses we all benefit from true universality, from
universality as a never-ending process involving all cultures. (154)

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As Richard Rorty might suggest such an outcome would be the result of a
more pragmatic, less idealistic, relationship to otherness, a relationship that
recognised the constructed, rather than essential, nature of truth :
From a pragmatist point of view, to say what is rational for us now to
believe may not be true, is simply to say that somebody may come up
with a better idea. It is to say there is always room for improved belief,
since new evidence or new hypotheses, or whole new vocabulary, may
come along. (23)
In the short stories already considered by Umar Kayam, along with his novel
Para Priyayi (which will be examined in Chapter6), and Achdiat’s Debu Cinta
Bertebaran, (and even in Pramoedya’s early short stories) there is the suggestion
that the continuity of traditional values of respect and restraint, submission and
responsibility are productive of community and family stability, while the
insistence on individual freedom and unrestrained (or ill-considered) speech
disrupts and disperses such social ties and therefore, in effect, robs the individual
of a right to family continuity, and mental and emotional stability.
It is, of course, not as clear-cut as this. Nevertheless, it could be asked
whether the consideration of these views and values in regard to community and
family necessarily degrade human dignity and fulfilment or whether it might be
possible for them to enhance it? And further to this, whether the intersection of
this non-Western vocalisation of values with the voice of Western predominance
should be resisted in order to fend off any interrogation or destabilisation of

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identity, or be welcomed and encouraged as a means of enriching and developing
the Western political and social perspectives and practices? It is, in Rorty’s
words:
The question of whether our self-description ought to be constructed
around a relation to human nature or around a relation to a particular
collection of human beings, whether we should desire objectivity or
solidarity. (24)
What I suggest in the argument of this thesis is the dialogisation of
solidarities, the recognition of the value of an open-ended negotiation of ‘othernesses’
rather than the imposition of a singular perspective as representative of all
perspectives.
In-Between Freedom and Order
Rivai and Hermanus in their encounter with Western / modernised culture,
enter the space between two solidarities (two quite different collections of human
beings) in order to generate a dialogue and produce an hybrid outcome. They do not
employ a counter-discursive or metaphoric rejection of Westernnesss. They respond
to the difficult alterity of Australia syntagmatically, therefore on the basis of
contiguity and negotiation rather than similarity and substitution. In this sense, their
approach to otherness is, firstly, metonymic, moving from signifier to signifier, and
secondly, dialogic, negotiating a middle way between the extremes of difference.

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Rivai, in particular, exhibits a determination to work through the clash of
values and practices in order to reach a hybrid form which is neither one nor the
other. This dialogic approach to cross-culturality, can be seen in almost every
encounter Rivai has with foreign values. At one point in the narrative he considers
the loneliness of Australian society, in which individual privacy forces people into a
formalised apartness. He ponders the extremes of difference that Jakarta and Sydney
represent for him. When he compares the two he thinks you need never be lonely in
Jakarta like you can be in Sydney. You could always visit a friends without even
telling them you were coming. And if they weren’t at home there would always be
someone else in the house to chat with about nothing in particular:
Over there they are not yet controlled by plans, appointments,
formalities and the clock. Here, in Sydney, everything is the other
way around. Every individual is very strict in locking himself away
within the confines of self-interest and business which is called
privacy. In this way the individual cannot disregard the importance of
the personal space and business of another. He must make an
appointment first. There must be a definite reason. He cannot just
visit for the sake of a completely idle chat. That wastes time. And
time is money. But Rivai had to admit that the almost total absence of
privacy in Indonesia was not good either. People visiting whenever
they felt like it, talking for as long as they liked without remembering
the time because time was not recognised as a crucial resource which
made work possible. The attitude that was right [in this situation] was
definitely located in the middle between those two extreme ends. (273)
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Rivai’s in-between approach to dealing with cultural clash is metonymic
rather than metaphoric because it does not pit the values of self against those of
otherness in order to overwhelm or replace them. Instead it actively seeks out, in the
midst of cultural agonism, the edges of difference, the contiguous plains of self and
otherness, in order to allow each side to contribute to the production of a hybrid
cultural syntax. In describing the outcome of this kind of approach to cultural clash
(in a different context) Homi Bhabha writes in a way that reflects the experience and
attitude of Achdiat’s character:
These instances of metonymy are the non-repressive productions of
contradictory and multiple belief. They cross the boundaries of the
culture of enunciation through a strategic confusion of the metaphoric
and metonymic axes of the cultural production of meaning. For each
of these instances of ‘ a difference that is almost the same but not
quite’ inadvertently creates a crisis for the cultural priority given to the
metaphoric as the process of repression and substitution which
negotiates the difference between paradigmatic systems and
classifications. (“Of Mimicry and Man” 238)
Unlike the Australian characters in d’Alpuget’s novels, Rivai does not resort
to the premature closure of dialogue, by attempting to impose his own metaphors on
otherness, in order to protect his own sensibilities. Rivai’s capacity to remain open to
the foreignness of Australian values is, in part, an outcome of his own extensive
experience of hybridisation and negotiation as the citizen of a nation which had only
recently freed itself from colonial domination and which continues to feel impelled
(and drawn) to negotiate modernity.

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The Australian characters in the novels of d’Alpuget and Koch have not
experienced the same sense (nor the reality) of such a compulsion to negotiate
difference. They believe that they still have the luxury of withdrawing and imposing
their own paradigms of value on otherness in order to resist its challenges. Bhabha
stresses that this attitude of resistance, and the determination to eschew dialogue with
difference, is particularly relevant in the case of the threat that an hybridised
otherness represents through the process of mimicry.
In the next chapter I will examine another strategy of the Australian literary
rejection of dialogue with the threatening face of an hybridised Indonesia through the
postcolonial process of cultural reclamation.
CHAPTER 5
In this chapter I will argue that the Australian fictional construction of Indonesian
identity in the postcolonial period68 has been shaped, in large part, by the need to
recuperate those elements of modern Indonesian culture in which the West has an
68
Such a designation of postcoloniality relates to the chronology of the period rather than its
character.
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originary stake. Through the analysis of novels like Koch’s The Year of Living
Dangerously, d’Alpuget’s Monkeys in the Dark and Glenda Adams’ The Games of
the Strong it will be suggested that the West has applied this strategy of reclamation
to those ‘Western values and institutions’ which have been hybridised by the other.
Typically these have been designated as non-negotiable and reclaimed in terms of a
mythical ‘authenticity’.
The hybrid condition of modern Indonesia - capitalised, nationalised and
democratised - generates images of otherness that are, in keeping with Bhabha’s
perspective, simultaneously strange and familiar to the Australian observer, and
therefore intrinsically unsettling. As noted in Australia in Asia: Comparing Cultures,
terms such as ‘democracy’ and ‘citizenship’ in countries like
Thailand, Indonesia or Japan…have become ‘free-floating signifiers’:
terms possessing multiple definitions shaped not by contact with the
West but rather, by deep-running local traditions. In a sense, the
Western inventors of these concepts have lost control of their
inventions.(6)
The idea of recuperation or reclamation as it is used in this chapter relates to,
what I will suggest has been, the persistent Western demand that the other return
to ‘authentic’ forms in regard to those values and institutions that it has adopted
from the West. Such a strategy of re-appropriation involves, firstly, the
perception that such authenticity exists, secondly, the implication that the West is
the source and guardian of this authenticity, and thirdly, the assertion that any
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divergence from it or supplement to it represents a degradation or diminution of
the original value.
In the first part of the chapter I will examine the concept of cultural
hybridisation and consider the threat that it is perceived to represent (in the
postcolonial setting) to Western claims of universality. This examination will focus,
once more, on ideas of truth, and the demand for ‘authenticity’ which have become
the Western response to the subversive effects of the hybridisation of its values and
political institutions. I will briefly consider the historical re-conception of
universality in the West as a reaction to scientific / academic shifts in thinking. I will
also comment on Homi Bhabha’s theoretical representation of the cultural hybrid, and
the intersection of this concept of hybridity with elements of discursive genealogy.
In the second part of the chapter, the Australian response to the threatening effect
of cultural hybridisation will be examined through the reading of Australian novels.
These depict a derogation of the hybrid other as little more than a corrupted and
belated version of Western ‘authenticity’. Such a literary approach to otherness
represents, it will be argued, a concerted effort to fend off the subversive potential of
cross-cultural dialogism. This Australian attempt to claim an originary and, therefore,
privileged position in regard to democratic / capitalist / nationalist values and
institutions (through strategies of selective association, polarisation and
universalisation) will be examined through a series of fictional texts.

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In the third and final part of the chapter, the fictional characterisation of the
Asian hero is introduced as a specific example of this propensity to impose Western
standards onto the other in novelistic discourse. This, it will be argued, is achieved in
the fictional texts under consideration through the strategy of cultural re-
appropriation, the demand that the other abandon its negotiation of Westernness, and
submit (or re-submit) itself, instead, to the authority and superiority of the ‘universal’
/ Western form. The production of the Indonesian heroic subject as the embodiment
of a Western system of values and beliefs represents another example of the
Australian unwillingness to negotiate the dialogic voice of an emergent otherness.
In the final part of this section of the chapter consideration will be given to
Indonesian cultural constructions of heroism and the contribution that these have
made to the hybridisation of heroic values.
Hybridity, Subversion and Recuperation
As suggested above, this chapter will argue that the Australian attempt to reclaim
the hybrid expression of modernisation in Indonesia reflects its own regional
difficulties in coming to terms with the fragmentary / hybrid / mobile / ‘inauthentic’
nature of postcolonial / postmodern reality. In terms of the broader argument of the
thesis, it also reveals the Western refusal to accept the loss of its dream of dominance
through the fixing of the other within the philosophy of the same. The Western
strategy of equating universality with Westernness (in a concealed form) implies that
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any hybridisation of Western institutions can only represent a degradation of, rather
than an addition to, universal values. The assertion of universality and finality in
relation to such concepts as democracy and individual human rights, and the
attempted recuperation of supposedly originary values in the name of ‘authenticity’,
suggests an extension of the Western strategy of maintaining a dominant discursive
voice into the postcolonial context.
Authenticity: A History of Maintaining the Universal
The present discomfort felt by the West, in the face of cultural contingency
and political hybridity, represents the consequence of recent colonial and
postcolonial history in which the West has seen its own philosophical / cultural /
political identity, as both the source and the goal of human endeavour. Western
discomfort emerges from the realisation that such claims to universal
representation are subverted by the non-Western re-negotiation and re-narration
of modernity.
In Modernity and Ambivalence Zygmunt Bauman describes the way in which
the modern West, in becoming accustomed to its position of dominance, felt the
need to maintain dominance at any cost:

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The residents of the house of modernity had been continuously trained
to feel at home under conditions of necessity and to feel unhappy at
the face of contingency; contingency, they had been told, was that state
of discomfort and anxiety from which one needed to escape by making
oneself into a binding norm and thus doing away with difference.
(231)
This Western / modern sense of necessity is, Bauman suggests, (reflecting
Levinas’ argument concerning the Western pursuit of freedom) born of “the horror of
alterity and the abhorrence of ambivalence” (235). “Truth”, Bauman writes,
is an aspect of the hegemonic form of domination or a bid for
domination-through-hegemony. Modernity was, from its inception,
such a form and such a bid. The part of the world that adopted modern
civilization as its structural principle and constitutional value was bent
on dominating the rest of the world by dissolving its alterity and
assimilating the product of dissolution. (232)
Over the last three hundred years this process has not been expressed through
a singular appeal to, and continuation of, Enlightenment principles of universality and
humanity. Rather, it has been represented by the experience of a complex ebb and
flow of contradictory ideas that have challenged and redeployed the initial
pronouncements of the Enlightenment, concerning human commonality.

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Robert Young, in Colonial Desire: Hybridity, Theory, Culture and Race
traces the dialectic that emerged in late eighteenth century Europe between the
continuation of the Enlightenment idea of European universalisation and the
development of concepts of cultural diversity. He goes on to explain the process of
rationalisation by which universality was maintained as a contrasting principle in
east / West relations. Young illustrates this emergent dichotomy between human
universality and cultural diversity by introducing the oppositional arguments of
Johann Herder and J.S. Mill. Herder argued that the regenerative effect of cross-
cultural interaction was an essential element in the progress of cultures, while Mill, in
the face of a disintegrating Western logos, propounded the idea of “the culture of the
human being” (emphasis added 44).
Throughout the nineteenth century “progressivists” and “degenerationists”,
“monogenists” and “polygenists” debated the respective influences of cultures and
species, or in other words of regionalism and humanism. However, as Robert Young
suggests, the retention of this idea of the universal as both desirable and necessary, in
the midst of an emerging awareness of diversity and hybridity, represents a strategic
response to the subversion of Western dominance.
As with Levinas’s “Philosophy of the Same”, Bauman suggests that
“emancipation” (232) from the dread of contingency appeared to the modern as an
essential and inevitable outcome of social / political progress:
Modernity thought of itself as the seed of future universality, as an
entity destined to replace all other entities and thus to abolish the
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difference between them. (233)
Young goes on to note, however, that:
By the 1850s the Enlightenment ethos of the universal sameness and
equality of humanity was being increasingly ridiculed as the evident
diversity of human society became ever more apparent. In this
situation, the only way to maintain the unity of humankind, and
therefore egalitarian principles, was, as Stocking observes, to treat
‘human differences as correlates of evolutionary stages’ (70). Humans
were one not because they were all the same, but because their
differences represented different stages in the same overall process.
(47)
Young goes on to explain the resilience of the Western capacity to maintain a
theorisation of unity over diversity (and with the promise of the universal), when he
writes:
The advent of social evolutionism meant in effect that a revised
version of the eighteenth-century progressive scheme was retrieved:
the apparent psychic unity of mankind meant that diversity could be
safely acknowledged. (emphasis added 50)
While in the twentieth century, through the advent of a critical and reactionary
modernism, “an ever more liberal view of cultures as indigenous, distinct entities”
(50) further contributed to the idea of cultural diversity, Young suggests that,
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the twentieth-century anthropological notion of culture as determining
still operates a notion of difference that works within an implicit
hierarchy overarched by the divide between the West and the non-
West. (50)
According to this process, Westernisation / modernisation continues to impose its
authority in terms of an epistemological assertion of priorities and limitations.
Bhabha examines this process in which the West has managed to maintain
cultural dominance in the face of the contemporary postmodern dispersion of centres
through a strategy that he describes as “the disavowal of difference” (Signs 172).69
By a stress on the concept of “diversity” over the threat of “difference” the West
manages to maintain otherness as an observable and definable multiplicity rather than
a subversive and uncontrolled alternative to Western authority.
It will be argued in the next section of the chapter that these demands made on
hybrid otherness to return to ‘authentic’ Western forms have come to represent the
next phase of the colonial will to power in the postcolonial context, which could be
described as the reiteration of the universal over the particular.
Hybridity and the Subversion of Authenticity
69
This postmodern phase of deploying strategies of control will be examined in detail chapter
7, in relation to the Australian ‘Bali’ novels.
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The Western claim that those social, political and ethical values and
institutions, which the other has synthesised into its various forms, should remain
essentially unchanged / un-negotiated 70 suggests a failure to recognise the “multiple
sites of language, narrative, his-stories and her-stories, and a heteronomy of different
pulses” that have generated “diverse spaces that disrupt the single, unfolding
narrative”(Chambers:75). I would argue that the attempted recuperation of those
values which have been successfully assimilated and hybridised by otherness,
particularly over the last fifty years, represents a final discursive phase in the colonial
project, a last stand against the depredatory and irresistible forces of cultural
heteroglossia and hybridisation.
Read from Homi Bhabha’s theoretical point of view, it could be argued that
the vigorous and persistent resistance exhibited by Australia and other Western
countries to the hybridisation (or mongrelisation) of Western political and social
values emanates from the unique capacity of hybridity to disturb assertions of
dominance and expose the West to the relative nature of its values and institutions.
This disturbance is achieved, according to Bhabha, because the process of
hybridity de-forms and re-forms authoritative discourses, re-presenting them as
estranged yet familiar entities. As Bhabha explains in “Signs Taken for Wonders:
Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817”, the
transaction that hybridity performs is not only “less than one” but also “double”.
Hybridity, in these terms, shifts the paradigm of power from the substitutionary
dominance of the metaphor (the colonial space of essential and authentic culture) to
70
We see this in the repeated demands (made by the west in regard to non-western political
practice) for ‘free and fair elections’ or ‘truly representative democracy’
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the subversive dialogic of the metonym (the agglomeration of contingent nuances of
similarity and alterity) (179). It is not merely the misconception but the re-
conception of Western discursive utterance which
repeats the fixed and empty presence of authority by articulating
syntagmatically with a range of differential knowledges and
positionalities that both estrange its “identity” and produce new forms
of knowledge, new modes of differentiation, new sites of power.
(Signs 180)
Thus the slippage in the chain of signifiers generated by the constant re-narration
of values, which occurs in the process of hybridisation, denies a firm footing for those
wishing to establish or maintain a secure position at the centre by constantly shifting
them to the margins and back again. The degree of alienation which this re-narration
of Western forms produces in the coloniser is achieved because “the hybrid object”
retains the actual resemblance of the authoritative symbol but revalues
its presence by resiting it as the signifier of Entstellung-after the
intervention of difference" (Signs 176).
Hybridity threatens late twentieth century Western identity because it
proposes the re-negotiation, and re-enunciation, of universal value, the interaction of
difference with similarity rather than the reduction of difference to similarity. The
particular difficulty (the terror) that this represents for the centre is located in the
capacity of hybridity to deconstruct a priori assertions of authenticity by re-
negotiating them according to [an]other cultural context.

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Hybridity: A Genealogy of Cultural Value
The non-Western re-negotiation and re-narration of Western values and
institutions has contributed (in a re-application of Sartre’s famous phrase) to the
‘striptease’ of Western authenticity. Such a process, I would suggest, is comparable
with Foucault’s description of the way in which genealogical analysis “deprive[s] the
self of the reassuring stability of life and nature…uproot[s] its traditional foundations
and relentlessly disrupt[s] its pretended continuity” (“Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”
154).
Foucault, in the context of this quotation, is writing about the way that
genealogical research (as his theory constructs it) is able to disrupt the supposed flow
of history by unearthing the social / political conditions (the play of power relations)
that contributed to the emergence of particular discourses. As noted in Chapter3 of
this thesis, the major historical shifts in dominant discourse, according to Foucault’s
analytical approach, are not so much indications of social or ethical progress, as they
are calculated strategic responses to historical shifts in the relations of power. As
such, these shifts in the cross-cultural context represent the expedient realigning or re-
tooling of discursive formations implemented in order to maintain dominance or at
least favourable relations with otherness. The purpose of applying “genealogical
analysis” to the examination of historical disruption is to show that “ what is found at
the historical beginning of things is not the inviolable identity of their origin. . . ”.
(Nietzsche, Genealogy, History 142) As Said notes in Beginnings: Intention and
Method this process, which he titles “reversibility”, cancels out the traditional
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conceptions of origin and source that generate ”principles of continuity and
development”, designating “originating authorit[ies] such as author, discipline and the
will to truth” as “functions of it rather than prime movers” (297).
In a similar fashion, I would suggest that, the socially constructed and
transient nature of ethical or political values can be (and often are) exposed through
the hybrid disfigurement (perversion) of the absolute, by the production of “new
forms of knowledge”, therefore the hybrid (“Signs Taken for Wonders” 180). The
genealogical effectiveness of hybridity is achieved through its capacity to unearth the
contingent nature of the universal at the moment of its discursive re-narration of
meaning. Hybrid discourse, in the colonial and postcolonial context, generates a
traceable re-production of established cultural values. It highlights the change and
the formation of truths in specific historical / cultural moments through its re-
enunciation, and identifies them as responses to shifts in the relations of power. This
serves to delineate the how and why of present ideology in the hybrid other and also
threatens to expose the culturally constructed and contingent nature of Western values
and institutions.
The processes by which Western truths have been formed (therefore, how and
why they have come to be constructed) becomes apparent as they are re-[de]formed
by the intervention of the hybrid other, which subverts the claim to transcendent or
absolute value. This occurs in an accelerated or immediate manner, as cultural
alterity is forced to negotiate an imposed value system. Thus the tracing of the hybrid
voice and its historical emergence, in a doubled or parodic form, represents the
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equivalent of a genealogical search for the disruption of teleological value in the
context of history.
The immediacy of cross-cultural hybridity subverts synchronic (inter-cultural)
histories. Rather than this disruption entering the timeline of the diachronic paradigm
within which memory and the re-telling of the origins of change are clouded by
temporal distance (as described by Benedict Anderson in relation to the formation of
the myth of nation), the intervention of cross-cultural hybridity occurs
synchronically, across histories and within a distance which is symbolic rather than
historic. 71
The outcome of colonial domination, from the perspective of the centre,
therefore, is the opposite of its espoused intention, the contradiction of its intended
purpose. Rather than gathering a diverse other into the monologic control of its own
authority (thereby reducing it to the same) the colonial exchange has effected the
multiplication and fragmentation of Western universality. As Bauman writes:
“Modernity thought of itself as the seed of future universality, as an entity destined to
replace all other entities” but discovered instead that its pursuit “of that lonely work
of universality…spawned ever more difference” and the “chase of uniformity”
resulted in “more ambivalence” (233).
71
The moment of encounter with the shocking hybrid is related graphically through the
experience of the white man, Dalwood, standing before the crucified pilot in Randolph Stowe’s novel
Visitants. This passage represents an experience that is immediately genealogical in terms of the
currency of its betrayal of origins and authenticity. See my article “The Voyage Out: An Australian
Dialogue with Asia”.
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Bhabha explains that the irresistible outcome of this reversal of colonial
intention has not only been the failure to overpower alterity but also the displacement
of that certainty which motivated the project of colonialism in the first place:
If the effect of colonial power is seen to be the production of
hybridisation rather than the noisy command of colonialist authority or
the silent repression of native traditions, then an important change of
perspective occurs. It reveals the ambivalence at the source of
traditional discourses on authority and enables a form of subversion,
founded on that uncertainty, that turns the discursive conditions of
dominance into the grounds of intervention. (“The Postcolonial” 173)
The visibility of the hybrid shift in meaning that occurs in condensed and
contemporary time, the traceable genealogy of its emergence from the ‘original’,
exposes the precarious nature of Western truth. In this sense the emergent hybrid
represents an unacceptable shock and continuous disorientation for the centre and
as a consequence draws from the West a counter-discursive demand for
‘authenticity’.
The Australian Novel and the Reclamation of the Authentic
It is, I would suggest, the displacement of authenticity described in the previous
section which makes it necessary for the West to combat the validity of an emergent
hybridity by constructing it as irredeemably corrupt and unworkable, and demanding

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it return to a “pure” originary state. In this part of the chapter I will introduce
passages from several Australian fiction texts which illustrate this point.
Hybridity and the Corruption of Authenticity
Where Indonesian hybridity is recognised and characterised in Australian
prose it is usually portrayed (in keeping with Stocking’s description of “human
differences as correlates of evolutionary stages” (qtd. in Young 70)) as a preliminary
or primitive stage in the journey of progress toward greater deferral to, and
acceptance of, universal / ‘human’ value (i.e. the disguised truths of the West).
Thus, non-Western hybridisation / parodisation of Western values is constructed by
the West, not as a subversive or alternative enunciation, but rather as part of the
struggle of the other to escape a feudal mentality in order that it might enter into the
promise of modernity. The present hybrid is represented, therefore, as a stage in the
emergence of the other from belatedness. This grudging and pejorative attitude to the
appearance of a mediated and transformed Westernness within the emerging other
reflects again the difficulty the West has in dealing with the incursions of diversity,
the possibility of alternative ways of seeing ‘universal truths’.
In the Australian novels, wherever the interaction of cultural difference effects
a shift towards a recognisable unfamiliarity, a displacement of the “authentic”
Western value, it creates a concurrent disturbance in the narrative texture of the
Australian fictional response, a fear and resistance to the possibility of newness.

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Cross-cultural hybridisation, I would argue, is for this reason constructed in these
fictional texts in terms of negative characterisations and unhealthy contaminations.
In Monkeys in the Dark when Sinclaire arrives at Alex’s house after watching
the young informant Usman die in a Jakarta hospital he tells Alex:
‘Of course, there would be no blood in the hospital and no doctors on
duty and the night nurses all eating bakmi and too bored to come into
casualty to see if there was anything they could do to save him - just a
fucking tourniquet might have helped. “This is arterial blood. He will
die,” they said. And so he bled to death, right there on the casualty
room floor while everyone stood around and said, “There is no blood
for a transfusion. He will die,” and “Let’s find a Holy Koran for him.”
And do you know what I did? I said, “Gentlemen, this is not a hospital,
its a slaughterhouse,” and I turned round and walked out and I heard
them all saying, “What’s he expect? Blood is very expensive. This is a
poor country. We do not have money to buy blood for every
emergency.” (103)
Hybridity in this description represents a stereotype of the inefficient, the
primitive, and the callous other incapable of properly understanding or implementing
modernity and worse yet insufficiently ‘civilised’ to care. The fictional construction
of the night nurses eating bakmi, and being too bored to assist a dying patient
reiterates the Western perspective on a hybrid other which remains morally deficient
and brutal, an innately inefficient other desperately in need of the continuing and
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capable intervention of the ‘universal’. Such a textual construction regenerates the
convenient and familiar stereotype of the darkened heart and mind, the inherently
savage other playing at modernity but incapable of truly understanding or practicing
it.
This voice, through its reiteration of evil and belatedness, reassures the West
that it is right to demand conformity to the authentic standards of the original, that it
is right to continue to attempt to impose itself on the inferiority of an hybridity that
continues to require the educational (civilisational) intervention of an ‘authentic’
West.
Fictional passages such as this represent a crushingly monologic construction
of racial / cultural difference that (purposefully) fails to hear the compassion and
wisdom that comes through the Indonesian characters in (for example) Dewi
Anggraeni’s short stories72, and that remains unaware of the shock felt by Achdiat’s
Indonesian characters at the Australian (Western ) failure to care enough for their
children to control them or their elderly to keep them from social isolation and
despair. In the same way this monologic voice is equally unconscious of the
paternal / maternal drive toward nurture and self-sacrifice embodied in the traditions
of Umar Kayam’s priyayi family structure (which will be considered in the next
chapter). Australian fictional discourse has decided instead to focus on the stereotype
of racial / cultural impurity, the propensity of otherness to weaken and pollute
Western values and institutions with its own inefficiency and corruption.
72
Dewi’s short story “Uncertain Steps” will be examined in chapter 6.
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The narrative selection of setting ( a poorly resourced hospital) aims to highlight
the most vulnerable aspects of the Third World hybrid and avoids the need to
negotiate any attribution of a positive non-Western interaction with Western value.
Such a stereotypical construction of the hybrid other as we see in texts like Monkeys
in the Dark is not simply a reporting of the facts, but represents a deliberate selection
and pursuit of the darker side of the hybrid which confirms its unacceptability.
In Turtle Beach d’Alpuget appropriates a range of the stereotypical outcomes
of hybridity at an interracial slanging match in the Selangor Cricket Club. Each
character in this multi-racial group acts out the postcolonial hybrid part that has been
assigned to him - the Chinese accountant, the Sikh doctor, the Tamil philosopher /
historian, and the Western -trained Malay ruler - talking about “black-faced buggers”
and “giving Johnny stick” (65). At the same time, the racial stereotypes of non-
Western deficit are regurgitated in the form of a racial / cultural passivity,
irrationality or immorality. The Hindu teacher is characterised as impractical and
morally detached, the Chinese as greedy and deceptive, the Sikh as excessively virile
and the Malay ruler as decadent. The text of Turtle Beach is heavily populated with
pejorative reproductions of the “mongrel” native, comically inept in his/her attempts
to imitate “civilised” behaviour.
At a party thrown by a member of the Malay royalty, a function that develops
into a humorous inversion of wealth and poverty (between the West and Asia), Judith
is drawn into conversation with the culturally hybrid Bibi (a Malay aristocrat) who is
a “counselor-therapist at this Human Relationship Centre” (134). Bibi practices TM
and is influenced by a New Age version of Hinduism. When she rationalizes her
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privileged place and lifestyle as part of Malaysia’s elite her words sound ironically
like something taken from the lips of a pre-war British coloniser and played back to
the Westerner in reverse:
There is no such thing as a person taking advantage of another against
their will. People ask to be taken advantage of. They believe that
they are badly done by.” She (Bibi) took Judith’s hand and pressed it
between kitten palms. “Do you know, you can be happy living on a
handful of rice a day?” (134).
Judith, bemused and disgusted, accuses Bibi of blaming the victims for being
victims. Kanan intervenes on Bibi’s behalf by explaining to Judith that she is not
blaming anyone: she is merely searching for inner purity. “Her point, I think, is that
ethics must arise from a pure inner source, dissociated from ambition, desire for
esteem, fear and so forth” (139). Judith restrains herself from saying that she really
thinks they are speaking
Superlative garbage! India is recognised as the most irresponsible
society in the world, and now I know why. ‘Pure inner source!’
Cosmic consciousness would be next. It was a great excuse for staring
at your navel, while people starved. (139)
It is once more the worst possible outcome of the dialogic between cultures,
the most negative hybrid exploited for its entertainment value73 but demonstrably
73
Bibi is especially hilarious, as an incomplete hybrid, when she says to Judith: ““I respect all
religions, but look at the prophet Jesus. He made a bargain to be called the Son of God. And what
happened to him? He was eaten by lions!” Judith felt her eyeballs bulge. “Actually, he was
crucified,” she said. Kanan nodded at this correction. Bibi conceded the point (138).”
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inferior and reprehensible in comparison to the original or ideal Western form that
monopolises the character of the modern Asian. Made comic by their primitive
attempts to keep up, the very interaction of cultures exposes their inherent
backwardness and the futility of trying to tinker with the universal.
In this way D’Alpuget constructs the hybridisation of Western value in Asia
as a process which debases and devalues the authentic form: Western psychology,
free enterprise and education amalgamated within a religious passivity and
carelessness for the value of the individual becoming a lethal and degrading
concoction of divergent ethical ingredients.
The character of Dr Kanan, the Indian / Malay lecturer in Western political
science and history, is portrayed at one level as having been ‘civilised’ by the
influence of the West. In the face of ‘abominations’ like the piercing of the children
and the drowning of Minou, however, he becomes passive and ‘irresponsible’, once
more retreating into his “cosmic consciousness”. Judith, meanwhile, draws on her
humanist pedigree in these tragic circumstances, to say “I believe that if life is
unbearable, change the system to make it bearable” (155).
Alan Knight, in an article in Arena Magazine titled “Dispatches”, describes
the Western propensity to search for the negative, the stereotypically savage and
‘oriental’ in its news reporting of Asia as a modernised / politicised entity. Western
journalists he argues take into Asian situations European preconceptions of what they
will find (in other words orientalist stereotypes) and the reports they produce are
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largely based on the need to fulfill these expectations of their own and of their
readers. In relation to the Australian reporting of the 1993 UN sponsored elections in
Cambodia he writes:
They are filming a movie (in their heads). They are filming their own
movie. They feel they are in The Killing Fields. But they are not. The
Killing Fields are over and with a little more work it won’t happen
again. It’s very surprising and disappointing because it shows in their
reporting. (44)
My point in introducing Knight’s argument here is that he asserts that Western
preconceptions not only are being taken into these situations, but the situations
themselves are being selected and at times even shaped to fit the Western
preconceptions. This is the case as noted earlier with the Australian novelist’s
predilection for not only incorporating the easy stereotype but also for selecting the
most negative hybrid situation in order to illustrate it.
One of the key reasons for this kind of news reporting, according to Knight, is
the failure of Western journalists to seriously consult Asian sources in the gathering
of information and opinion (the failure to negotiate difference), a failure derived in
part from a lack of local language skills and perhaps more importantly a preference
for Western news sources. Knight concludes his article by writing:
This does not mean that Australians be asked to abandon their beliefs
in freedom of expression. It does mean however that Australian
correspondents and editors have to improve their credibility, by

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seeking more Asian voices, and by widening their news agenda. They
should learn from the theories of development journalism and find
stories which show the wider picture which includes agriculture,
economics and the arts, as well as political conflict. In short, they
must exorcise the ghosts of colonialism which continue to haunt much
of their reporting. (emphasis added 44)
The search for, and reiteration of, the “ghosts of colonialism” is a continuation
of the pursuit of the binary, the unwillingness to see, and perhaps be challenged
by, a more complexly dialogised and compromised alterity. Applied to the hybrid
other the maintenance of stereotypically negative outcomes assists in the
deflection of disorientation, and the rejection of negotiation. It represents an
attempt to maintain predetermined extremes of difference in the face of cultural
heteroglossia and transgression.
Political Hybridity: Examples of Recuperation
A critique of the hegemony of the authentic is most difficult to apply, of
course, when it addresses the political hybridisation of institutions and values. This is
particularly so in the case of recent Indonesian political history in which the existing
regime has so visibly profited from the amalgamation of Javanese cultural and
Western political ideas.74 The autocratic and repressive nature of both the Old and
74
Arif Dirlik suggests that the so-called “East Asian Confucian revival” has had less to do
with a production of “alternative values to those of Euro-American origin” than an “articulation of
native culture into a capitalist narrative”(350). The selective nature of this narrative construction
which fervently pursues Western capitalist theory while disavowing key elements of its social and
democratic agenda, is read not only in the West but also by certain Asian critics, as, at least in part, a
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New Orders (after a relatively brief and unstable period of multi-party parliamentary
democracy 75) has seen the application of colonial strategies76 of control including the
imprisonment and (for a concentrated period after the abortive coup of 1965) even the
elimination of large numbers of political opponents. At the same time, the
opportunity and capacity for political dissent, particularly during the period of New
Order rule, has been largely neutralised through the manipulation of political and
legal processes (e.g. the abolition of political parties (until recently) outside those
designated by the state, the formation of largely powerless parliamentary and
consultative bodies [the DPR and MPR]), the legal restrictions placed on media
outlets, to mention a few). This along with the systematic abuse of human rights (as
defined by the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights) through, for instance,
the exploitation of workers rights, the appropriation of native lands for
transmigration, and the brutal annexation of Irian Jaya (under the Old Order) and East
Timor (under the New), contribute to the overall perception in the West of Indonesian
authority as corrupt and repressive. Each of these criticisms represents essential
political and ethical interventions on the part of the West in the global context, yet
they also harbour a crucial concealment that is more difficult to trace and offer real
insight into Australian attitudes toward otherness.
Because of the terms of address that this thesis has determined (i.e. that the
central focus of the thesis is a reflection on Australian rather than Indonesian
machination of political expedience. As C.J.W.-L. Wee, a Singapore academic, argues:

We in Southeast Asia use the West as a politico-cultural foil; industrial Asia-
Pacific shares the Western interest in free trade, and uses an anti-West discourse to
discipline and spur on their populations to higher levels of production. It is a
curiously reciprocal yet adversarial power game - let us have modernity, let the
whole world consume, but let us not have a Western value system. (289)
75
Which extended from 1950 to 1957.
76
Strategies learnt from the Japanese as well as the Dutch.
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discourses) the state of Indonesian political practice will be considered only in order
to reflect on Australian discourse concerning the other. The argument of this thesis is
not that the Indonesian government has been innocent of repressive and authoritarian
practices but rather that the enormity of this repressiveness has appeared to obfuscate,
by means of the insistency with which it has cried out for notice and opposition,
valuable reflections on Australian hegemony, a hegemony far more successfully
concealed, and therefore in its own way more insidious. In attempting, therefore, to
look beyond the content of Australian criticism of Indonesia, to the means of its
production, it is important to ask not what is being said (therefore what can be
immediately identified as the content of the discourse) but rather what is it that is left
unsaid (but nevertheless is able to be traced) in terms of its production. 77
The argument, therefore, is not that the Australian critique of political
authoritarianism in Indonesia is misplaced but rather that the Australian rebuke of
Indonesian political transgression contains or conceals within it an implicit demand
for the renunciation of social values intrinsic to cultural identity within Indonesia. In
this sense, I would argue, that Australian criticism represents far more than an
apparently rational and objective appeal to the other to act a little more decently (be a
little more ‘human’). It is, in fact, a demand that the other act a little more like us,
that it not simply model its political processes on the West (by tinkering with a few
laws relating to greater economic and political freedom) but that it unreservedly
recognise that its future is Western because the West represents the only true form of
modernity and universality.
77
Such an argument concerning the vital nature of narrative absences in the understanding of
the production of discourse in the novel is argued most cogently in Pierre Macherey’s A theory of
literary production.
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A specific example of this tendency to recuperate the hybrid voice in Western
terms is apparent in the Australian response to Javanese discourses of paternalism
(bapakism), respect for authority, valorisation of order and unity, and non-
confrontational approaches to the resistance of authority (which have contributed not
only to New Order government’s production of ideology, but the societal response to
its rule).78 The amalgamation of these traditional values with modern Western
institutions of democracy, and free enterprise since decolonisation have been, almost
uniformly "rehabilitated" by Australian writers in terms of an unmediated / and
culturally uncomplicated authoritarianism and repression. In the Indonesian mind, as
reflected in Debu Cinta Bertebaran and as will be seen in the novel Para Priyayi in
Chapter 6, the consideration of such values, interwoven as they are through
Indonesian history and culture, represents a far more complex and positive process.
The Australian reclamation of the hybrid form reflects a resistance (or retreat
from) cross-cultural dialogue, a determination to hold apart and reify separate
political/cultural discourses in confrontational tension. Indonesian hybridity
78
It is frequently argued that what is being opposed in this instance is not the values
themselves but the Javaneseness of these values. In response to this I would say that there is no
doubt that the present regime has attempted to promote its own view of universality within Indonesia,
with itself as the centre. At the same time, however, many cultural / racial groups in Indonesia share
those Indonesian values which are considered to be Javanese (certainly much more closely than the
values of the west). This was certainly my experience during my years amongst the Dayaks in West
Kalimantan.
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therefore, while potentially more comprehensible to the West, in fact, generates
greater resistance to dialogue.
The Games of the Strong and the Universal Political Paradigm
In her 1982 novel Games of the Strong Glenda Adams provides perhaps the most
direct reinforcement of the Australian perception of modern Indonesia as
unrelentingly authoritarian. 79 The text portrays the Indonesian population as subject
to the all-seeing eye of the military state, and overwhelmed by the fear of violence
and imprisonment. It stresses the tractability of the masses and the crucial (though
ultimately futile) role of the “resisters”.80 State rule is portrayed as a simple top-down
imposition of autocratic will.
The threat of arrest is pervasive, and the fear of the Orwellian capacity of the
state to listen-in to every conversation and observe every action through the reports of
loyal ‘complexers’ in the community is the driving force behind the central narrative
reversal in the novel. This monitoring (or rather the perception of being monitored)
by the state is achieved less through the intervention and punishment of transgression
79
While my comments on this novel are brief, and somewhat at a tangent to the overall
argument of the thesis, they nevertheless represent an important reinforcement to the theoretical
direction of the whole.
80
Adams, herself, denies that Indonesia was the setting of her novel (Holliday:70). However,
while places and characters in the novel have been disguised by alterations in names, the
coincidences of climatic, geographical, and, most of all, historical elements appear too strong to
make such a denial plausible. The description of Barm, the dissident writer’s, situation, for example,
including his imprisonment on the Island and his house arrest in the city is very reminiscent of
Pramoedya. Even the details like the names of his novels and short story collections (Stories from
the Field, Corrosion, Revolutionary Family bear rather obvious similarities with Pramoedya’s titles
Cerita dari Blora (Stories from Blora), Korupsi (Corruption), and Keluarga Gerilya (Guerrilla
Family). Also details such as the banning of Barm’s books, the conditions of his house arrest (the
order of house arrest and exile are a reversal of Pramoedya’s experience) as well as Barm’s most
recent work being “about the national struggle, three generations, two volumes” (which suggests
similarities with the Bumi Manusia) and his shift of focus away from literature and toward history.
[See Holliday for more elaborate comparative analysis]
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than by the threat (and fear) of such intervention. Thus, it is the possibility of state
surveillance and the impossibility of knowing if it is taking place that forms a crucial
and recurrent thread of interest in the narrative.
In this way Games of the Strong represents a subversion of the Orwellian view of
the totalitarian state by exposing not the all-seeing nature of modern state power but
the success of state discourses in enlisting the population in the task of self-
surveillance. D.M.Roskies description of the effect of Pangemanann’s narration in
Pramoedya’s Rumah Kaca serves to elaborate this process of panoptic self-
surveillance with valuable insights:
[The novel Rumah Kaca] suggests…that the state, the supreme
institution, is not some monolithic despot sitting on high and ruling by
main force (hegemony-as-coercion), but a collection of statements
which engineer, mark, machine, making it possible only for some
things to be said (hegemony-as-consent), while all that threatens the
coherence of such a collection - in what Foucault might designate as
the “archive”- is confined to silence. (27)
Adam’s Games of the Strong describes a similar process of hegemony-as-consent,
which is achieved by the surrender of the population to the threat of the largely
unseen / unsee-able surveillance of the state. By concealing its surveillance in the
anonymity of the darkened watchtower (to use Foucault’s panoptic example) of a
generalised production of rules and punishment, the potential rather than the actual
gaze makes surveillance and the threat of punishment perpetual and inescapable. The
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law of the state rather than pressing down on the individual, enters and works out
through the individual by means of the production of a process of self-monitoring.
Discourse, therefore, rather than physical power, becomes the force behind
totalitarian control:
The myriad ways that [state power] collectively and individually
(mis-) represents and variously encourages, coaxes, and compels its
subjects/citizens to (mis-)represent themselves. (Roskies 27)
At this level, Adams’ novel represents a more subtle and interesting
examination of the Indonesian political context than most, veering away from the
straightforward reiteration of authoritarian strategies of control towards a more
complex and ironic political reality. This is achieved through the textual realisation
of the actual ineffectiveness of the regime’s system of surveillance in identifying
those who oppose its rule, and the consequent inability of anyone, complexer or
resistor, to be sure where they stand in relation to each other and the state. The
repeatedly mistaken reading that the central character, Neila, makes of her fellow
‘resisters’ allows an ironic construction of authoritarianism, but also reveals the
textual portrayal of the repressive practices of the ruling regime and its alienating
effect on the collective Indonesian consciousness.
Games of the Strong emphatically demonstrates and reinforces the repressive
and autocratic nature of New Order rule. The solution to the political evil that this
regime represents is not to be found in the emergence or development of a more

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democratic or compassionate hybrid political form but rather in the overthrow of the
cultural system which bred it.
The voices of opposition to authority in the figures of Neila, Wils and Anna,
those characters who represent heroism and positive ideals in the novel, reflect a
distinctly Western liberal-democratic tone in the mode of resistance they adopt to
centralised power. Neila’s struggle to free the political prisoners, to help a group of
‘fielders’ (rural peasants) to form a union to resist capitalistic exploitation (and so on)
reveals her recognition of the influence of Western values in the experience of the
modern Indonesian but fails to even attempt a dialogue with specifically Indonesian
ways of seeing and contributing to politics, authority and resistance. 81
In Adams’s novel as with most Australian fictional (and media) discourses the
specifically Javanese conception of paternalism, respect for authority, community
consensus and obligation is rejected from any analysis of Indonesian political
structures and history, or is tarred with the stain of belatedness or political
expedience. As I have noted earlier, this represents, in part, an attempt by the West to
maintain the other within the grip of a detrimental binary by means of a determined
recuperation of “essential” political values, the refusal to negotiate the ‘universal’ or
enter into dialogue with the hybrid.
81
In a similar way contemporary readings in the Australian media of political opposition to the
Habibie government frequently contains the presumption that the leadership of this opposition (e.g.
Amien Rais and Megawati Sukarnoputri) will automatically champion the ideals and practices of
western parliamentary representative democracy without taking into consideration the Javanese
cultural influences that will effect their political perceptions.
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My argument, therefore, is not that cultural difference needs to be insulated
from justifiable political criticism or reprimand (for example, where national
sovereignty or the rights of a shared humanity are usurped) but rather that it should
not be an excuse for the deconstruction of, or failure to consider, valid alternative
cultural values which have been implicated in the political process.
The critique of New Order authoritarianism by the West is often subject to
slippage tending to dispose of the cultural baby with the political bath water. My
suggestion is that where valid, and often essential, criticism of New Order political
manipulation and military repression becomes a dismissal, or rebuke, of the
Indonesian cultural valorisation of community decision making, respect for
leadership, stress on community obligation (etc), then a shift from the criticism of
political abuses to the intervention of Western hegemony has occurred.
Asian Heroes: The Liberals of the East
An example, and further explanation, of the process of reclamation, that will
be considered in this section of the chapter, will be examined through a reading of
the Australian fictional portrayal of the Indonesian hero (and anti-hero). The
argument here will be that the construction of the Indonesian hero in Australian
fiction reflects the overall project of recuperating the hybrid other in the way that it
reduces and limits the heroic type to the Western form. I would argue that the
Indonesian heroes of d’Alpuget’s, Adams’ and Koch’s novels are in practice the
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champions of egalitarianism and free speech, the enemies of hierarchy and patriarchy,
the liberal thinkers and radical activists of the East. Similarly, the villains of the
piece stand in opposition to these Western values, as the supporters of strong
leadership, social order, and a corrupt form of capitalist feudalism.
In the Australian novels I have examined earlier in this chapter the hybrid
other is represented almost exclusively as a pejorative construction, the vaguely
ridiculous offspring of East/West interaction. Blanche d’Alpuget’s “New Order
creeps”(105), and Christopher Koch’s “thugs disguised as military”(103), for
example, represent a view of Indonesian political identity which generalises all re-
definitions (hybridisations) of Western democratic principles in terms of
authoritarianism and political contrivance. The novels focus on Southeast Asia as a
place in which children are mutilated, animals tortured, “women are murdered for
losing their virginity; wives divorced by the repetition of three words” (to use
d’Alpuget’s construction of Judith’s thoughts in Turtle Beach) (207-208).
Non-Western hierarchy and authority described in these terms, whether
political, social or familial, does not represent a Western negotiation of difference,
but the construction of hybrid otherness in unequivocal terms of belatedness, evil and
inefficiency. Significantly, these texts also appear to insinuate a solution to the
cultural monstrosity of the hybrid which, unsurprisingly, involves a return to
authenticity or purity of form.

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Such a return is constructed in terms of a polarity or a binary of authentic
outcomes which entails either the maintenance of native values and practices in their
‘authentic’ form, or their complete rejection in order that they might be replaced by
Western values. Neither the pure (undisturbed) native nor the whole-hearted convert
to Western value (which represent two extremes of the Western literary construction
of the non-Western reaction to the modernising project) generates a disturbance in the
Western observer. Such a disturbance is reserved for the hybrid who draws the two
extremes together. It becomes, therefore, in essential textual practice, in order to
protect a secure sense of identity from a Western perspective, that the hybrid be
satirised (as described earlier in this chapter ) as inferior or recuperated into the
essential / original form.
At one end of this polarising strategy, the West lionises the “unspoiled native”
as a kind of guardian of authenticity. Those “natives” who remain faithful to
‘uncontaminated’ value (uncontaminated by the unsustainable admixture of Western
modernity), the “authentic” Javanese or the “genuine” Balinese, are treated with
respect and admiration.82 The traditional Balinese dancers and artists uncorrupted by
the commercialism of the Kuta society, for example, are romanticised by the
Australian characters in Gerard Lee and Inez Baranay’s novels on Bali. 83
82
It’s worth noting that even in their ‘nativeness’ sympathetic Indonesian characters frequently
betray characteristics which would endear them to a liberal western reader because they reflect
western moral and political attitudes. Hadi, for example, is an artist who paints subversive portraits
of Indonesian generals. Hadi’s wife, though constructed as a typical Javanese matron, feels a strong
sense of feminist fellow-feeling with Alex when she tells her: “All women are sisters but all men are
not brothers. They fight to rule the world. We are just the poor slaves, picking stones out of rice.”
(86)
83
Lee, in particular, is conscious of the falsity that underlies this attitude and provides a
parodic critique of this perspective through his central character’s point of view.
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Iain Chambers suggests that this ‘reverse image’ has developed in
contemporary relationship to the other as a reaction in the West to the corrupting
effects of Western capitalism:
The imperious gesture has more recently been extended to a mourning
for the pristine culture of the primitive, that is, the past, the elsewhere,
from within the perceived decay of the metropolitan present. (72)
Despite the apparent celebration of alterity that such a perspective suggests, I
would argue that, in reality, it represents a further strategy of control over the
disruptive and relativising effects of the hybrid by attempting to maintain an “other”
quite separate from Western historical influence, an other which can be observed
rather than negotiated.84
At the other end of this polarity are those characters who have more
thoroughly, and unreservedly, embraced the ‘best’ from the Western model while (as
far as possible) renouncing the compromise and complication of native culture.
These characters are portrayed more positively in Australian fiction, due to their
relative closeness to ‘authentic’ modernity and their (attempted) renunciation of that
hybrid element which is their “Indonesianness”. This pole of the binary represents a
84
This in turn predetermines the structure and scope of self-identity in terms of its emphasis on
the negation of western values and stereotypes. From the perspective of the centre it allows the west
to define the character of the non-western identity by making it the focus of its demands for
authenticity. It is this form of fixation, in terms of non-western nativism, the (re)production of the
non-western authentic, which contributes to the perpetuation of a distinctive binarism by which the
West is able to maintain its position of dominance. Chambers explains this process of containing the
other in terms of the monologic nature of its opposition when he writes:
The western demand for the ‘mythical uncontaminated space’ of an authentic
‘native’ culture perpetrates the imperial gesture though seemingly opposed
modality. It involves a defense of the archaic in Occidental fashion to an
irredeemable absolute. (72)
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closeness of the other to Western rather than native authenticity. Once more such a
paradigm of evaluation (as argued in chapters 1 and 3 of this thesis) sets the non-
Western against the universal (Western ) ideal by camouflaging its Western origins
and allegiances. 85
In this latter form Australian writers have constructed the Indonesian character
as hero. The argument that the Indonesian heroic figure in Australian fiction is
developed in a way that reinforces the Western universal is supported, I would
suggest, by a reading of the Australian fictional production of the Asian heroic
subject in the novels under consideration in this thesis. Characters like Maruli, Neila
and Kumar represent the heroic face of Indonesia through portrayals which reflect
predominantly Western norms of heroism. Maruli is committed to the struggle to
overthrow the New Order and re-establish (what is perceived in the novel as) the freer
and more democratic rule of Sukarno. Pak Hadi wants to see the end of the corrupt
influence of the army. Kumar, in The Year of Living Dangerously, strives with the
social and economic injustices of Sukarnoism, and Neila, in Glenda Adam’s Games
of the Strong, wants her people set free from authoritarian rule. One might ask at this
point what else should represent heroism, other than this courage in the face of
political repression, but such a point of view, I would suggest, merely reflects a
singularity of cultural perspective and a tendency to view alternative value as
divergent or subordinate to ‘true’ cultural value. As I will show later in this chapter,
and in Chapter6 in relation to the novel Para Priyayi, Indonesian culture provides
alternative hybrid constructions of the heroic type.
85
It should be noted in this discussion that the preference for the fixed and knowable other as
authentic native (as described above) rather than the subversive hybrid, does not extend to the
political. In the context of politics the other is expected to conform to the higher modern
standards of the authentic west.
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As noted earlier, characters like Sutrisno and General Djaya, in Turtle Beach,
stand for Javanese political values of hierarchical order that contribute to a system of
injustice and corruption for which they are despised, while Kanan, in Monkeys in the
Dark, represents an unacceptable passivity and submissiveness to authority, and is
therefore the focus of pity and disgust.
It is the quality of independence, of choosing to “go it alone” in the face of
overwhelming odds, that typically represents the Western archetype of the acceptable
fictional hero. The aggressive pursuit of the “truth” (and the unwillingness to be
constrained by social pressures into making compromise) often leads to the isolation,
the estrangement of the individual from his social context and eventually defines the
parameters of his resistance. Hamilton in The Year of Living Dangerously represents
this kind of boldness and unstinting determination to face-down an overwhelming
opposition. Billy Kwan in an off-beat way also provides an example of a kind of
heroic determination to defend the socially and economically downtrodden. Alex and
Judith, in the d’Alpuget novels, while generally frustrated by their impotence in the
face of social suffering, are also imbued with a desire to change the way things are,
and in certain situations make attempts to intercede against injustice.
Anthony Hopkins provides a useful model or pattern of contemporary heroism
in Western fiction by suggesting four main features of the modern Western hero:
1. The hero possesses exceptional natural vitality, both in terms of
masculine energy and spiritual integrity; perhaps coupled with
spontaneous charity and humanity. In any case, his virtues are

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native rather than civilized, tending toward potency rather than
purity, cunning rather than honour.
2. Society is inherently and massively repressive, by its nature and its
operations opposed to vitality, eccentricity, individuality,
independence.
3. Despite increasing social pressure, the hero remains non-
conforming. The hero - who possesses neither social power nor
influence - stands alone in essential spiritual opposition to social
forces encroaching even more progressively upon his independence
and freedom. (133-134)
This individualistic perspective represents a crucial thread running through
Western literature. The pessimistic and individualistic tone of the contemporary form
of Western heroism is reflected in a long ancestry of novels like Solzenitsyn’s The
Full Circle, Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, or Graham Greene’s The
Power and the Glory. Hopkins elaborates the validity of the idea of pessimistic
heroism and its relationship to modern individualism in contemporary Western fiction
by explaining that,
in the plight of the contemporary hero…people can see the essential
fate of their own feelings of individuality and their own personal
freedom… In the image of the annihilated hero…people see embodied
and expressed their own real but perhaps inarticulate tension, anxiety,
and a sense of victimization at the hands of social pressures and
institutions, inimical toward individual action and personal

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satisfaction, over which neither they nor anyone else seems to have
any degree of significant directional influence. (119-120)
What I am interested in arguing in relation to this conception of the hero is that
the Indonesian heroic figure in Australian fiction is portrayed in a way that reflects
just such a Western bias in regard to heroic qualities, and therefore, a further
reclamation of the hybridised voice of the universal. Maruli, for example, after a
period of study in Paris, bears the stamp of this kind of Westernised heroism. He has
come to recognise the failures of his own culture and the superiority of Western ideals
of individualism and activist opposition to an unjust authority. He tells Judith that
when he returned he was appalled by the traditions (of his village and family) that he
had once admired, “I couldn’t bear it. I no longer agreed with the traditional laws; I
was a stranger among my own kinsmen. So I came to Djakarta and politics” (113).
In Jakarta he sets up and runs an anti-government printing press. During the process
of his resistance Maruli reveals that he has a pessimistic (or doomed) sense of what he
is doing.
In the political demise of Maruli (who is arrested and interrogated by the
regime), and the ideological deflation of Neila in Games of the Strong (who is
doomed to an endless and seemingly futile struggle against a monolithic system) we
see a reflection of the modern Western voice of pessimistic heroism. This symbolic
enactment represents another attempt to draw the hybrid other away from a negotiated
form of modernity toward the true or authentic Western model.

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The figure of Kumar, in The Year of Living Dangerously, provides another
example of the Westernisation of the Indonesian hero. Kumar draws on a loose
comprehension of Marxist doctrine to critique the injustices and inequalities of
international capitalism while preserving his own aspirations of one day claiming his
share in the capitalist dream. He mobilises his perception of the unfairness of the
distribution of global wealth (“Why should I live like a poor man all my life while
stupid people in your country live well?” (288-289)) in order to fight the glaring
injustices of the Indonesian economic system. Meanwhile, he dreams of the coffee
shops of Europe and being able to apply his talents in a more meritocratic society.
Koch reinforces the Western character of the Kumar figure when he describes
Hamilton’s thoughts as he watches Kumar reveling in the “luxuries” of a restaurant in
the hills near Bogor:
If Kumar was a Communist, then far from being indifferent to worldly
gain it occupied most of his waking thoughts. The things of this world
were not despised, they were simply in the wrong hands…there was
far more of the aggressive European in him than of the gentle
Javanese: a bottled hunger, always working its way upwards, seeking
an outlet. (emphasis mine 163)
For Kumar even the Western cigarettes that Hamilton smokes seem fantastically
unattainable (“Like water from the moon”(289)). Yet he is determined to fight on
against the social/economic injustices of the Indonesian system and the broader
capitalist inequalities. Despite the tremendous shift in power after the failed coup,
and the realisation in the wake of Suharto’s angry broadcast (concerning the
murdered generals) that the army and much of the population is massing against the
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PKI, Kumar vows, “They may try to crush us, but we will come back” (290).
Hamilton tries to dissuade him but Kumar responds, “I will follow Comrade Aidit.
His day will come. Think of me when you are sitting in a nice café in Europe” (290).
Kumar represents the heroic type of the West in terms of his courage in the face of
unbeatable odds, his criticism of, and rebellion, against authority, his opposition to
social justice and moral evil, and his determination to stand up as an individual
despite impending annihilation.
While Neila, in Games of the Strong, betrays no clear characteristics of
Indonesian value (the betrayal of the novel’s “Indonesianness” is to be found in the
narrative and political elements) she nevertheless represents a Western remedy for
Indonesian political and cultural ills. As an Indonesian (but archetypally Western )
hero imprisoned within a Third World authoritarian state she struggles courageously
and defiantly without real hope of success, and after the final crushing of hope resigns
herself to a life of resistance for its own sake, heroic resistance as an end rather than a
means.
The character of Indonesian heroism as represented in Koch, d’Alpuget and
Adams’s fiction suggests that decent and heroic Indonesian figures want what liberal
humanist Westerners want. They have the same dreams and ideals as their Australian
readers, the same attitudes to authority, the same philosophical belief in heroic
individualism over community obligation and the same commitment to ideals over
social and familial responsibility. This, in Richard Rorty’s terminology, represents a
commitment to “objectivity” over “solidarity” with its long history in Western
philosophical and religious thought (21). It should be asked in regard to such a

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textual assumption, however, if this represents an attempt to textually examine the
Indonesian situation or recuperate it? Does it represent a testimony, once more, to the
power of Western discourses to reclaim wayward or hybridised ‘truths’.
It also raises the question of whether it is possible that there could be a voice in
the Indonesian other which goes beyond this binary of evil and belatedness which
could, in fact, be recognised as providing a negotiable alternative i.e. a development
of an acceptable hybridity?
From the perspective of the West, it would appear that in the development of
political forms and institutions, such as democratic, economic or judicial structures,
the other can only become the equal of the centre when it is ready to jettison its own
cultural contribution. In other words equality is only possible when the other roots
out the contaminatory effects of its own values and institutions wherever they
insinuate themselves and returns to the original and ‘authentic’ forms.
The production of such a binary opposition of distinct difference requires the
margin either to maintain its alterity or to surrender it completely to modernity,
therefore cease to exist in its own negotiated right in order to exist as an equal. This
reclamation by the West of its own economic and political structures and values in the
face of non-Western hybridisation and re-narration does not represent an
unwillingness on the part of the West for the other to be influenced by Western values
(after all the West has actively exported and at times imposed these values on the
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other) but rather an opportunity to maintain the other within the terms of its reference
(i.e. the Philosophy of the Same).
Indonesian Heroism: An Alternative Contribution to the Hybrid
In considering an Indonesian response to such questions, it should be noted at
the outset that post-independence Indonesia has a strong sense of the heroic. Its
literature and its historical calendar is heavily populated with heroic behaviour and
remembrance. Its streets and buildings endlessly reiterate the names of Indonesian
heroes, the wayang and the cinemas retell their glorious deeds, and the nation sets
aside one day (Hari Pahlawan) to specifically remember their sacrifice. Goenawan
Mohamad, in fact, suggests in Sidelines : Writings from Tempo that the Indonesian
post-independence production of the heroic subject is particularly strong due to an
uncertain sense of national identity and worth:
We in the Third World live through breathing and swallowing hope.
We have to be like this in the Third World there has been exploitation
for so long, the feeling of being despised is so deeply ingrained, and
our problems are piled so high, that we need some kind of superhuman
faith to show how amazing man can be. And so we construct heroes,
as a kind of prayer for a miracle. Fantastic biographies are composed,
monuments and museums are put on display (or sometimes altered),
and masses join in the praise with cries, vows of loyalty and tears. We
are reluctant - or perhaps just not yet ready - to display a portrait of an
‘anti-hero’ in our history (192-193).

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In attempting to critique the Australian fictional approach to the construction of
the Indonesian hero I am not suggesting that heroism is a concept foreign to Indonesia
or its own writers, but rather that it is a different, unique and hybrid concept. In
understanding this it is worth briefly considering traditionally different Indonesian
versions of the heroic in order to open up a more dialogic / hybrid space within which
to position the Indonesian concept of postcolonial heroism.
In looking at the more traditional Javanese and (later in the chapter) Bugis-
Makassar versions of the concept of heroism it is important to indicate that these
represent examples of alternative authenticities. I am not suggesting in describing
these constructions that they constitute a widespread contemporary perception of
heroic value in modern Indonesia. As I have argued throughout this thesis all cultures
are hybrid. Indonesia is very much an example of such dialogic interaction between
those cultural differences which have generated richly hybrid outcomes Thus, the
introduction of concepts of Indonesian heroism into this chapter represents a brief
consideration of an alternative authenticity which has contributed in an essential
fashion to the production of the hybridised conception of heroism that we saw in the
streets of Jakarta in the weeks and months of political change, for example, prior to
and in the wake of Suharto’s resignation. The argument, therefore, is that the
Indonesian construction of the hero needs to be seen in its own philosophical /
religious context, as well as that of the West.

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Traditionally, the Javanese hero (as my first example of the Indonesian
valorisation of heroism) has been constructed less as a figure of ideals than of duty,
less the rebel against the establishment than the protector of good order and social
stability. Neils Mulder stresses the importance in traditional Javanese culture of a
recognition of what he calls “the order of the cosmos” and the overarching “unity of
existence” (5) to which individuals within the social context need to attune
themselves by developing a quality of sensitivity called rasa. This attentiveness to
the metaphysical essence of existence is achieved by the surrendering (menyerah) of
the outer (liar) and inner (batin) self “to the consciousness of fulfilling one’s task in
the great order” (12). In Mulder’s words:
People have the moral duty to respect life’s order. They should
acquiesce in life as it comes while cultivating a state of inner peace
and emotional calm. . . . Impulsive actions . . .giving free rein to one’s
passions, are reprehensible because they upset personal, social and
cosmic order. (12)
Mulder illustrates the idea of the connection of the individual to a kind of
cosmic unity (and the behavioural / ethical consequences of this) by retelling an
episode from the wayang story based on the Mahabharata in which Arjuna hesitates
in his duty to kill his half-brother Karna. 86 Karna, who is initially unaware of his
relationship to the Pendawa brothers finds himself fighting on the side of the Kurawa
brothers (the cousins of the Pendawas who have taken possession of the Pendawa
86
Such stories are important, for as Hunter explains, in his introduction to the English
translation of Y.B. Mangunwijaya’s Burung Burung Manyar (The Weaverbirds): “The wayang
theatre is the ideal embodiment of the Javanese worldview of human events as a reflection of a
higher unity” (xv).
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kingdom).87 Although Karna has had a revelation of his own death at the hands of
Arjuna he is determined to fulfill his assigned role in the existential scheme of things
by fighting until he is killed. Arjuna, on the other hand, feels a certain reluctance to
kill Karna and tells Kresna (his mentor) of his desire to let Karna live. Unlike the
probable Western reading of this episode (which might consider Arjuna’s attitude as
compassionate and admirably independent in the face of oppressive custom and
superstition) Arjuna’s sense of scruples are not viewed sympathetically in the
Javanese retelling. His moral pause, the flicker of rebellion against the crushing
demands of divine order are interpreted as an example of personal willfulness, and his
eventual recognition of this obligation (when he kills Karna) as the restoration of his
self-control. Mulder writes:
While both did their duty in fulfilling the demand of history, to many
the real hero is Karna, personifying the moral example of a man who
follows his duty and destiny without hesitation; his fate is in the hands
of “God” and the best he can do is to accept it and to shape it
beautifully. Such is a true hero; such is also a moral man. Life and
destiny are ordered in a great scheme that is beyond human volition
and in which moral choice means faithfulness to position and
obligation. (emphasis added 13)
Benedict Anderson, in Language and Power, suggests that when Arjuna turns
to Kresna and says “he cannot bring himself to kill his brother and cannot face the
prospect of so much suffering and death” he is, according to Javanese traditional
value as constructed and understood through the wayang kulit, acting in an unheroic
87
The Pendawa brother “symbolise order, righteousness and justice” (12) while the Kurawa
brothers “stand for disorder, passion and desire”. (12)
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fashion. “Kresna’s famous response is that this humane sentiment is essentially a
form of pamrih [i.e. “concealed personal motive” or individualism] (52).
Personal ties should not be permitted to sway a satria from the
responsibilities laid upon him. The satria goes into battle … not out
of personal hatred or passion, but because of darma [which Anderson
translates as “caste or status obligation”]. Arjuna should be no less a
satria than Karna, who is performing his darma though foreseeing his
own death. The purposes of destiny are above those of individual
mortals. (52)
In this form, the behaviour of the Javanese hero is not driven or evoked by
passion, no matter how morally idealistic or laudable, but by the sense he has of
contributing to “a physical manifestation of the great order of Life… fulfilling his
duty and following the destiny he has to accept.” (Mulder 20). In this the individual
recognises his place in the community and his obligation to protect and maintain the
state of slamet, “a state in which events will run their fixed course smoothly and
nothing untoward will happen to anyone” (Koentjaraningrat 95). 88 In this a certain
detachment is required of the alus individual, an emotional equilibrium which avoids
any extremes of either happiness or misery. “Emotional equanimity, a certain
flatness of affect, is then, the prized psychological state,” according to Clifford
88
This traditional stress on the social responsibility to ensure an ordered quietness is reflected
in the centrality at all levels of Javanese society of the slametan or communal / religious meal which
is held for a wide range of social and spiritual events. Mulder writes:
Slametan serves to demonstrate the desire to be safeguarded from danger in an
unruly world. They do not aim at a better life, now or in the future; their purpose is
the maintenance of order and the constraining of danger. It also appears, however,
that humans play an active role in maintaining this order and can influence its
course, well-ordered social relationships being a means and a condition to promote
the state of slamet. (15)
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Geertz, while “passion, is kasar feeling, fit only for children, animals, peasants and
foreigners” (The Religion of Java 240).
The fear of unrestricted emotional expression is reflected in the constant
literary repetition of the amok as a warning against extreme emotion and uncontrolled
passion. The amok is an individual (or group) who loses any sense of social and
personal control and in so doing causes a disruption in the social order which usually
results in his own destruction. The amok is represented in many Indonesian novels
and short stories as the worst possible scenario for the individual and the nation that
fails to master its passions and fulfill its social and existential obligations. Indonesian
fiction also explores the enormous pressure that modern urban existence in Indonesia
places on the capacity of the individual to maintain control over his passions and
contribute to social order. These disruptive forces have been described and analysed
in a wide range of Indonesian fictional texts in the last fifty years.
Leonard G. Andaya, in an interesting article titled “Arung Palakka and Kahar
Muzakkar: A Study of the Hero Figure in Bugis-Makassar Society”, examines the
“cultural context” of the hero figure in Bugis-Makassar society by arguing against the
generalisation or universalisation of an heroic type. He asserts that “what constitutes
a folk hero in a particular society may go far deeper than the superficial attributes
extracted from many societies to form the prototype of a “folk hero” (9).
In this regard, the two central heroes of Bugis-Makassar history, cited in the
article, re-position (or make hybrid) a range of heroic behaviours that would align
them with a Western model by making vital alternative contributions to the mythic
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requirements of the heroic in their specific society. In keeping with the Western
valorisation of heroism, they are both exceedingly brave, they struggle against far
more powerful opponents (ie. the power systems of their day) and they show a fair
degree of independence of mind. It should be noted, however, that their resistance to
authority does not represent a disrespect for their own leadership as the powers they
resist are external colonial powers (one European and other a separate Indonesian
group) and not the powers of their own society to which they are expected to submit
and show respect.
Andaya suggests, in fact, that there are elements peculiar to Bugis-Makassar
culture that deepens the quality and identity of their heroism and sets it irrevocably
apart from the Western heroic type. The two elements are “siri” which he translates
as both “shame” and “self-esteem” (each representing the counterpart of the other)
and “pesse/pacce” which means “the ability to commiserate and empathize with
one’s compatriots” (8). Both of these characteristics of Bugis-Makassa heroism refer
the individual back to community
concern for the well-being of the whole society and for themselves as a
vital part of that society. This subtle distinction between selfishness
and selflessness, between being motivated by one’s own ambitions and
that of the welfare of the community, is what determines whether one
becomes an object of scorn or a hero to the society. (9)
It is not enough to identify the similarities in non-Western cultures in order to
affirm the universality of a Western typology. Certainly bravery , daring and a
degree of independence are essential elements in the production of a hero in Bugis-
Makassa society but the incompleteness of such elements is evident in the suggestion
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by Andaya that the absence of a commitment to community, and devotion to the
communal cause would relegate such behaviour to the level of a rashness or
willfulness that would not constitute genuine heroism. Such an emphasis on social
empathy, on heroic / self sacrificial behaviour motivated by community concern
rather than the response to an ideal (which may generate support for or opposition to
community), evident in Western heroism, suggests a deep difference. This difference
is largely ignored in the Australian fictional portrayal of the Indonesian hero.
Post-authenticity: The Heroic Hybrid
Finally, to re-introduce Indonesian varieties of heroism into the textual space of
this analysis is not, as noted earlier, to suggest a reconsideration, or a recuperation, of
Western excess in the name of a prior ‘authenticity’. It is not to suggest (or even
imply the possibility of) a return to origins. It is instead intended to remind the reader
of the complex and deeply felt contribution of Indonesian value to the postcolonial
production of its hybridity and the Western determination to avoid the implications of
allowing such contributions to, or enhancements of, the Western logos. It is also a
reflection on the vitality and validity of alterity, which is not, as contemporary
evolutionism suggests, merely the re-enactment of our own social / political infancy,
but represents an altogether other expression of interacting systems of “truth”.
Alternative conceptions and expressions of the heroic (or a range of other non-
Western values) do not merely represent the reproduction of a primitive or feudal past
which the other must outgrow in order to arrive at a genuine modernity, but rather the
[e]mergence of a new and hybrid history, unique to its own future.

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It is this future - negotiated, dialogised, and hybridised - that the West fears
and resists and cannot incorporate into its teleology of modernity. The West,
therefore, continues to feel compelled to construct it as a belatedness, a stage of
underdevelopment that must be overcome, or an impurity that must be purged before
the other can reach an acceptable maturity. According to this recuperative view the
other, in effect, must cease to be other and become the same as the self, merging into
the universal with which the West has disguised (it)self in the postcolonial
(postmodern) context.
The thrust of Indonesian change in the last fifty years, since independence, has
been manifested in the difficult political and social processes of attempting to balance
modernisation (the eager assimilation and re-narration of capitalist, nationalist,
democratic values and institutions, and the embrace of Western technology) with the
maintenance and re-formation of traditional social and political values.
Chambers suggests that such a hybrid response to the external demands of
monology at either extreme must force the reconsideration of the concept of
authenticity. Such a decentering, and the subsequent break up (and undoing) of the
dualism of centre and periphery (and with it the associated poles of falsity and
authenticity), would take the West into an as yet unnegotiated space in which it would
be forced to “see others not as ontologically given but as historically constituted”, and
would, in turn, “erode the exclusive biases we so often ascribe to cultures, our own
not the least” (81).

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The indigenisation / hybridisation of modernity has produced a broad
spectrum of literary responses from Indonesian writers. Several texts from different
perspectives within the Indonesian spectrum of literary responses to modernisation
will be included in the next chapter in this thesis. These responses to the dominant
discourses of the West generate a degree of agonism and debate, and provide space
for a dialogic process that has been lacking in past representations of Indonesia by
Australian writers.
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CHAPTER 6
The Indonesian literary response to the effects of Western influence on
Indonesian cultures can, I will argue in this chapter, be divided into three broad
categories: universal, regional, and hybrid. There are those writers who have
embraced the Western universal, recognising it as the next essential stage in their own
development from feudalism towards modernity and substituting it, in large part, for
indigenous values. These will be designated as universalist. Alternatively, there are
those more regionally oriented (i.e. culturally specific) writers who have attempted to
resist the interventions of modernity by the production of a counter discourse of
‘authenticity’ which valorises indigenous ‘truths’. And, thirdly, there are those who
have more actively engaged in negotiating cross-cultural differences and producing
what Said would call a ‘contrapuntal’ or hybrid voice.
These three responses to the interventions of modernisation will be examined,
in this chapter, through the reading of three Indonesian fictional texts: Pramoedya’s
Gadis Pantai, Umar Kayam’s Para Priyayi and Dewi Anggraeni’s “Uncertain Steps”.
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The first of these literary responses to the hybridisation of Indonesian cultural
values and institutions, which will be called universalist, reflects an agreement with
the idea that there are certain essential ‘human’ values and ideals which transcend
questions of cultural difference. This response to the interventions of modernity
tends to idealise Enlightenment conceptions of freedom and individuality. The
literary text that will be considered as a broadly representative example of this
position in Indonesian fiction will be Pramoedya’s novel Gadis Pantai.
The narrative of Gadis Pantai (The Girl from the Coast) describes the
enslavement and gradual liberation of the main character (who is the Girl of the
title89) from the oppressive effects of tradition and class, and her development, by the
conclusion of the narrative, into a character who reflects many of the values of
modernity and the Western universal. After her introduction into an exploitative
relationship with an Islamic ruler (the Bendoro), the Girl begins to question, and
eventually reject, the system which tries to control her. By the conclusion of the
narrative she even forsakes the community of which she has felt herself a part, in
order to fight against the social injustices which she has suffered. Pramoedya’s text,
in these terms, reinforces the Western conception of what needs to occur in
89
I will use the words “the Girl” throughout this section of the chapter, in the same way that
Harry Aveling has translated and used it throughout The Girl from the Coast, firstly, because the
author does not give her a name, and secondly, because I can then more directly and easily refer back
to Aveling’s translation. Any paternalistic overtones are unintended.
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Indonesian society in order for it to truly enter into an equal modernity where the
“universal” values of individual rights and democratic freedoms are embraced.
The second Indonesian literary response to the hybridisation of Indonesian
cultural values and institutions is characterised by an emphasis on the role and
importance of cultural specificity (as opposed to universality). This stress on
indigenous social values could be described, in relation to the influence of Western
discourses and the Western impingement on the development of modern Indonesian
hybridity, as counter-discursive. This literary position will be represented in this
chapter by Umar Kayam’s 1992 novel, Para Priyayi. The challenge of alternative
ways of seeing and maintaining social values and individual ethics as it is enunciated
by this text generates a threat to Western concepts of universality and its attempted
monopolisation of international values.
Umar’s novel suggests an alternative reading of the modern ideal and the
Western hero, and therefore of the ‘universal’, to that of Gadis Pantai. In Para
Priyayi it is social, communal and familial values that are given precedence.
Individual effort is recognised, but only as it contributes to social cohesion and family
security. Willful independence and individualised idealism are rejected as self-
indulgent and ultimately divisive. In this novelistic context, therefore, the Javanese
upper and middle-classes (priyayi) are represented in a way that inverts the high
moral ground and reinforces the value of cultural specificity over Western
universalisation.
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In considering these first two literary streams in Indonesian fiction, the divide
between the universal and cultural views will be illustrated by observing the differing
textual responses on issues such as paternalism and hierarchical authority.
The third literary response, represented in this chapter by the writing of Dewi
Anggraeni (and in Chapter4 by Achdiat Mihardja), is, I will argue, more dialogic and
engaged in the process of negotiating the effects of hybridising change. This hybrid
voice emerges from the long experience of cross-cultural and dialogic engagement
with the West.90
This dialogic stream will be examined both to conclude the argument of the
chapter and in order to introduce the exploration of the emergent hybrid / postmodern
voice in Australian fiction in the seventh chapter of this thesis. Dewi Anggraeni’s
short story “Uncertain Steps”, as the title suggests, takes a more negotiated, less
trenchant pathway into the influences and effects of the cross-cultural encounter
between Australia and Indonesia. The agonism of competing values, in the context of
Dewi’s narrative, is sustained by the imperatives of the central Indonesian character’s
situation and the impossibility of imposing closure from either of the extreme
perspectives outlined in the previous two novels. Consequently, unlike those novels,
the story does not provide answers of a metaphoric or finalised nature but instead
opens the metonymic of cultural negotiation and change, the difficult discursive space
of cross-cultural dialogism.
90
Dewi is an Indonesian Australian who was born in Jakarta in 1945 and has lived in
Melbourne for a number of years as the correspondent for Tempo.
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Pramoedya: Universality and Individuality
I will argue in this first section of the chapter that Pramoedya develops his
universalist perspective in Gadis Pantai in two stages: firstly, the universalisation of
political / social existence; and secondly, the individualisation of human actions and
obligations.
Richard Rorty: Solidarity and Objectivity
In order to provide a theoretical context for the universal / local binary I will,
prior to examining these perpectives in the writing of Pramoedya and Umar Kayam,
briefly recount an aspect of Richard Rorty’s discussion in Objectivity, relativism, and
truth which contributes useful ideas in relation to the emergence and importance of
such a binary opposition in Western thought. According to Rorty, ‘objectivity’ is a
product of the Western encounter with otherness, one which emerged in Greek
society as a philosophical defence against the intrusions of non-Hellenic values
(spread by means of the expansion of Greek trade and travel). The Greek awareness
of diversity contributed to the deconstruction of parochialism (cultural specificity) as
a valid means for the evaluation and resolution of questions of an epistemological and
ontological nature. Objectivity represented a Platonic method for transcending
scepticism and the threat posed by alterity by “envisag[ing] a common goal of
humanity - a goal set by human nature rather than Greek culture” (21)
In the international / intercultural setting this philosophical perspective, which
Rorty also describes as the “realist” position,
must argue that there are procedures of justification of belief which are
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natural and not merely local. So they must construct an epistemology
which has room for a kind of a justification which is not merely social
but natural, springing from human nature itself, and made possible by
a link between that part of nature and the rest of nature. In their view,
the various procedures which are thought of as providing rational
justification by one or another culture may or may not really be
rational. For to be truly rational, procedures of justification must lead
to the truth, to correspondence to reality, to the intrinsic nature of
things. (22)
The pragmatic view that Rorty proposes, based on solidarity rather than
objectivity (i.e. locality and temporality rather than universality and transcendence),
argues for the culturally constructed, and therefore limited, nature of truth. Rorty
suggests that “the gap between truth and justification” is not something “to be bridged
by isolating a natural and transcultural sort of rationality which can be used to
criticize certain cultures and praise others, but simply as the gap between actual good
and the possible better” (23).
In his summation of truth as a culturally necessary fiction, Rorty shifts the focus
from idealism to functionalism, from the unquestionable nature of truth to the
usefulness of beliefs and practices in the maintenance of solidarity in a specific
cultural situation and time.
‘Kampung Mentality’ and the Enlightenment
Pramoedya’s novel, Gadis Pantai, I will argue, suggests the former,

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“objective” view of truth. His adoption of the realist / objectivist valorisation of
universal / transcendent human ‘truths’ allows him to relocate (or dislocate)
Javanese social inequality into a Marxist / humanist paradigm. It is the
universalisation (or monologisation) of true and false / good and evil which overrides
or circumvents cultural heterogeneity / difference and draws Pramoedya into a space
shared by Western discourses.
In the first part of the chapter I will briefly consider Pramoedya’s own
description of the internal processes that directed his thinking and writing toward a
universal or objective perspective as it is defined by the West.
Pramoedya, at the time of writing this novel,91 derived some of his ideas from a
Marxist philosophical base, but also from a Western belief in the essential value of
the individual in the face of social oppression and injustice. In an article titled
“Maaf, Atas Nama Pengalaman” (“My Apologies, in the Name of Experience”),
Pramoedya writes about his ethnic origins in Java. In this article he develops a
Nietzsche-like critique of the political expedience of continuing to support local
historical and religious mythologies which, he asserts have served to enslave and
emasculate Javanese potential through the centuries. In his critical rejection of
traditional culture and its repressive effects Pramoedya argues that the role of
promoter or defender of state authority (and the traditional satria or warrior class)
was a function, in large part, of traditional chronicle poetry and the wayang kulit.
Describing the role of babad (chronicle literature) and wayang in pre-colonial
Java, in an article titled “Literary Censorship and the State: To What Extent is a
91
In the early to mid 1960s.
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Novel Dangerous”, he writes:
This [Javanese traditional literature]…glorifies the satria caste, and in
the hands of the court poets conjures away the crimes and defeats of
kings, leaving fantastic myths instead. . . . Here we are faced with
literature in its relation to the state, and its utilization by the state,
functioning for the glorification of [the state’s] own words. (par 1 and
3)
As a reaction to this perception of the role of Javanese literary tradition in the
perpetuation of a repressive hierarchy Pramoedya asserts that he decided “to leave
literature of that sort behind altogether” (“Literary Censorship and the State” par 3)
and turned instead to the literary voices of the West:
The little reading I have done in Western literature, at first
unconsciously, but ever more forcibly, made me free myself from the
“kampung” civilization and culture of my own ethnic origins” (“My
Apologies” 10 par)
According to Pramoedya, Javanese traditions continued to animate modern
Indonesian life and a system that sought to perpetrate its influence because of its
reinforcement of authoritarian and hierarchic control, which he describes as “power a
la Java” (“My Apologies” par 23):
It is necessary that I emphasize the problem of power, because it is this
that tends to turn people to bandits, above all if they have held it for
decades and, without ever knowing the spirit of Verlichting
Aufklaerung remain in thrall to “kampung” civilization and culture.
(par 15)
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Pramoedya’s choice of language in this part of the article is of interest. His
decision to write of Aufklaerung (the Enlightenment), a term that reflects the heart of
the colonial justification of conquest and domination, does not indicate an allegiance
to Westernness per se, but rather a belief that Western rationalism and humanism
(those aspects of the modern West closest to the ideal, according to Pramoedya)
reflects a human/universal set of values applicable to all societies and cultures. He
brings this view to bear on the ongoing feudal values of modern Indonesian literary
expression and political life when he writes:
This people [the Javanese] has not yet brought to life the slightest
enlightenment, Verlichting Aufklaerung. The Brahmins still occupy
their position as the [fashion] accessories to the power of the warrior
class, who live from and for power alone. . . .(par 36)
Passages like these reflect Pramoedya’s clear and decisive rejection of the
oppressive elements of his own cultural tradition which he asserts have failed to take
notice of the voice of the Enlightenment. Pramoedya’s construction of traditional
Javanese values as feudal and politically driven represents a close approximation and
reiteration of the Western production of Indonesian belatedness and the need for it to
divest itself of outmoded practices and beliefs discussed in Chapter5 of this thesis.
For Pramoedya the values of the Enlightenment represent, not the values of Europe or
the United States, but of the truly human universal.
While Pramoedya is direct and unflinching in his support for the “universalist”
voice of human value, derived from the ideals of European and American
philosophical and political production, I am not suggesting that he does not at times
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comment on the positive nature of values which are Javanese, or that he is singular in
his preference for Western or modern forms. It is apparent, in fact, in the narrative
progression and the development in Minke’s internal monologue in the Bumi
Manusia tetralogy that any simplistic prioritising of West over east is fatuous and
risk-laden.92 Pramoedya’s interest is in an intrinsic human / universal sense of justice
and value in which he considers the West to be merely more advanced.
Not only in his novels, but in a series of essays and interviews, Pramoedya has
also denounced the effects of Western capitalist / colonial greed and exploitation. Yet
behind this he sees in the modernity of the West a political and ideological potential
which represents a universal / human presence. In paper a titled “The Role and
Attitude of Intellectuals in the Third World” Pramoedya argues that:
Indonesian intellectuals . . . must act in an intellectually and morally
courageous manner toward the West and demand all that is best and
most useful from science and technology. . . . We have our ancient
culture, we have our passive and defeatist regional cultures, we have
our modern Indonesian culture, which is (as the proverb has it)
“barely the age of a crop of corn”, and we must have the culture of the
93
West. (136)
92
Employing the language and logic of universalist values and rights he roundly denounces
the evils of Dutch colonialism with the same vehemence and universalist argument as he does
Javanese hierarchism.
93
A fuller quotation from this article indicates the ambivalent more complex position that
Pramoedya takes in regard to Indonesia’s relationship to the west. It is an argument which both
rebukes Western practice while preferring its ideals. In the article mentioned above Pramoedya
descibes the “attitudes” that he believes Indonesians should adopt in relation to the demands of an
encroaching modernity, suggesting that Indonesians,
(a) set aside our old, dead culture and use reason as our sole means of building the
future, thus actively creating a modern national culture [and] b) maintain a
critical vigilance towards the passive and defeatist aspects of regional culture.
(135)
He goes on, however, to suggest that they should not chase after the west indiscriminately but with
discernment draw on only the highest ideals and advantages of modernity:
Indonesian intellectuals are first and foremost Indonesians, living out Indonesian
culture. Indonesian life and culture exist within the framework of the Third World,
and the Third World exists because of its opposition to the West. (135-136)
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In Pramoedya’s writing little credence is placed in the idea of cross-cultural
interaction, the possible contribution of a dialogic between East and West. His own
culture, in its unenlightened state, is, according to Pramoedya, too mired in a
suffocating etiquette of hierarchy and repression, maintained largely by a literature of
mythology which extols the virtues of the elite and the duties of submission of the
rest, to contribute anything worthwhile to a universalist discourse.
Pramoedya extends his rejection of Javanese culture to the post-war
emergence of the Javanese bureaucrat in the modern post-independence state.
Benedict Anderson in Language and Power comments on the way in which
Pramoedya, in one of his short stories, directs this critique against the nouveau
priyayi (‘priyayi dari udik’ i.e. “priyayi from the sticks”) who have risen to positions
of authority and wealth after independence. He describes the way in which
Pramoedya employs a subversive approach to bahasa Jawa and kebudayaan Jawa
through the Bakhtinian method of parodic reversal in order to critique this post-
independence variety of autocracy. Thus the linguistic and cultural distance provided
by the national adoption of Bahasa Indonesia becomes an ally for Pramoedya in his
purpose of opposing not so much traditional Javanese chauvinism (in this case) as the
emerging force of state bureaucracy, the more recent face of priyayi privilege, which
he views as the next stage in the class struggle and resistance of hierarchical
hegemony. 94 As I will argue later in this section of the chapter, this generalisation or
Despite such an espousal, I would argue in what follows of my analysis of Pramoedya’s novel that
this ‘Indonesianness’ as Pramoedya proposes it represents in reality a pursuit of the ideal universal.
94
In Anak Semua Bangsa (Child of All Nations) Pramoedya spells out this project of opening
his readership to the more democratic, structure of Bahasa Indonesia (or Malay as it was then
known), when he describes the “awakening” of his hero Minke to the importance of writing his
articles in the Malay language. Kommer, one of Minke’s mentors in the early part of his writing
career, aligns this endeavour once more with the Enlightenment project when he tells Minke that it
is:
through the Javanese language you yourself actually help to enslave your own
people… You must begin to write in Malay, Minke; Malay does not hold within it
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extension of what Pramoedya sees as hegemonic reaches beyond the culturally
specific. Pramoedya does not merely criticise local traditions of authoritarianism but,
in the style of the ‘true’ objectivist, all cultural manifestations of political or social
injustice.
In the next section of the chapter I will examine the way in which Pramoedya
applies this universalist view of socio-political injustice to his fictional production in
Gadis Pantai.
Gadis Pantai: Looking into Ideology
Gadis Pantai inhabits a unique place in Pramoedya’s extensive literary output.
Written after his shift toward the political left (in the late 1950s) and prior to his
imprisonment by the political right (in the mid-1960s), this novel sits at the heart of
his ideological interests. The narrative of Gadis Pantai centres on the process of
demystification which his young Javanese heroine experiences as she crosses into the
any oppressive character. It is in accord with the aims of the French Revolution.
(422-423)
Dr A. Teeuw writes in Citra ManusiaIndonesia dalam Karya Sastra Pramoedya Ananta

Toer:
Minke is a fictional character contemporaneous with the Gadis Pantai period.
Exactly as can be read on the first page of Gadis Pantai: “she had left the nineteenth
century and entered the twentieth century”, so also in the first page of the second
volume of the tetralogy titled Child of All Nations we read: “entering the world of
Betavia [Jakarta] - entering the twentieth century”. And in regard to the central
character of the tetralogy [Minke] we know that he struggled with equal
determination to oppose priayi tradition and colonial power. (227)
Tokohnya, si Minke, adalah orang rekaan sezaman dengan Gadis Pantai. Persis
seperti apa yang dapat dibaca pada halaman pertama Gadis Pantai: ‘ia telah
tinggalkan abad sembilan belas, memasuki abad dua puluh’, demikian pula pada
halaman yang pertama jilid kedua tetralogi berjudul Anak Semua Bangsa, dapat
dibaca: “memasuki alam Betawi - memasuki abad dua puluh’. Dan tentang tokoh
utama tetralogi itu kita telah tahu bahwa is sama kuatnya berjuang melawan
tradisi priayi dan kekuasaan kolonial. (227)
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world of Javanese nobility (priyayi) and is able to compare their world with her own,
the world of Javanese peasantry (wong cilik).
The ‘Girl’ of the title, who lives in a small fishing village, is somehow observed
by a young Islamic ruler (the Bendoro) who is impressed by her beauty. He calls her
and her parents to his home in the city where he informally ‘marries’ the Girl. Her
parents are sent home to the village after the “ceremony”, and the Girl remains
isolated in the house, except for her constant contact with the old servant woman who
has been assigned to care for her and teach her the ways of the Islamic elite. The old
servant has performed this task before with other village ‘Girls’, previously chosen by
the Bendoro, who were sent back to their villages once they had provided him with a
child. Toward the close of the narrative the same thing happens to the Girl when she
bears him a daughter and despite her protests is sent back without the child to her
village.
Pramoedya generates a textual critique of elite Javanese values by developing
narrative and conversational comparisons between the Bendoro household and the
poor fishing community from which the Girl has been taken. After living in the
house of the Bendoro for some time, the girl starts to compare him (in her mind) to
her father, and in so doing considers the relative values of the two classes they
represent. In the girl’s mind her father is brave and strong. He faces the dangers of
the sea each day. She wonders, on the other hand, if the Bendoro “had ever done
something heroic. He seemed so thin. His skin was so soft. He was pale. He looked
so delicate” (53). These questions take the reader into a subtle critique of the ruling
myths of Javanese society through which common people, in Pramoedya’s view, have
been enslaved for centuries. The concept at the heart of this enslavement is that of
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kehalusan (or refinement), of the controlled and delicate hero who by means of his
self-mastery is able to overcome his much larger enemies, who are, in turn, at the
mercy of their passions and willfulness (and are therefore kasar).
Asking the old servant about the apparent weakness of the ruler, the Girl is told,
“In every war, Mas Ngangten, the giants are always defeated by slender young
warriors.” She asks the girl if she has ever seen the wayang in which young delicate
nobles war against evil giants and the girl responds by telling the story of a dalang (a
wayang puppeteer) who visited the her village. When the oldest man in the village
found out that the visitor was a dalang he attacked him angrily, accusing him of
waiting to trick us with your puppets! . . . You’d sell us lies. The
puppets are only pieces of leather. You cut them out yourself and
painted them fancy colours. But you’d be telling us how great the
different figures are. How powerful they are. Unlike anything else in
the world. All lies. The most powerful thing here is the sea. Not your
puppets. (54)
The old servant is shocked to hear this story, saying people of the village are
too ignorant to understand. “The puppets are our ancestors,” she says. To which the
girl responds, “Our ancestors are dead, mbok. The sea goes on forever” (54).
The dialectical materialism that runs through Pramoedya’s story, with its
implied critique of what Noam Chomsky calls “necessary illusions” is representative
of Pramoedya’s rejection of the way in which the Javanese people continue to allow
themselves to be fooled by the lies of ruling ideology.

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Community and Hierarchy
Pramoedya’s text idealises the community life of the fishing village in Gadis
Pantai and sets it in stark contrast to the isolation and fragmentation the Girl feels
amongst the Javanese elite in the Bendoro’s household. In this part of the novel it is
worth considering the way in which certain hybrid values inherited by Pramoedya
from his petty priyayi background are reflected in his writing. As Keith Foulcher
writes, in “The Early Fiction of Pramoedya Ananta Toer, 1946-1949”:
Characteristically, Pramoedya’s sympathies in the situation he is
describing lie with the underdog; they are anti-hierarchical, anti the
power that results from privilege and social position and on the side of
a visionary enthusiasm that rests on skill, courage, and a sense of
responsibility. (191)
Pramoedya’s text portrays the peasant community, in an idealised form, as
not possessing the same traits of self-centredness, or cruelty as the ruling class. The
peasantry, which is oppressed by a corrupt system of hierarchy, practices within its
own social setting: goodness, honesty and communal concern. His writing shares this
idealised social split with D’Alpuget’s novels. In an article titled “The Construction
of Indonesian National Culture: Patterns of Hegemony and Resistance”, Foulcher
argues that this authorial position of the priyayi writer as an authority on the struggles
of the wong cilik (the small people) raises certain questions in regard to the
production of ideology. In analysing the effect of an Indonesian film titled Selamat
Tinggal Jeanette, Foulcher argues that the portrayal of the central character in the
film does not represent peasant Java itself but peasant Java as it is conceived and
propagated from the new priyayi point-of-view.

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Foulcher goes on to suggest that the majority, if not the totality, of Indonesian
prose texts written about the struggle of the rakyat have been in fact the product of
priyayi authors, and represent priyayi constructions of peasant aspirations and beliefs.
In Foulcher’s words this artistic endeavour is a “cultural and creative activity which
reproduces the dispossessed in the image preferred by the oppositionist artist and
intellectual” (318). While Foulcher goes on to argue that Pramoedya avoids this
tendency in the Bumi Manusia tetralogy by focusing on the tradition of the modern
nationalist elite through the character of one of its pioneers, rather than concentrating
on its effects on the wong cilik, this is not the case in Gadis Pantai.
In describing the Indonesian genre of priyayi writing, obsessed with peasant
characters and their struggles, Foulcher could, in fact, have been describing
Pramoedya’s focus in Gadis Pantai:
Frequently, it [the priyayi genre] presents the dispossessed as engaged
in militant struggle with the hegemony, taking control, confronting,
pointing towards ultimate victory. It is a positive, heroic image, which
also incorporates elements of idealization of kerakyatan culture itself.
Local communities are presented in this view as dynamic and aware,
uncorrupted by the political and moral excesses of the nation. (312)
Foulcher explains the hybrid character of this perspective as “not priyayi culture
in its traditional form, but its redefinition, filtered through colonial Dutch notions of
propriety” (308). In the Bumi Manusia collection, Minke, the central character, is a
priyayi hybridised by the influences of a Westernised education. While recognising
the injustices of Dutch rule, and eventually championing the fight against it, he is an
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admirer of “the good side of Europe” (354), the Europe of humanist, Enlightenment
ideals. The character, Kommer, a Dutch editor and patron of Minke’s writing says to
Minke:
It’s true what people say, that you’re going further and further in the
direction of humanism…. You’re writings cry out to people’s sense of
humanity, rejecting barbarism , cheating, libel, and weakness. You
dream of human beings who are strong and whose humanity is strong
also. Indeed, sir, it is only when all people are strong like that we have
true fraternity. You are truly a child of the French Revolution. (415)
There are many passages in this collection that suggest that this liberal / humanist
perspective represents the way forward into a universal modernity and humanity.
In the elite Muslim household in Gadis Pantai, on the other hand, Pramoedya
observes qualities of alienation from, and the repression of, the ideals of modernity.
The Girl’s perspective, unlike Minke’s, is progressively narrowed and controlled, as
she is isolated in the Bendoro’s house. Besides the old servant, no one talks to the
Girl, nor do they appear to speak to each other for fear of antagonising the ruler who
dominates their lives. The ruler himself only speaks to the Girl at their moments of
sexual relations. She feels oppressed by loneliness and self-alienation in the situation
and longs for the human community of the village.
With no one to reflect her existence back to her she believes she has become
invisible. This along with the unsettling ambivalence of her identity as a commoner
amongst nobles, plunges her into an existential angst. From the first moment she
arrives she is separated from her identity as the ‘Girl from the Coast’. Looking in the
mirror she screams “That’s not me! It isn’t! It isn’t! It is an evil spirit!” (27)
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The Universal Over the Culturally Specific
It is crucial, in regard to the argument of this chapter, to note that Pramoedya’s
construction of tyranny and injustice remains focussed on the ‘universal’, and that his
writing compresses all versions of oppression into a common (trans-cultural) anti-
humanism.
Running parallel to the main narrative of the Gadis Pantai is the story told by
the servant woman of the building by the Dutch of a road from one end of Java to the
other for which Javanese “slave labour” was used and which resulted in tremendous
suffering, including the arbitrary dispersal of families and the deaths of many of the
Javanese participants.
The old servant tells the Girl of “Tuan Besar Guntur”, Governor General
Daendals, who used forced labour to build “the long post office road” and hung those
whom he deemed too slow. The recurrence in the narrative of the novel of Daendel’s
(the Dutch governor-general’s) cruel exploitation of the Javanese peasantry is
positioned alongside the injustices of the Javanese nobility, and highlights the trans-
cultural similarities. In this way, I would suggest, Pramoedya’s focus on class
struggle against the Dutch and Javanese elites produces a generalised conception of
political repression which excludes or discounts other possible cultural emphases,
leveling out or equating all hegemony along the common axis of class. Pramoedya
sees the practice of hierarchic authority, whatever its specific cultural form, as anti-
democratic, leading to the abuse of individual rights and social justice.

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The old servant tells the Girl how she and her husband were forced to labour
on a Dutch plantation and how she was kicked in the stomach while pregnant and her
husband killed when he attempted to defend her. In relation to these experiences she
explains the distinctions between “the working class” and “the upper class”. When
the Girl asks which she is as the wife of the Bendoro, the old servant tells her,
“Working class, Mas Ngangten, forgive me for saying so. For the moment you live
among the upper class.”(64)
The servant’s kindly bitterness finds fertile soil in the Girl’s thoughts. She
rapidly recognises the injustices of the system into which she has been placed. When
the Bendoro laughs at what the Girl says about her father one night she is affronted
and says to him, “No, Bendoro. Fate never favours the poor, foolish working class….
I’ve heard it said, Bendoro, that the common people are always hungry. Because of
that their eyes see everything. . . (68). Disquieted by her words he rebukes her
saying, “I’ll thank you, Mas Nganten, not to use the words ‘working class’ and
‘upper class’. We are all human beings. Allah rules the world; we do as he
commands.” (68) This represents a disavowal of difference, typical of ruling elites,
which utilise difference in order to justify their own superiority and rightful
dominance, while at the same time denying the validity of the differential (which
bears with it the potential for challenging the truth of the centre).
The narrative in these passages about economic classes clearly reflects the
influence of Marxist ideology. The implied correlation between the suffering of the
Girl under the Bendoro and the Javanese as a whole under the Dutch, refers the
critical reader to the capitalist relations of domination, the reification of the individual
through the mode of “production”, and the alienation of the direct producer from her /
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his product. In the master / slave, capitalist / worker relationship the worker is
employed in order to produce surplus which far exceeds the workers own wages. The
surplus from the Girl’s “labour” (in the dual sense) becomes, after its completion, the
property of the master. The Girl is supplied with her physical requirements for as
long as she is needed to produce the surplus, (ie. as long as her labour is a valuable
commodity), and afterwards (when the baby is produced) she is discarded.
Throughout this process the parents of the Girl, bound by the feudal traditions
of Java and colonial Dutch rule, in relation to the Bendoro, submit to the demands of
the ruler and despite their own sense of loss portray it to the Girl and themselves as a
privilege and a blessing. It is only after the Girl enters the world of the nobles,
passing through the mystifying veil constructed by feudal / colonial ideology that she
sees the truth of what has been done to her and what it is that aristocratic society
represents.
Just prior to her return to the village on a visit sanctioned by the Bendoro she
remembers her parents’ words when they left her with the him. She recognises in
these the depth of deception which has been perpetrated by the nobles on the Javanese
peasantry and in her imagination tries to clarify the situation to them:
You will only have to open your mouth and everything you want will
be brought to you. All you will have to do then is choose what you
want. Oh bapak. . .bapak [father…father]. That is the world you
offered me, such an easy world. I can ask and I can choose, but I am
not happy. Bapak. . . bapak. I want nothing from this world. I only
want the people I love. People who care, who find it easy to laugh,
who aren’t sad all the time, and aren’t afraid. Ah, bapak. . . bapak.
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What a waste sending your daughter to town, so that a noble could
practice being married. (90)
In this we see the fetishisation of tradition through the inability of the parents to
question or challenge what happens to the daughter.
For Pramoedya, as with the majority of liberal Western writers, such injustice is
an issue of the human misuse of power which transcends cultural argument or
justification. Whether the paternal figure is a Javanese Bupati (in Bumi Manusia)
who humiliates others in order to gain and ensure their submission, or an Islamic
Ruler (in Gadis Pantai) who asserts his divinely ordained position of privilege, or the
Dutch colonial authority (in Anak Semua Bangsa) who mercilessly imposes the rule
of his own law. The fault is shared equally and that fault is located in a common
humanity.
Pramoedya differs from the liberal humanist response of writers like Mochtar
Lubis (a universal humanist) only in the way in which he has located universal social
evil within the struggle between the classes (in novels like Gadis Pantai). The ruling
class are identified by Pramoedya in terms which transcend cultural specificity,
relating instead to practices and attitudes exhibited in all human societies. This view
is represented in Bumi Manusia tetralogy, for example, by the Javanese priyayi, the
Dutch colonial government, the Chinese business operators and foreign capitalist
conglomerates all of whom repress and exploit the masses for their own gain.
The Individual Over the Communal

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Pramoedya’s championing of the ideal of individual rights and the ideas of the
heroic struggle against state domination becomes most apparent in the denouement of
the novel. When the Bendoro tells the Girl she must return to the village without her
baby and never see her again, the Girl finds her voice and the courage to defend her
rights as a human being:
I don’t care if you are angry, Bendoro. A baby isn’t a piece of
jewellery, like a ring or a necklace; you just can’t throw her to the first
person that comes along. . . A hen will defend her chickens, Bendoro.
And I’m more than a hen. I’m a human being! Even if I can’t chant a
single word of Scripture! (180)
Her efforts are, of course, defeated by the prevailing social authority, which
appears intent on crushing her attempt to assert her individual value. Nevertheless,
her actions are heroic. She single-handedly confronts the traditions which have
maintained the ruling elite in its position of privilege. After being forced to leave her
baby at the Bendoro’s household she realises that she cannot return to the village.95
She tells her father that rather than return to the village she will go on her own to
Blora, a town south of Rembang where she lived with the Bendoro.
Despite Pramoedya’s construction of the village style of community as superior
to the society of elite privilege the Girl decides to turn her back on the obligations and
95
Despite the Girl’s preference for the village, however, she is unable to re-assimilate into
community life as she once knew it because the people insist on treating her as a noble. “Please.
Don’t call me ‘Bendoro’,” she says to them. “We’ve known each other since I was a small Girl,
haven’t we?” A woman replies, “That was then. You’re not the person you were then” (107).
Caught between worlds, she is unable to cross over into the new or return to the haven of the old.
But it is not only the world around her and her relationship to it which has been so drastically
changed. By the crossing into the world of the priyayi, she has also been changed inwardly into a
hybrid who shares in and is separated from both worlds.
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benefits of community (the social form) and pursue her goals through heroic
individualism.
In an epilogue, added to the English translation of Gadis Pantai, which was
based on a conversation with the author in 1990 96, the Girl is reunited with her
daughter, Sa’idah, in Blora many years later. In the period after this meeting she
visits her daughter regularly but refuses to accept her daughter’s invitation to move in
with her and her grandchildren. “Despite her hard life [she is forced to “eke out a
living selling things”] she cherished her independence.” (187) Sa’iadah dies of
tuberculosis in 1942 during the Japanese occupation and two years later her mother
(the Girl) becomes seriously ill.
Her grandchildren take her home and nurse her for three days in their house.
Then, brushing aside pleas, she gets up from her bed, saying she wants to return to
her own home. She collapses by the roadside and dies, just as she had lived,
“independent and in the open” (186-187). A similar valorisation of individualism is
evident in the Bumi Manusia tetralogy where social advances on a wide scale are
achieved through the struggles of larger than life individuals like Nyai Ontosoroh and
Minke.
Pramoedya’s production of this binary opposition in which he privileges the
universal over the culturally specific, and the individual over the community,
suggests an agreement with, and reinforcement of, the Western valorisation of
essential and universal human values and institutions.
96
Gadis Pantai tells the story of Pramoedya’s maternal grandmother, “based on stories he had
heard about her, her life as he had witnessed it while still a child, and his imagination. It is thus, not
completely fact, nor is it completely fiction” (The Girl from the Coast Aveling:viii).
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Umar Kayam: Cultural Specificity and Countering the Universal
In the next section of the chapter I will examine an alternative view of issues
of authority and freedom, constructed through the Javanese priyayi worldview of
Umar Kayam’s novel, Para Priyayi. This text, published in 1992, is the work of an
Indonesian academic, born in East Java who gained his doctorate at Cornell
University. In contrast to Pramoedya’s more universal / humanistic voice, Umar’s
novel represents a more culturally specific or regional view of cross-cultural
interaction and hybridisation, perceiving issues such as patriarchy and hierarchy,
freedom and individuality, in a quite different, even opposite, light.
Accentuating the cohesive effect of traditional values on the Javanese family
unit, Umar’s text portrays patriarchal leadership and the delineation of social position
within hierarchy not as repressive of individual rights but as productive of a strong
sense of community identity and interpersonal responsibility.
In relation to Pramoedya’s text, and the Australian novels set in Indonesia,
Para Priyayi appears as an inversion of universal values. Paternal authority, for
example, is constructed as an experience of self-sacrifice (rather than exploitation or
overbearance) in the way in which the father figure in the narrative takes upon
himself the responsibility of providing prosperity and moral guidance to his wife and
children. Respect for this kind of authority is portrayed as character-building and

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ennobling rather than excessively submissive or repressed. Umar Kayam’s
characters, in this sense, are not modernist figures, alienated and alone (the archetypal
‘Western ’ individual found in so many Indonesian novels) but rather the products
and supporters of Javanese community and cultural values.
This represents a much stronger, counter discursive approach to
universalisation / modernisation than Achdiat Mihardja, for example, who, as we
have seen in Chapter4, addresses the issue of Western liberalism by negotiating the
Western perception of individual rights. Achdiat in both Atheis and Debu Cinta
Bertebaran attempts to develop a dialogue between Indonesian traditional values and
modernity and arrive at a satisfactory understanding and commitment to a hybridised
future.
In Para Priyayi, Umar evokes the traditions and values of the Javanese priyayi
and the role of ‘priyayiness’’ in an Indonesia undergoing massive social
transformation from the period of postcolonial rule, through the Japanese occupation
and the revolution, to the unrest of the post-coup period, and the era of the New
Order.
Priyayiness, as it is expressed in the novel, consists of a range and blend of
lineal and collateral values which privilege and celebrate community / family
centeredness, respect for and submission to authority (parental, communal and
national) and the preservation of order. Concepts of refinement (kehalusan) and
social consciousness (eling Jv), along with the strong valorisation of an hierarchic
structure separate the priyayi conception of community obligation and unity from that
of the Javanese peasantry.

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As Koentjaraningrat notes, community is understood more as a collateral
orientation in Javanese peasant society than amongst the priyayi who have
traditionally concentrated on a ‘lineal value orientation’ (respect for, and submission
to elders and superiors). This, according to Koentjaraningrat, fits more closely with
the priyayi ‘civil-servant mentality’ (459). For Umar, however, the stress on the
collateral, or horizontal, orientation is pronounced and in this sense may reflect an
intention to construct a broader reading of the modern priyayi role in Indonesian
society.
It should be noted that the passages from the novel quoted in this part of the
chapter will be my own translation. No English version of the text was available at
the time of writing.
The Priyayi Family: A Cultural Haven
In Para Priyayi, Umar portrays the Javanese nuclear family (and specifically
the Javanese priyayi family) as potential haven of identity and cultural continuity in a
broader culture undermined by the invasion of modernity and political strife. Para
Priyayi represents a return to cultural roots, with the re-emergence of the family as
“moral ideal”, and an aesthetic response to social displacement.
In his book The Novel in Javanese, George Quinn elaborates on the social
context from which the reaffirmation of priyayiness emerges. He describes the
intrusive influences of modernisation, the consequences for the Javanese family, and
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the effect this has had on the shape of contemporary Javanese fiction (i.e. Javanese
fiction written in Javanese). According to Quinn, the tendency to idealise the
Javanese nuclear family structure has not diminished in recent years but has, if
anything, become more pronounced as pressures on the family have increased:
As in the turbulence of everyday living the institution cracks, authors
bring more and more attention to [the nuclear family] as an ideal rather
than a working model. For the only road to the salvation of the family
is to promote it as a necessarily distant concept which, precisely
because of its distance and because of its idealized nature, can thereby
be defended and even become, like Pancasila or ‘Javaneseness’, all
things to all people and a touchstone for the resolution of social
tensions. (105)
Umar sees priyayi philosophy and ethics as the basis of Javanese family
coherence and the expression of its most developed form. In this text priyayiness is
extolled as the highest expression of Javanese culture and as such represents a
counter-discursive response to “universalist” standards. The effectiveness of a
benevolent patriarchal leadership and respect for authority is compared in a positive
light in the narrative to the negative outcomes of Western individualising and
democratising influences. Constructing issues of authority and submission according
to a traditional Javanese paradigm, the narrative arrives at conclusions diametrically
opposed to those put forward in Australian novels already considered in this thesis.
In the next section of the chapter I will consider the way in which Umar
explores and develops several distinct aspects of Javanese priyayiness in the novel
through his key characters: Sastrodarsono, Lantip, Mukaram, Marto and Seten.
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The conception of a changing / hybridised identity in the development of
twentieth century priyayi culture is a key element of the novel. It is developed
through the story of the emergence of a priyayi family from peasant roots, under the
leadership and guidance of its patriarch Sastrodarsono. While continuing to propound
the advantage and superiority of certain priyayi values, Para Priyayi obliquely
critiques the basis of modern priyayiness by separating it from feudal conceptions of
heredity and establishing its validity instead in terms of notions of personal merit and
character. 97
Sastrodarsono and Lantip will be examined as figures who exemplify the
character-driven nature of ‘true priyayiness’ in the vision of Umar’s text. While both
are born into poor farming families, after being raised into priyayi society they come
to represent the embodiment of idealised priyayiness through their individual
endeavours and commitment to priyayi values.
Thus, as will be argued in this part of the chapter, Umar’s text should not be
simply read as an attempt to resist Westernisation through a counter-discursive return
to “nativist” values or counter-stereotype. It should also be seen, instead, as an
attempt to explore some degree of hybridisation / modernisation of the traditional
priyayi value in the postcolonial context. Nevertheless, the novel does represent the
production of a class driven and culturally specific perspective which valorises
priyayi lifestyle over that of the non-priyayi, and Javanese values over those of the
non-Javanese.
97
Class patronage continues, however, to be a crucial and defining element in the introduction
of the non-priyayi into the privileges and responsibilities of priyayiness.
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Priyayi Genealogies
(i) Sastrodarsono
Sastrodarsono (Sastro), the son of a Javanese subsistence farmer, enters the
world of priyayi (“dunia priyayi”) when he finishes school and receives an
appointment as a government teaching assistant. Conscious of the importance of this
moment in his youth, Sastro reflects on this first stage in his upward mobility :
This means I am the first person in our large family to succeed in
becoming a priyayi, albeit a priyayi of the lowest level. That doesn’t
matter. What is most important is that I have taken the first step on the
path of “priyayiness”. (29)
Sastro’s social elevation is achieved in large part through the patronage of a
local priyayi leader and government official Ndoro Seten Kedungsimo. Sastro’s
father, Kasan, works Ndoro Seten’s sawah (wet rice field) and the two men over their
years of association have built a relationship of mutual respect. It is Seten who
endows Sastro with his priyayi name. The incident of the name-giving is important in
the novel as it is used to illustrate the vast divide that exists in the early part of the
century between the classes. Sastro’s mother, on hearing of the name-giving, is
afraid that the name will become too “heavy” for her son, as the child of farmers, and
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cause him to die prematurely. This reference to the social power of naming in Java is
also described by Umar in the short story “Sri Sumarah” where the narrator of the
story explains that Martokusomo, the name of a teacher who becomes Sri Sumarah’s
husband, would be too much for a common non-priyayi child to live up to:
No! Ordinary folk would not dare, would not even think of owning a
name like Martokusomo. It would be more than they could bear. Just
as they belonged centrally within a clearly defined universe, so there
names were chosen and circumscribed as well. This circumscription
clearly relates to social standing or familial ancestry: A farmer might
call himself Kromomenggolo; Martogrobak or Martoglinding might do
for a cartowner; and Karyotosan (but definitely not Karyodahono) for
a blacksmith. Martokusomo is a refined name. Suitable for a priyayi,
a noble, and for those white collar workers who claim noble descent.
(104) 98
Kasan however, trusting Seten’s instincts, allays the mother’s fears and Seten
gives Kasan’s son the name Soedarsono which after his graduation is changed by
Seten to Sastrodarsono in keeping with his vocation as a school teacher.99
From the moment of his social elevation, Sastrodarsono is determined to adapt
to the demands of his new life. His willingness to submit to the requirements of
traditional culture is made most apparent in the text when a marriage partner (Dik
Ngaisah) is chosen for him by his parents. Sastro accepts without demur the
98
This use of names from wayang or mahabarahta stories occurs in many Indonesian fictional
texts including Y.B. Mangunwijaya’s Burung Burung Manyar where Teto (the central charcater of
the story) = Setadewa = Kakrasana (the spiritual twin who becomes Baladewa) and Atik = Larasati or
Parasati the wife of Arjuna (xvi). As Thomas Hunter writes in the introduction, the Javanese
matapor of the wayang suggests “through names and attributes of characters a spiritual world that
parallels the world of the shadow theatre…” (xv).
99
“Sastro rak berarti tulis to, Le.” (35)
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traditional Javanese procedures of negotiation between the parents and the ritual
practice of nontoni (looking), at which he is given his first sight of his bride-to-be
when the two families negotiate the marriage at her parent’s home. The selection of
Dik Ngaisah as a life partner for Sastro proves to be fortuitous, and she and Sastro
come to represent an ideal partnership in the novel. This reinforces the value of the
traditional custom in the text.
Umar also uses the issue of courtship and marriage to illustrate the rapidity of
social change in Java in the period before World War Two. A telling comparison
with Sastrodarsono’s own marriage occurs later in the narrative when Sastro’s second
son Hardojo chooses his own bride-to-be, Nunuk. After meeting Nunuk, a Catholic
girl, during a wedding reception Hardojo builds a romantic relationship with her over
a period of months during which he spends his weekends at her parent’s home. When
Hardojo returns home to ask his parent’s blessing, Sastro calls a family meeting.
Sastro is not pleased with Hardojo’s approach to courtship, nor with his choice of a
non-Muslim wife, and he advises him to reconsider. At the meeting he comments,
with irony, on how happy this generation is that they are able to
. . . go looking for and choose their own brides and more blessed still
that they are able to go out together before their marriage. I met my
wife on the day that I proposed to her. (96)
The match of Harjono and Nunuk eventually fails when Nunuk recognises that
the difference in their religions represents an insurmountable barrier.

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Some years later, Hardojo, who has become a school teacher like his father,
senses that one of his students would make an ideal partner for him. While he feels
he may have fallen in love with her he “did not at all feel the heart fluctuations which
flared up, as, for example, before with Nunuk. My feelings for Sumarti proceeded
peacefully, delicately and slowly”. 100 This is more in keeping with the Javanese
sense of refinement and orderliness than his previous more turbulent and willful
romance.
While Hardojo does not submit the choice of his bride to his parents from the
outset, or ask them to make the selection for him, as occurred with Sastro’s marriage,
he nevertheless decides against attempting to develop a romantic relationship with
Sumarti or even approaching her or her parents directly in the way that he did with
Nunuk. This is partly because Sumarti is so young and he feels that, as he suggested
on his sister Soemini’s behalf, she should be permitted the opportunity to continue
with her schooling if she wishes, but also because he wishes to avoid the mistakes of
his previous courtship. In keeping with this more circumspect attitude, he does not
attempt to court her (or even indicate his interest) in the modern way but rather
“decided to await further developments” (159).
Before he approaches Sumarti or her parents, he visits his parents’ home to tell
them, firstly, of his decision to take up a teaching post in the royal district of
Mangkunegaran, and then of his plan (rencana) to propose to (melamar) Sumarti, to
which his father replies:
Yes, we agree completely. You already have experience of making a
100
“Tidak saya rasakan sama sekali gejolak-gejolak hati yang menggebu seperti, misalnya,
pada waktu dengan Dik Nunuk dulu. Perasaan terhadap Sumarti itu agaknya berjalan dengan
tenang, halus dan pelan.” (159)
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wrong choice. Obviously you learnt enough from your experience.
Good, just let us know when [your] father and mother must go to
Wonogiri to apply on your behalf (melamar). (160)
After talking to his parents, Hardojo still does not directly approach Sumarti,
but indicates his interest in a letter in order to find out her feelings before he
approaches her parents. Rather than explaining her feelings she suggests he come to
meet her parents. The parents accept his proposal and suggest they marry after he has
worked at his new post for a year and once more Hardojo submits to the ruling of his
elders.
Later, after they have been married for a number of years, Hardojo reflects on
the way things have worked out and he is forced to reconsider the values that his
parents have espoused in an interesting reconsideration of Javanese tradition:
I have come to feel that our household is not very different from that
of my parents. Which is an outcome truly beyond my anticipations
and expectations of marriage in this era. When my parents advised
me, and indirectly told me, to follow in their footsteps. . .I did not
really believe or even want to follow them. But, who would have
expected that my path in life would have moved me toward Sumarti
and almost without any of the romance of this age, we have succeeded
in building a compatible and pleasurable marriage relationship. . .
Sometimes I feel that my parents are always watching the development
of our marriage from behind our bed’s mosquito net, smiling and
whispering to me: were we right or were we wrong in the advice that
we have always given you. (emphasis added 162)

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Sastro’s own life experience is narrated prior to these events in the lives of his
children and we see, in comparison, that Sastro’s own progress into priyayiness is
much smoother than the experience of his children. Earlier in the narrative, Sastro
starts as a teaching assistant and is promoted to the position of full teacher in a school
nearer his own town. His rapid elevation in his vocation is again an outcome of
Ndoro Seten’s patronage. Sastro, however, soon proves his own capabilities and his
determination not only to live according to the priyayi ethic (which Umar elaborates
as the novel progresses) but also to raise a family which will become the foundation
of a “petit” priyayi dynasty. The remainder of the novel elaborates Sastro’s, and his
wife Dik Ngaisah’s, achievement in fulfilling this goal of raising their children as
well-educated and successful priyayi adults.
The children themselves, Noegroho, Hardojo and Soemini appear to be less
effective in educating their own children according to the priyayi standards laid down
by Sastro. Several of Sastro’s grandchildren exhibit a willfulness and lack of self-
control which takes the Sastro family though a series of crises. The text presents this
gradual weakening of priyayi influence from parent to grandchild in order to
demonstrate the importance of personal endeavour, rather than inheritance, in the
achievement of a positive priyayi lifestyle.
(ii) Lantip
Lantip is another key character in the novel, one of its several narrators, and a
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central mimetic means of advancing the ideological intent of the novel. By the
conclusion of the narrative it becomes clear that Lantip is the member of Sastro’s
family who most effectively assimilates priyayi social and ethical values, despite
being adopted, rather than being born, into a priyayi family. Lantip is the son of a
desperately poor village woman, Ngadiyem, who became pregnant after Soenandar, a
boy under Sastro’s care, seduced her while he is teaching in the village school that
was set up by Sastro to help the villagers. On hearing about Ngadiyem’s pregnancy
Soenandar flees the village and is later killed along with a gang of bandits.
Feeling responsible for what happened, Sastro takes her son, Lantip, into his
household when he has nearly reached school age in order to educate him. Despite
his unpromising background Lantip submits willingly to the household
responsibilities he is given, is diligent in his studies and responsive to the family and
social ethic that Sastro embodies. When Lantip’s mother dies he is adopted into the
Sastro family permanently, and the family soon comes to respect and rely on him in a
variety of situations.
When the family patriarch, Sastro, dies the children and grandchildren decide
that Lantip should speak on behalf of the family at the funeral because “he is more
truly priyayi than any of us.”101 It is made clear through the narrative outcomes, of
both Sastro and Lantip’s social elevation, that priyayi refinement and dutifulness is
not a natural consequence of ‘high birth’ but rather of individual endeavour and
commitment to the principles of familial and social responsibility. The characteristics
and beneficial outcomes of priyayiness are to be seen in the lives of Sastro and his
adopted son, Lantip, who are both children of the wong cilik (the little or poor
101
“Dialah priyayi yang sesungguhnya lebih daripada kita semua.” (304)
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people).
(iii) Mukaram: Forgetting and Remembering
A second crucial focus of the text relates to the priyayi philosophy of family
and community responsibilty. The importance for the priyayi of remembering his /
her place or role in modern Indonesian society is a fundamental issue raised by
Umar’s novel. The attitude of remembering is important, firstly in relation to one’s
own family and, secondly, in relation to one’s immediate community. In the text
familial / communal values, are constructed as the best hope for Indonesia in avoiding
the anarchic pitfalls of Western individualism and the devaluation of those social /
cultural values which have sustained the Javanese family and community. To forget,
and therefore act in a way that contravenes priyayi social value, not only brings
shame onto the individual and his/her family, but disturbs community order over
which the priyayi appears, according to this line of thought, as some sort of guardian.
A recurrent form of forgetting, of failing to live up to, one’s role and
responsibilities as a priyayi involves the pursuit of individual desires to the detriment
of the community. As George Quinn explains the role of the individual in the life of
the community has been a central preoccupation of Javanese literature (i.e. fiction
written in Bahasa Jawa rather than Bahasa Indonesia) throughout this century. In
most Javanese novels
community is paramount, whether that community be the nuclear

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family, the village or the home town, or ultimately the Javanese
community in general. Ethical norms and personal identity become
diffuse and are perhaps even unthinkable outside a strongly familial
and clearly Javanese context. Preoccupation with personal desires
and ambitions is depicted as obsessive, individualism is foreign and
un-Javanese. (emphasis added 120)
The forgetting of community obligation is represented in Javanese by the word
‘nekad’ or ‘nekat’. Edroes defines nekad as being “reckless, selfishly insisting on
acting perversely regardless of the consequences to oneself or others” (Quinn:114).
In Para Priyayi, Dik Ngaisah’s father (and, of course, Sastrodarsono’s father-
in-law) Romo Mukaram, a government opium dealer, provides a clear example of
‘kenekatan’ when he brings misfortune and shame on his family by ‘conniving’
(kong-kalikong) with Chinese traders to smuggle opium and as a consequence loses
his job. When a colleague tells a story about Romo Mukaram smoking some of the
opium and causing himself to vomit for the rest of the day the story gets out and
becomes the source of further embarrassment (menanggung malu) to Mukaram and
his family.
Importantly, Sastro considers Mukaram’s behaviour as a particular type of
“kenekatan” which he compares to the behaviour of Yudhistira, the eldest brother of
the Pendawa heroes in the Javanese wayang. In the Mahabharata story, Yudhistira is
described as “nekad bermain dadu” [determined to keep on playing dice] to the point
where he loses the Pendawa kingdom to the Kurawa brothers. This moment of
willfulness leads his family into a period of shame, and physical and emotional
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suffering lasting for many years before their kingdom is regained. Mukaram’s moral
failing is seen in a similar light to Yudhistira’s: a temporary form of forgetfulness.
There are two different kinds of behavior associated with ‘kenekatan’: an
ongoing form, or alternatively a momentary, uncharacteristic lapse. This latter form
is known as lali. The Javanese word lali means, to momentarily forget yourself, to be
momentarily, or for a period, beside yourself, or out of your mind. Sastrodarsono
immediately recognises Mukaram’s behaviour as a case of lali and he comforts his
wife with the thought that all men are prone to its power at one time or another, “Yes,
its name is man, Buni. Our ancestors said melik nggendong lali. The desire to
possess brings with it forgetfulness.” (85)102 The concept of lali evokes the Javanese
valorisation of social obligation and respect, the importance to the priyayi of
remembering your place in, and obligation to (eling), the family and, in certain
matters, the broader community.
Quinn asserts, in describing the influence of the concept lali in the Javanese
novel
When an individual places personal desires and interests above those
of the community, he endangers community order, and inasmuch as
the community is a microcosm of the universe and is intimately
integrated with it, he upsets cosmic order as well. The idea is
expressed in the aphoristic phrase melik nggendhong lali, ‘desire to
possess bears with it forgetfulness’.” (116)
It is the fact that the needs of the family and the community have been forsaken
102
“Yah, namanya manusia, Buni. Leluhur kita bilang melik nggendong lali. Nafsu memilih
itu membawa serta lali”.
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in order to achieve individual advantage that makes ‘lali’ reprehensible in the
Javanese mind and which makes ‘eling’ (remembering) a positive characteristic
especially attributable to the priyayi social ethic.
Mulder relates this notion of remembering your place in the order of things to
the Javanese conception of metaphysical orderliness and interdependence:
Impulsive actions, or sacrificing oneself to one’s lusts and desires,
giving free rein to one’s passions, are reprehensible because they upset
personal, social and cosmic order. Therefore one should master
oneself, inwardly and outwardly, while trying to shape life beautifully.
(12)
(iv) Marto and Seten: Ideals or Obligations
In Para Priyayi, it is the recognition of ones responsibility to ones own family
and local community which takes precedence over every other social value according
to Sastrodarsono’s understanding of the priyayi mentality. Umar Kayam illustrates
this process when the principal of the school at which Sastro teaches, Mas
Martoamodjo, risks and eventually loses his government position because of his
determination to oppose colonial government injustices. Mas Marto (Martoamodjo,
the radical) reads sections from Mas Tirto’s newspaper “Medan Priyayi” to the local
peasants even though it has been banned by the government.103 Eventually, he and his
103
Minke the central character in Prameodya’s Bumi Manusia tetralogy who produces the
radical paper “Medan” is loosely based on Tirto Adi Suryo, as Mas Tirto, who published “Medan
Priyayi”.
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family are sent to a remote school as punishment but Marto continues to stand up for
his beliefs by setting up private schools for the poor in the face of colonial regulations
that forbid it.
Initially, Sastrodarsono is influenced by Marto’s idealism and wonders whether
he should take a similar path of open defiance to the colonial government. When he
seeks the advice of his parents and in-laws they all advise him to submit to the
government regulations and highlight the priyayi dependence on government favour.
On visiting his priyayi patron, Romo Seten, Sastro discovers that Seten also
reads “Medan Priyayi” and supports its views but Seten practices a more subtle and
priyayi-like form of resistance to colonial injustice that involves a recognition of his
responsibilities to his family and local community before the masses (wong cilik).
Seten does not openly oppose the government but instead provides opportunities for
poorer families to educate their children (as he has done with Sastro), thereby,
according to his explanation to Sastro, equipping them to contribute to a more just
and enlightened society under Dutch rule:
All my efforts together with other progressive civil servants is to
develop the ranks of progressive priyayi, not priyayi who later on will
try to arbitrarily set themselves up as little kings lording it over the
people. (emphasis added 63)
According to this view, the best hope for the Indonesian masses, in the future
Dutch East Indies, rests with the development of a well-educated and concerned
priyayi elite, secure in its relations with its colonial rulers and prepared to lead the
wong cilik into the modern era. When Sastro is offered the position of principal at the
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school from which Mas Marto has been expelled he decides to take it and use it to
help his community and protect his family.
Later when news reaches Sastro that Marto has been sent to an even more
remote location for his defiance of government regulations, Dik Ngaisah expresses
her admiration and sympathy for Marto’s wife while making a subtle criticism of Mas
Marto himself:
Mbakyu Marto is the real Sembodro . . . . As a mother, I can imagine
the busyness and trouble she is experiencing raising children in exile.
How will those children turn out when they’ve grown up. What will
they become later? (87)
In this and their subsequent conversations there is a note of disappointment
and reproach in relation to Mas Marto. Although Marto has acted like a ‘ksatria
yang mulia’ [a glorious knight] through his “social work in helping the people in
the community” 104, he has separated himself from his responsibility to raise his
children as priyayi. In considering Marto’s actions later Sastrodarsono thinks:
I certainly admire their courage and integrity [i.e. Mas Marto and
people like him] but I cannot understand their determination
[kenekatan] no matter what to brazenly gamble with the fate of their
families. (110)
He considers Romo Seten, on the other hand, to be a truly
. . . glorious knight, who loves his people, but is not grusa grusu, is
not reckless, is mature and refined in his actions. He accepts defeat in
104
“Pekerjaan sosial buat bantu-bantu rakyat sendiri”
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his endeavours without blackening his name by being a rebel and
sacrificing the future of his wife and children. He yields because he
wants to give an opportunity to his children to find their own way.
(110)
Thus Marto’s behaviour is characterised as ‘nekat’ according to Edroes’s
definition of reckless and willful. He has, according to Sastro, sacrificed his family
because of his own willful and determined pursuit of an ideal. Despite the fact that he
has given everything up to defend the rakyat, this is to his detriment.
Seten on the other hand is the true priyayi (ksatria yang mulia) who does not act
gegabah (rashly or recklessly) but in a refined and mature manner refuses to foreclose
on his children’s future by confronting authority head-on. He thus works against
injustice and defends the rights of the peasants while maintaining the priyayi values
of family responsibility and social order.
At a separate, more pragmatic level he recognises that to instigate or participate
in ‘pemberontakan’ (rebellion) against the colonial government would undermine
both the priyayi valorisation of ‘halus’ behaviour and endanger the political and
economic interests of the priyayi which were inextricably linked to colonial good -
105
will.
105
The prized nature of kehalusan relates back to wayang mythology and its manifestation in
the smooth, controlled, and refined behaviour of the satria (knight) in comparison to the loudness,
agitation, aggression and lack of control exhibited by the kasar demons and giants. Such control
requires tremendous effort and concentration and reflects the inward power of the individual (as
opposed to lack of control which is the natural state). According to Anderson, the accumulation of
power that kehalusan represents can only be undermined by pamrih (i.e. “concealed personal
motives”):
This complex term means doing something not because the act has to be done, but
because one’s personal interests or desires are thereby satisfied. The traditional
motto of the Javanese administrator, sepi ing pamrih, rame ing gaweI, still
frequently quoted by politicians and officials, means that the correct attitude of the
priyayi official should be to refrain from indulging personal motives, while working
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Priyayiness Through Western Eyes
Sastro’s assessment of Marto and Seten is for the Western reader rich with
critical possibilities, and the potential for misunderstanding, misconstruction and
appropriation. For instance, would a Western reading of these passages recognise
different cultural value, an ethical otherness, which requires negotiation in order to be
fairly represented? Or would it, without attempting to engage the value of the other,
simply appropriate the voice into its own ideological construct and thereby override
the necessity for negotiating its unsettling indeterminacy? The universe of Western
ideology could easily draw the ‘aberrance’ it perceives into its own orbit, a universal
which is the Western construction of all values, by identifying and interpreting the
voice of the other in this passage as merely an elitist attempt at reinforcing control
through the production, or reiteration, of an ideology of the ruling class.
In the context of familial and hierarchic values expressed in this passage, for
instance, it might appear ‘natural’ and perhaps incumbent on the Western reader to
impose his / her more ‘enlightened’ social ethic on the ‘belatedness’ of the other.
Such thinking might argue that it would be inappropriate, a backward step (a
transgression of Western progressivism) to entertain the familial, hierarchic values it
itself once owned and has largely discarded. The contemplation of such values in the
other frequently produces within Western readers an immediately critical response
hard for the good of the state. At the level of everyday morality, pamrih is the
socially undesirable quality of selfishness and personal aggrandizement.
(Mythology and the tolerance of the Javanese 51)
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drawn from socio / historical memory, the criteria of ideological plausibility and the
limits of discursive possibility which disallow serious negotiation.
Alternatively, such a reading could, in anthropological terms, construct Para
Priyayi as a typical Javanese retreat from engagement, the justification of a colonised
people which hides its capitulation behind the multiplication of traditions or the
vagaries of cultural mysticism. One example of such a reading of Javanese priyayi
culture, John Pemberton’s On the Subject of ‘Java’, describes the way in which the
Central Javanese royal families were able to submit to colonial authority while
maintaining, through the proliferation of ritual, the appearance of retaining power.
On the other hand, taking a more difficult and dialogic approach, more
problematic in terms foreshadowed by Julia Kristeva in her examination of Chinese
culture, the Western reader could permit the text to read as different, to be a valid,
alternative voice which speaks back (or even interrogates) the Western position.
Kristeva explains the value of this self-reflexive dynamic in the encounter with
otherness in About Chinese Women when she writes:
I think that one of the functions - if not the most important - of the
Chinese Revolution today is to introduce this breach (‘there are
others’) into our universalistic conceptions of man and history. It’s
not worth the trouble to go to China if one insists on closing one’s
eyes to this breach. Obviously there are those who find a solution:
they try to fill the abyss by rewriting a China for ‘our people’ (who
may have some revolutionary or revisionist or liberal cause which will
be strengthened by proving that the Chinese are like us, or against us,
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or to be ignored); or else by creating a China against ‘them’ (against
those who are deforming China by making it conform to ‘their’
ideology rather than ours’). To write ‘for’ or ‘against’: the old trick of
a militant committed to maintaining his position. It can help, it can
stifle: what is lost is the chance that the discovery of ‘the other’ may
make us question ourselves about what, here and now, is new,
scarcely audible, disturbing. (emphasis added 9)
There are many narrative events and character developments in the novel that
would provide difficulties for the Western reader and would fuel the conception of
Indonesian otherness as belated and socially / morally retrograde.
One interesting example, of many interesting examples, of the difficulties raised
by this text in terms of developing a truly dialogic engagement with Indonesia occurs
when Sastro’s daughter Soemini returns to her parent’s home after discovering her
husband’s unfaithfulness. When she informs her parents of her husband, Mas
Harjono’s, sexual liaison in Jakarta they are shocked and wonder how this could
happen in such a successful and well-to-do family. Perhaps, her mother thinks, it is
because they have so much that they have never needed to learn an attitude of
acceptance106 as she and Sastro have had to learn over the years. This concept of
surrender and acceptance is a central theme in much of Umar Kayam’s writing. Also,
unlike she and Sastro, they have only had to look after their own family not the
extended family of nieces and nephews. These larger responsibilities had always kept
Sastro and Ngaisah from being over-concerned with their own needs and problems.
106
‘Sikap nrimo’ - Jv passive, acquiescence to one’s fate.
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Rather than nrimo Dik Ngaisah sees in her daughter keras hati (hard
heartedness, stubbornness). This rather than Harjono’s adultery is perceived to be the
cause of the marital breakdown. “Your child,” Dik Ngaisah says to Sastro “is hard
hearted. Goodness, her children are already adults, she has grandchildren and she still
wants to separate.”107 Dik Ngaisah sees her task as that of melting her daughters heart
“melumerkan hati Soemini” (217). Later, as she gently probes the situation she asks
her daughter if she has sent a letter to her husband. Soemini says she hasn’t and that
it is better to just let it be. Dik Ngaisah thinks “Hm, how hard this child is” (217).108
Eventually she suggests to Soemini that Harjono is acting in a way that is
typical of men. Men are ‘pembosan’” (prone to boredom) she tells her:
“He will become bored with his knew plaything as well. As long as. . .
.” “As long as what, Bu?” “As long as you are patient and clever”
(219). 109
According to Dik Ngaisah, part of being patient and clever entails Soemini not
going out of the house to the organisation that she has been involved with:
You must take good care of your husband and children. . . Now then,
later on slowly, slowly you may urge your husband to draw back from
that singer. Possibly without your urging he will draw back of his own
accord. (220)
In Dik Ngaisah’s mind, as it is constructed by Umar Kayam, keeping the family
107
“Anakmu keras hati. Ee, anak sudah pada jadi orang, sudah punya cucu, masih mau
pecah.” (217)
108
“Hm, alangkah keras anak ini.” (218)
109
“Dia akan bosan juga dengan mainannya yang baru. Asal...”
“Asal apa, Bu?”
“Asal kau sabar dan pintar.” (219)
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together is her daughter’s responsibility. In fact, from her point of view it seems that
it is Soemini’s, rather than the adulterous Harjono’s, fault that the family has been
momentarily divided.
Such a passage raises obvious difficulties for the Western reader in relation to
the patriarchal control of discourses. Thus, read from a Western orientation Dik
Ngaisah’s pragmatism represents a patriarchal hegemony, the foregrounding of a
system which encloses the woman’s voice within a prisonhouse of obligation,
primarily the obligation to nrima whenever men transgress.
Earlier in the novel, Dik Ngaisah is critical of the idealistic school teacher,
Mas Marto, who likes to attend ledak tayub, a dance performed by hired female
dancers at feasts in which the male guests often join. But rather than concentrating on
the man’s transgression of decent behaviour she suggests that the solution is in his
wife’s hands:
Mbakyu Marto [Marto’s wife] didn’t make a scene about that, Pak?
She kept quiet, she kept the knowledge of it to herself, but she
continued with patience and determination to repair and strengthen her
relationship with her husband and children.(87)”
Mas Marto’s behaviour is clearly portrayed by Dik Ngaisah in Umar’s text as
reprehensible. On the other hand, Marto’s wife had been wronged but she had to put
her feelings aside in order to preserve the family. The responsibility implied here is
that the woman patiently care for the husband and children even when she is wronged
by the husband; and that the husband maintain the family’s social and economic
standards and standing in the community and provide opportunities for the children’s
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future. He is, it would appear, permitted sexual relations outside the marriage
relationship (although there is shame attached to it for both the husband and wife)
provided he fulfils these other obligations. Here the family is again portrayed as
holding the privileged place in priyayi social interaction over the rights and feelings
of the individual.
Seen from a different perspective it could reasonably be argued that these
difficulties relate to differing conditions of plausibility. The stress on individual
responsibility and rights on one side and the focus on familial obligations (the rights
of the family) on the other, the transgression of individual rights motivating a
different solution to the transgression of familial rights. Such an argument is
difficult, if not impossible to make, however (in anything but the most idealistic and
unengaged way), while the possibility of alternative, equally valid truths is rejected.
In other words, while everything continues to be measured by its relation to a
standard of universality set by the West.
If, on the other hand, the preferred Western reading could be fended off
momentarily, these difficulties might be appreciated from an alternative perspective
which re-constructs the cross-cultural clash, in terms of differing conditions of
plausibility or ways of seeing, rather than in regard to progress and belatedness, good
and evil. In Kristeva’s words: “‘[T]he other’ may make us question ourselves about
what, here and now, is new, scarcely audible, disturbing” (3). In this way the ideal
of a dialogic, a metonymic rather than metaphoric relationship to difference, might
become a possibility. Such an approach to the difficulty of cross-cultural negotiation
would require a willingness and capacity to delay the metaphorical work of
substitution in order to interact with difference. The way toward such a difficult and
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destabilising approach to otherness will be discussed in more detail in the next
chapter.
Suture and Interpellation: Resisting the Hybrid
Returning to a specifically Indonesian perspective on events and characters in
the text it should be reiterated that Para Priyayi’s fictional construction represents a
counter-discursive response to the in-roads made by Western individualism into the
Javanese communal consciousness.
Para Priyayi appears, at one level, as an apologia for priyayi values in the face
of modern materialism and individualism, while at another it represents a description
(perhaps even a celebration) of change, of the inevitable shift toward the
hybridisation of priyayi value.
This latter voice returns the reader to an attempted negotiation of the
contradictions presented to Indonesians by the clash of cultural values, and struggles
with the contradiction inherent in attempting to establish the old Javanese values of
hierarchy and community responsibility within a democratised and capitalised
Indonesia.
The novel should be seen, I would suggest, in terms of the theory of suture,
therefore as an attempt to insert (or re-insert) the modern Indonesian subject into
Javanese ideology through the signifier of alternative priyayi value orientations. In
Althusserian terms such a process constitutes the “re-interpellation of the [subject]

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into pre-established discursive positions not only by effacing the signs of their own
production, but through the lure of the narrative” (Silverman:221).
Umar Kayam’s outspoken explication of priyayi ideology in Para Priyayi, the
fact of its constant narrative visibility, indicates, I would suggest, the acute phase of
splitting, currently being experienced within modern Indonesian / Javanese cultural
identity. As George Quinn argues, in his book on Javanese literature, the shift into a
democratic and meritocratic modernity has had especially traumatic effects on the
hierarchic interdependence of the family as the primary site of community obligation
and belonging:
The weakening of pure blood lines among the old aristocracy, the
pressure put on families by crime, war, poverty and transmigration, the
effects of urbanization and industrialization, the rising status of
individualism, the decline of respect for parents and elders, these and
many more factors continue to bring intense pressure to bear on the
Javanese cultural heartland-the nuclear family. (105)
The approach taken by Umar’s novel to the destabilising effects of the
hybridisation of traditional Indonesian values with those of the West is strongly
counter-discursive. It is an attempt to combat the substitutionary powers of the
Western modernising metaphoric by a re-emphasis on the superiority of ‘authentic’
Javanese values. It is a form of reverse closure which fails to liberate the Indonesian
voice from Western control because it continues to define itself in reaction to it.
Para Priyayi re-emphasises a broader social / political response to the
displacement of traditional values in Indonesia and other Southeast Asian countries.

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From the perspective of political discourse there has been a concerted attempt to
interpellate (or re-interpellate) the Indonesian and Malay subjects into a more
traditionally Asian social / ethical orientation. As already noted, this has been the
approach taken by the Malay and Indonesian leadership to the incursion of non-
Western values over the last decade or more as indicated by the constant flow of
reactionary statements through the media to what is seen as the Western
contamination (“West-toxification”) of their own social values and a call for a return
to a more traditional worldview.
Dewi: the Indonesian / Australian Hybrid
In concluding my analysis of the Indonesian literary response to the Indonesian
encounter with the threat of Western hybridisation of traditional values it is worth
taking a brief look at the interactional possibilities of a text (written by Dewi
Anggraeni) which does not eschew the challenges, but rather attempts to negotiate
Indonesian / Australian hybridity. Dewi Anggraeni has written two novels (The
Root of All Evil and Parallel Forces) which explore the Indonesian / Australian
divide as well as a more recent collection of short stories titled Stories of Indian
Pacific.
In “Uncertain Steps”, a long short story in her Stories of the Indian Pacific
collection, Dewi describes the experience of a young Sundanese English teacher who
reacts to family pressure for her to get married, by impulsively accepting the proposal
of a visiting Australian teacher. The story explores Aryani’s journey into her
Australian marriage, her struggle to come to terms with, and overcome, Australian
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preconceptions of her Asianness, and the strangeness of her new environment.
On Aryani’s arrival in Kalgoorlie (an obvious location for the juxtaposition of
stark comparisons with Java) she is instantly aware of the strikingly different, in fact
frighteningly alien, landscape in which she finds herself. The streets are empty, the
houses spread out, and the horizon is everywhere visible. Her new surroundings are
described in terms of emptiness, isolation, flatness, absence, underpopulation and
distance:
She looks around. They are entering a surrealistic painting. Dead
trees on yellowing dry grass, symbolic of the skeleton of her elusive
happiness. She is occasionally jolted by the eagles and the crows
flying above the skeletons. She feels irrationally vulnerable. (109)
Juxtaposed with the bustling streets of Bandung (to which she returns with her
Australian family later in the narrative), the desert town appears to Dewi’s central
character, Aryani, to be the surface of another planet.
Dewi reverses this cultural / geographic point of view and the role of cultural
incomprehension when she allows Sharon, Steve’s sister, to observe the Bandung
scene on their arrival for the traditional wedding ceremony in Java:
Sharon looks around, fascinated by the place teeming with people….
They drive past grand old buildings, testimony to the Dutch colonial
era, side by side with modest, more fragile looking houses.
Everywhere she looks, there are people. People walking carrying
bags and baskets, people talking under trees, people selling, people
eating beside street hawkers.” (143)

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Prior to this when Aryani first lands in Australia she not only feels the
oppressive threat of the landscape but the strangeness of the people and their customs.
(Steve actually lives in the hills of Adelaide but is visiting his children and ex-wife,
Ann, in Kalgoorlie.) When they reach Ann’s house from the airport Aryani is struck
by the fact that:
They aren’t standing outside the brown brick house waiting, and when
Steve slowly drives into the driveway, no one comes bursting out of
the door. . . . (104)
Later when they pull in at Steve’s own home in the Adelaide hills, she
expects, “Steve’s sister, who lives with him to step out to meet him” (116) but she too
is not home. To Aryani this seems odd and rather disturbing. She expected that his
sister would get the day off work to greet her. She, on the other hand, insists on
waiting to meet Sharon before she even looks at her room or changes so that when
Sharon arrives home several hours later and hears this, she thinks, “Crikey what’ve
we got here? Some imitation Victorian lady who’s going to stand on ceremony and
protocol in every little thing” (118). It is, on both sides, a misunderstanding of
interpersonal style, of differing conceptions of family, the expression of affection,
and the geographic space of relationships.
In contrat to the Arynai’s Australian experience, when Steve, Aryani and
Sharon go to Bandung for the traditional wedding they are greeted with great
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excitement and enthusiasm at the airport by Aryani’s Ibu and her two sisters, Erwina
and Widya.
When they arrive at her parents’ home Aryani is barely out of the car when
two women burst out of the side door to greet her. For a moment Sharon thinks they
are going to hug Aryani, but to her amazement they slightly bend their knees and take
Aryani’s hand to kiss it. Seeing Sharon standing perplexed by the spectacle, Erwina
chuckles, “Those are Dariah and Marni, our domestic help. They’re very fond of
Aryani.” (143).
Resentful of this display of class division and Aryani’s willing participation in
it, Sharon thinks: “They’re not going to treat me like royalty” (144). Sharon is also
discomforted by the atmosphere of polite formality which, in comparison with the
jokey camaraderie of the Australian family, she interprets as coldness:
[Aryani’s father’s] natural smoothness adds to the sophistication
Sharon finds a little awesome. Sharon is a down-to-earth matron. Her
personality merges with her profession… She regards sophistication as
an increasing barrier between the real person and other people.” (145)
Yet beneath this complicated display of courtesy Sharon senses a depth of
familial feeling and respect which is alien to her own cultural experience:
Sharon felt strangely divided. Part of her was permeated with a sense
of belonging, as if Steve were pulling her with him, but the other part
was resisting and despairing. The culture was too foreign for her
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emotional acceptance… Her sense of alienation is, however, without
threat. She feels that the family is inviting her to enter their fold,
respecting her reluctance to do so.” (148)
Aryani in Australia, on the other hand, is portrayed by the text as being more
alone in her fearfulness of her surroundings. Sharon seems abrupt when they first
meet and she becomes suspicious of Aryani’s motives in wanting to marry her
brother. “She’s obviously using Steve, isn’t she?” she says to a friend (124).
As Aryani gets out of the house more often she becomes aware of what she
sees as Australian characteristics: their “impersonal way of communicating” and the
“cynical half-smile” of Australians when they see her in the company of Australian
men (137). She becomes “accustomed to being talked down to” (137).
When Aryani finally strikes up a friendship with an elderly male neighbour,
Steve and Sharon are immediately suspicious of his reasons and try to warn Aryani
that he might have mistaken her for a mail-order bride. When the neighbour visits
her on a later occasion, when Steve is at work, Aryani immediately invites him in to
the house and then thinks:
Oops, I’ve invited a stranger to come in! I’m so excited I feel I’m in
Bandung already. In Bandung I’d never think twice about inviting
someone in, unless he looks positively dangerous. One is rarely alone
in the house. (141)

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After encountering Steve and Sharon’s reaction to what to her seems a
perfectly natural friendship and friendliness,
Aryani sighs privately. Unconsciously she expected Australian society
to be more egalitarian and have more respect for women than
Indonesian society, therefore she is quietly disappointed. Being an
Asian woman doesn’t seem to help either, apparently. Inwardly she
adjusts her expectations of life here. Aryani knows that if she wants to
be happy she has to assess the situation as best as she can and react
accordingly. She has learned resilience. (138-139)
This is a culturally external view of Australian social value, a re-narration of
the Australian conception of its own unwavering egalitarian spirit. In these
constructions of Australian characteristics seen through Aryani (and Dewi’s) eyes we
are made conscious again of the power and importance of exteriority, of being able
to observe ourselves through the eyes of others in a way that can enable us to see the
non-linear, heteroglossic nature of truth.
Aryani herself is at the edge where differences meet and disrupt one another,
and is beginning to enter a space of re-negotiated value. Unlike Sharon, her
preconceptions of Australian society are not held too tightly, her expectations are
adjusted, she has to “assess the situation” and “react accordingly”. But she is not
pretending that it will be easy, that her own sense of true society and correct human
values will not revolt against, or struggle with this process. She is, however, prepared
to sacrifice the binaries of true and false to the middle experience of emergent value.
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Aryani’s willingness to press on and negotiate the difficulties and dangers of
otherness takes place because of the influence of ‘material change’. She is not a
tourist in Australia, she is married to an Australian and held to a determined dialogue
with this unsettling difference by her growing attachment to him and the shame that
would follow her return to Bandung without him. This does not make her struggle
any easier, her sense of dislocation and being misunderstood any less acute.
After one incident in which she encounters an Australian woman who
expresses a common Australian preconception concerning her Asian femininity,
Aryani is shocked by the realisation of how she must be perceived by many other
Australians who see her on the street or in restaurants. She is introduced to the
woman by the local butcher who has suggested (without Aryani’s knowledge) that
Aryani might be able to baby-sit for her while she works in her boutique. Asking a
series of questions about how far she lives and whether she has transport, the woman
presumes that Aryani would be thankful for the opportunity of being able to “stay
with my children three days a week” (150). When Aryani finally ascertains the
reason for these questions she responds by asking in “a chilled voice”:
“What makes you think I want to look after your children?” “Well
aren’t you from the Philippines?” Mrs Winter was bewildered. “What
if I am?” Aryani jerked her head pointedly upward. Mrs Winter
realised now she’d made a faux pas. Looking accusingly at Mark, she
clutched her handbag, the business-like aura fading. Aryani turned
slowly toward the door and opened it, “You ought to be careful who
you ask to look after your children. We Asians can do horrible things
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to them, you know. We wring their necks, for instance. You don’t
want that, do you?” then slammed the door. (150-151)
Later, she bumps into Vincent, the older neighbour she has befriended and as
they sit down for coffee she notices the looks they are getting and thinks, “Now they
really think I’m a mail-order bride” (152).
Partly in response to this stereotype Aryani looks for an avenue of personal
expression which she finds in writing poetry and eventually film scripting. This leads
her toward the denouement of the narrative in which an Australian film producer,
Don Stevens, attempts to use her desire to see her script made into a film to make
explicit sexual demands. When Aryani angrily rebuffs him he calls her a ‘hussy’,
saying, “You came here [meaning his house where he has told her to meet him to go
over her script] just the way you came to marry Steve Dunn!” (180)
The story ends with Aryani feeling humiliated and having lost her chance to
get her script produced. In the closing lines she recalls an Emily Dickinson poem that
appears to sum up her experience of meeting disorientation with growing a
determination to engage with difference rather than impose closure on it:
A Moment - We uncertain step

For newness of the night
Then - fit our vision to the Dark
And meet the Road - erect - (181)
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The voyage in to the centre taken by hybrid writers like Salman Rushdie and
V.S.Naipaul, as well as Australian / Asian writers such as Yasmine Gooneratne, Beth
Yahp and Dewi Anggraeni, who speak with the Western listener’s questions in mind,
is more truly dialogic than any of the Australian texts examined thus far in this thesis.
Dewi’s writing is, to some degree, a bridging or dialogic form of prose which
addresses itself predominantly to the West yet displays a consciousness of an
Indonesian addressee.
It is worth quoting at some length what Dewi has written in regard to this
internal dialogism in the hybrid writer:
When I write in English, I assume to a degree, the psyche of a
Western, in my case, Australian, writer. This doesn’t happen because
I consciously target English speaking readers, but happens
automatically. It happens without a conscious effort, probably because
I’m part Australian, in the sense that I have lived half of my lifetime in
Australia, among my Australian family. Then when I write in
Indonesian, I resume my Indonesian psyche, also to a degree, because
over the years, I have found my own cultural residence which
effectively overlaps in both cultures. . . . Living [the experience of
crossing cultures] is one thing expressing it is another. In my case,
living it, and expressing its overlap, the process is seamless. Not only
do I write fiction, where I express cross cultural feelings, I also work
in cross-boundary journalism. I work for publications in Indonesia,
writing about events in Australia and the Pacific. It has been said
many times, by politicians, writers and others, that for two close
neighbours, Australia and Indonesia could not be culturally further

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apart. That may be so, but the fact should not be regarded as absolute.
Both Australian and Indonesian cultures experience constant change.
At times some parts fall into pieces then regroup into something
different. As a result, some salient features of each culture may
converge, while others diverge even further. One thing of which many
people in Australia are not aware is that Indonesia is a very dynamic
society. While it has a variety of very ancient cultures, there is also a
powerful current that explores modern thinking that can be applied to
contemporary cultures. The clashes occur between cultures, ancient
and contemporary, and those among contemporary sub-cultures,
generate webs of intrigue that puzzle many an observer. (59-70)
This is similar to Rushdie and Naipaul (among many others) whose writing is
cross-culturally dialogic in the sense that it is addressed primarily to a Western
audience but is expected to be read extensively by Indian and Caribbean readers as
well. It is undoubtedly the case that writers of such ethnically hybrid backgrounds
would write with the questions and faces of both audiences in mind, drawn from what
Edward Said would call “overlapping territories” and “intertwined histories” (Culture
and Imperialism 1).
The three Indonesian fictional responses, to Western intervention and the
effects of modernity, that I have examined in this chapter, take us from two
monologic constructions of Indonesia’s place in a rapidly changing postcolonial
context to the more dialogic productions which emerge out of the difficult interaction
with a more insistent and independent otherness. In the next chapter I will be
examining what I have termed the postmodern phase of Australia’s portrayal of

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Indonesian identity, which represents both a rearrangement of strategies of
domination (in one form), and the first stages of a genuine negotiation of cultural
difference (in the other).
The next chapter will focus on a period of Australian writing (in the early
1990s), therefore, in which Australian writers have been forced to deal with the more
tangible loss of cross-cultural authority and as a consequence an engagement with a
valid alterity.
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CHAPTER 7
This chapter will explore the ways in which recent Australian novels set in
Bali110 have contributed to the process of developing a more dialogic approach to the
examination of cultural difference between Australia and Indonesia during the period
under discussion. In the context of a growing postcolonial awareness and a
weakening of imperial associations, these novels represent the first hesitant steps into
the cross-cultural unknown, a space progressively denuded of its familiar stereotypes
and challenged by an independent other growing in its capacity and willingness to
speak for itself.
If the stages of the Australian literary construction of Indonesian identity to
this point can be described as colonial (in terms of Koch’s reiteration of the imperial /
colonial voice) and postcolonial (in regard to the fictional attempts made by writers
like d’Alpuget to resolve contradictions emerging from postcolonial realities) then the
latest phases (of novels published in the 1990s) might best be described as
postmodern and dialogic.
The postmodern perspective, as Bhabha suggests, splits and disperses the
110
These novels, Troppo Man and The Edge of Bali, were published in the early 1990s.
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subject of otherness into “alternative temporalities” (“The Postcolonial” 174), a
heteroglossia uncontained by grand narratives. The postmodern (postcolonial)
perspective has also generated, in the Australian mind, an awareness of the “profound
limitations of a consensual and collusive ‘liberal’ sense of cultural community”; and a
recognition that “the time for ‘assimilating’ minorities to holistic and organic notions
of cultural value has dramatically passed” (175).
The two Australian works of fiction under consideration in this chapter
suggest two possible fictional responses to this postmodern shift, which, drawing on
Bhabha’s terminology in The Location of Culture, will be called “the
epistemological” and “the enunciative” (177-178). The epistemological, drawing on
Bhabha’s terminology, represents a continuation of liberal strategies for the control
and containment of otherness (adapted in this case to the interrogation of
postmodernity). “Enunciative practice”(178), on the other hand, represents a shift
toward a more agonistic and negotiated response to alterity. The two terms usefully
separate out parallel aspects of the colonial/postcolonial and the postmodern/dialogic
responses to otherness but also highlight, I will suggest, a fresh dichotomy within the
postmodern itself.
In his article “The Postcolonial and the Postmodern”, Bhabha attempts to
broadly define the meanings that he attaches to these two terms:
The epistemological is locked into the hermeneutic circle, in the
description of elements as they tend towards totality. The enunciative

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is a more dialogic process that attempts to track displacements and
realignments that are the effects of cultural antagonisms and
articulations - subverting the rationale of the hegemonic movement
and relocating alternative, hybrid sites of cultural negotiation. (178)
I will argue that the two Australian novels that will be analysed in this
chapter, broadly speaking, represent epistemological and enunciative responses to
Indonesia. Obviously the novels are not entirely one thing or the other; what I am
concerned with making visible here is broad emphases and discursive patterns. Inez
Baranay’s 1992 novel The Edge of Bali represents the first phase of a postmodernist
response in which the Indonesian other is constructed in terms of cultural diversity.
According to this approach, Western cultural / political dominance is [re]asserted by
the containing effects of liberal tolerance that allow space for diversity, but always
within the confines of the ever-expanding scope of Western epistemology.
According to Bhabha:
Cultural diversity is the recognition of pre-given cultural contents and
customs; held in a time-frame of relativism it gives rise to liberal
notions of multiculturalism, cultural exchange or the culture of
humanity. (34)
Within in this construct, diversity is celebrated but remains the subject of Western
observation and definition.
Gerard Lee’s 1990 novel Troppo Man enunciates what I would suggest
represents the second approach to the postmodern construction of otherness by
portraying (and engaging with) alterity as cultural difference. In this form the other
is perceived as an alternative other, another Symbolic Order that both subverts and
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augments the values of the self. It is an alterity which is separated from the West, but
as an alternative to Western identity it is also the site of potential disruption and
alienation. As Bhabha suggests, “through the concept of cultural difference” we are
able to “recognise that the problem of cultural interaction emerges only at the
significatory boundaries of cultures, where meaning and values are (mis)read or signs
are misappropriated” (“The Commitment” 34). In this case the latter view might be
said to be metonymic or contiguous and the former metaphoric and substitutionary.
1. Epistemic control: the Other as Diversity
According to Bhabha, the textual approach to otherness which stresses cultural
diversity rather than difference is representative of a more contemporary form of
cross-cultural exclusion. In “Signs Taken for Wonders” he sets up an argument
against this strategy of control which he describes as an extension of the Western
disavowal of difference. Disavowal, according to his view, constructs difference as
aberrance or underdevelopment requiring the cure of Western modernity, the
incorporation of alterity into the Western universal (ie. the other is represented as
different only because it is belated).111
In “The Commitment to Theory” he extends this critique to the postmodern
(and postcolonial) avoidance of cross-cultural dialogue. In this form, the difficulty of
maintaining monologic dominance in the context of postmodern dispersion is
overcome by separating diversity into self-contained epistemologies which never

111
Robert Young expresses the idea of disavowal most clearly when he writes:
[D]iversity is only introduced so that it can be taken away again in the name of an
underlying unity which implies that at some level all such experiences are identical,
despite their wide cultural and historical differences, that underneath there is one
human nature and therefore a common human essence.”(White Mythologies 122)
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need to (or are allowed to) interact with each other and which the centre is able to
theorise rather than directly engage.
According to this process diversity is celebrated while the threat of cultural
difference is defused. This strategy Bhabha describes as the sublation of difference.
Thus, as he explains the construction of cultural alterity in terms of diversity is a
strategy that positions the other as a subject of study and definition but not as a site of
dialogue.
The revision of the history of critical theory rests, as I have said, on
the notion of cultural difference, not cultural diversity. Cultural
diversity is an epistemological object - culture as object of empirical
knowledge - whereas cultural difference is the process of the
enunciation of culture as "knowledgeable", authoritative, adequate to
the construction of systems of cultural identification. (“The
Commitment” 34)
The containment of the threat of difference within the boundaries of the
definable and ‘studyable’ paradigm of diversity represents a new strategy, a
contemporary adaptation to the movement of history and modern thought, which
permits the West to once more sidestep (temporarily) the challenges of a maturing
otherness.
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Stange and the Epistemic Clash
In a helpful article titled “Deconstructions of Javanese “Traditions” as
Disempowerment”, Paul Stange illustrates the way in which postmodern theory has
generated a shift away from the direct imposition of a singular reading of cultural
otherness (drawn from Western academic perceptions and systems of knowledge).
This shift emerges from the post-structuralist / postmodern decentring of truth and
multiplication of valid alternative cultural voices. Stange suggests that this has
opened the way for the greater recognition of diversity in cultural alterity.
He goes on, however, in keeping with Bhabha’s views of a diverse rather than
different other, to argue that such a theoretical shift in epistemology has brought its
own problems, including “methodological atheism” which demands the “voiding of
spirituality” and the redirection of spiritual discourses into areas which are deemed to
be more valid. These are currents of discourse which are accessible to structuralist /
poststructuralist / postmodern techniques of analysis. The social sciences,
theoretically filtered through the recent revolution in linguistics and discourse
analysis, which deconstruct existing centres (including those upon which spiritual
constructs are built) necessarily exclude or re-narrate what cannot be aligned with
current Western epistemology.
Stange offers an example of the Western re-writing of otherness through the
imposition of epistemological limitations when he writes:
If local [in this case Javanese] practices emphasise a spiritual
dimension, this is written out of the picture. References to “spiritual”

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are re-read as “political”, local perspectives on local purposes thus
being consistently redirected by scholarly representations. . .
Concentration on one half of the dialectic, on the conditioning forces
which shape human subjectivity, effectively represents Javanese actors
as creating parodic imitations either of Western -filtered constructions
of their own past or of modern practices. Thus, significant
communities of contemporary actors. . .are rendered speechless by a
systematic unwillingness of contemporary theories to engage them.
(92-93)
The tenacity of Western theorists/ anthropologists/ sociologists in privileging
Western thought, and devaluing local input, represents a continuation of the West’s
hegemonic project of retaining the role of universal interpreter even within the
postmodern stream which is generally associated with anti-colonial, anti-hegemonic
and decentering ideological trajectories. Stange argues that Indonesian culture has
been reduced to a socio-material structure accessible to Western analytical methods -
“to phenomenal structures of ritual and belief, to social and ideological structures”
(95).
He goes on to suggest that on this basis even highly perceptive
anthropological studies of Javanese culture have themselves been selective and guilty
of re-narration because they have been forced to limit the scope of their analysis to
the study of the sign (the semiotic), or material/ritual manifestations of inner
experience. Stange asserts that this is due to the fact that

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mysticism is precisely what is knowable only to and through an
internal voyage of “experience”, related to the conviction that the
ultimate truths of life, are not captured in forms as such, though
ultimately they move through them. (93)
Stange’s criticism of the Western materialistic exclusion of motivational /
inner detail because of the discursive limitation on the boundaries of knowledge (the
knowable), points, I would suggest, to a retreat from otherness. However, this retreat
can, at least in part, be reversed through the reading and analysis of Javanese writers’
interior experiences as elaborated through their own literature. This is why, in this
chapter, I consider an Indonesian fictional response to contemporary Australian
tourist constructions of the Indonesian other in the work of the Indonesian novelist
and short story writer, Gerson Poyk.
While postmodern scholarship eschews, and attempts to deconstruct, the
Western claim to be the centre of cultural value, or the guardian of right social /
ethical standards by which the other is to be measured, it continues to be the arbiter of
what can be known. In the “clash of epistemic worlds” the West still makes the rules,
deciding what constitutes valid knowledge and what must be excluded on the grounds
of epistemic irrelevancy or inaccessibility.
James A. Boon, in Affinities and Extremes (which critiques Western
anthropological intervention in Bali), indicates the maze of intervening statements

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and the epistemological boundaries generated by the Western academic production of
the Balinese subject when he suggests that:
Discourses of cultural difference rely on many demarcations and
composite formulations: particular cultures (“Bali”); qualified cultures
(“Hindu-Bali”); religiously, politically, or economically related
expanses (“Hindu”, “Indianized”, “Indonesian”, “Third World”);
sweeping historical-ethnological complexes (“Indo-Europe”,
“Polynesia”). (51)
This Foucauldian dominance of power relations through the maintenance of
control of the systems of knowledge is, Stange asserts, an “imperialism of the mind”
(107). It does not directly impose a Western construction on Javanese culture but
defines and aligns the boundaries of inquiry to suit a Western bias. Later in this
chapter I will show how this tendency is borne out through novels such as The Edge
of Bali, and following on from this, consider how such epistemological interferences
can begin to be counteracted through readings that approach difference through the
negotiation of otherness, as suggested by Australian fictional texts like Gerard Lee’s
Troppo Man. These two ends of the postmodern binary will be described as
epistemological and enunciative.
2. Enunciative Practices: The Other as Difference
Bhabha asserts that any rehistoricisation of the “discursive construction of
reality” can only occur when the focus of cross-cultural interaction shifts from an
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approach which positions otherness within the prisonhouse of discursive diversity,
and ceases to contain and control alien values within a tolerance which disavows
genuine dialogue. Such a shift, according to Bhabha, would entail the relocation of
“the referential and institutional demands of such theoretical work in the field of
cultural difference - not cultural diversity”. (“The Commitment” 32)
It is, he argues, through negotiation rather than negation that space is opened
for real contact in which the theorisation of alterity is pushed aside by the experience
of alterity:
In such a discursive temporality, the event of theory becomes the
negotiation of contradictory and antagonistic instances that open up
hybrid sites and objectives of struggle, and destroy those negative
polarities between knowledge and its objects, and between theory and
practical-political reason. (“The Commitment” 25)
By and large, it is this experience of discursive temporality that the Australian
novels have avoided, replacing it with orientalist stereotypes, overwhelming it with
the demands of universality, or (as is the case with the Australian Bali novels) fixing
it within an idealised diversity. At each step, difference, with its threatening
multiplication and hybridisation of authenticity, is fended off with a new strategy in
order to distance its subversive potential.
Bhabha’s stress on ‘difference’ over ‘diversity’, on the other hand, is derived
from the commitment to the ‘enunciatory present’ which provides a space, a level
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playing field of more evenly distributed praise and blame. This is an outcome of
relating to otherness through an awareness of the culturally constructed nature of
truth. In this form the ‘centre’ or ‘self’ relates to the ‘margin’ or ‘other’
metonymically, through contiguity and clash, rather than attempting to repress it
under the weight of the Western metaphoric:
The enunciative process introduces a split in the performative present
of cultural identification; a split between the traditional culturalist
demand for a model, a tradition, a community, a stable system of
reference, and the necessary negation of the certitude in the
articulation of new cultural demands, meanings, strategies in the
political present, as a practice of domination, or resistance. (“The
Commitment” 35)
In Troppo Man, such liminal engagement, displacement and renegotiation of
cultural value is explored through the character of Matt, who is intent, from the
moment of his arrival in Bali, on imposing a Western textualisation on every Balinese
person and place that he encounters. Matt’s experience of Bali, however, repeatedly
contradicts the assumptions that he has brought with him, and the Balinese hybrid
refusal to submit to his idealisation of their traditions generates a sense of
displacement between the ‘ideal’ and the ‘real’. His growing sense of cultural
disorientation is complicated by economic pressures, physical stress, social rejection
and a sense of geographic enclosure. These external factors are exacerbated, in turn,
by his even more desperate attempts to impose his idealised expectations onto the
Balinese rather than revise them in the face of his contradictory experiences.
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Thus, the three elements or prerequisites to cross-cultural interaction,
introduced in Chapter1, material change, the hybrid subversion of Western
epistemology and the threatening effects of proximity combine to displace and
effectively silence the ceaseless certainty of the Western logos. Matt is driven into a
discursive gap between the same and the other from which he is unable to impose his
demand that otherness submit to his construction of it.
Such a discursive interruption in the Western monologue of domination is
described by Bhabha as a “temporal break in representation”(“The Postcolonial” 183)
where the substitutionary power of the Western metaphor is emptied of its weight (its
ability to crush alterity) and the supplementarity of an alien metonymic is
momentarily privileged. In this break in the symbolic order, Matt is exposed to the
possibility of negotiation with alterity and his sense of identity is made porous to the
flow of hybrid articulations. He, therefore, becomes the object as well as the subject
of the quest for definition and identity.
The intersection of the three elements or prerequisites of cross-cultural
negotiation, in Matt’s case, produces a violent immersion into the other, into a state in
which the Western monologue is silenced and a genuine engagement with otherness
becomes possible. The crude intensity of Matt’s experience reflects the unwillingness
of the subject to engage alterity in an ‘unfinalisable’ dialogue because of the
disorientation and displacement such an experience represents.
In the next section I will examine three Australian responses to the challenge
of encountering cultural otherness in the postmodern context, through the reading of
the novels The Edge of Bali and Troppo Man.

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The Novels: Tourists, Travellers and Transgressors
In order to explore this argument the reading of the novels will follow three
stages, addressing the three textual approaches to Bali that I have already outlined:
that of the tourist, the traveller, and the transgressor. The tourist reading of Bali
suggests an older, more colonial perception of otherness as the site of exotic pleasures
and incomprehensible risks. The Bali of the traveller is constructed on the
postcolonial / postmodern attempt to privilege diversity over difference. Finally, the
Bali of transgression, it will be argued, represents the entrance into an encounter with
otherness that recognises, and is forced to deal with, difference through an agonistic
and ultimately enriching dialogue.
Both Troppo Man and The Edge of Bali enter into the exploration (and to
differing degrees, satirisation) of the Australian traveller in Bali by stressing the
dichotomy between the tourist and the traveller. From this point forward, however,
the two novels take different narrative and ideological paths: The Edge of Bali
celebrates otherness within the construction (and limitations) of relatively narrow
concepts of diversity; while Troppo Man enters into the more precarious space of
cross-cultural negotiation with Indonesian difference.
There are three main character types in the two novels which drive my
examination of these different narrative / ideological emphases. The Edge of Bali

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provides two of these: the tourist (Nelson), who is representative of the exploitative
colonial voice in relation to otherness, and the traveller (Marla) who represents the
postcolonial / postmodern strategy for the enclosure of alterity within an epistemic
idealisation. Troppo Man explores issues of tourism and travel as well, but does so in
order to generate a third type of character, which could be described as the
transgressor of colonial and postcolonial discourses: Matt.
(i) The Tourist Traps: Avarice in Wonderland
In the first part of The Edge of Bali, Baranay explores the Kuta tourist culture
through the persona of Nelson, a young Australian girl returning to Bali to rejoin her
Balinese lover who has promised to await her return. In this part of the text Baranay
is reasonably successful in providing the reader with a way into the Australian
experience of displacement.
Nelson is unashamedly a tourist. She has no knowledge of, or interest in,
Balinese culture. The first time that Nelson visits Bali with a friend, she is looking
for a good time and meets Miki, a Balinese bar worker, with whom she develops a
romantic relationship. She leaves Bali promising him she will come back as soon as
she can get enough money. When she returns to Bali she takes it for granted that
Miki has been waiting for her and that they will simply continue the relationship that
was postponed by distance.

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In Nelson’s mind the relationship with Miki is not in any way compromised
by the propensity, and necessity, of young Balinese men to use their contacts with
tourist girls as a means of gaining income. When she returns to Bali and arrives at
the Bungar Club, where he works, he appears to be with another white girl and at the
moment that she greets him she realises that he has (momentarily) failed to recognise
her. At that point she is made aware of her mistake and rushes out of the club: “Miki
called after her. Not her name. “You! Girl! Chick!” Finally, “Nelson!”, but she had
gone” (15).
Later, hanging out with Australian friends, Nelson is told by a Balinese boy,
Agung, that he is looking for a tourist girl only staying in Bali for another week so he
can fill in time until his Dutch girlfriend returns to Bali in ten days. “’Yeah’, said
Nelson; ‘don’t waste ten days just waiting.’”(21), highlighting her a sense of betrayal
and bitterness toward the Balinese young men who appear to her to be exploiters of
the feelings and material wealth of Western girls.
In this first section of the book, titled “Nelson”, the conception of the Balinese
young men as expedient gigolos is reinforced through an interview given by the long-
term manager of a Kuta club to Marla (who is the central character in the second
section of the novel):
“Most of the girls, Australian girls, haven’t got a clue. There was an
Australian girl waiting for a barman here, she had bought him a
motorbike, she wants to buy land with him, she goes to all the clubs
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with him. She’s being used, sucked in. . . Ninety per cent of the girls
with Balinese boyfriends don’t know.” (37)
This part of the narrative constructs the Balinese exploitation of Australian
female tourists, as a kind of a colonial reversal. Marla, who is sensitised to Balinese
culture (by her reading) and determined not to be seen as a tourist, manages to resist
the too easy relationship with the Balinese boys, and the stereotypical Balinese
romance. However, towards the end of her stay in Bali, she too becomes involved
with a court dancer in a remote palace community. His ‘authenticity’ provides a
certain sense of distance from the normal tourist behaviour that she despises but in the
end she too is unsettled by the dancer’s talk of his financial dreams:
He would like to have a business with tourists. His family own some
land near the sea. There they could build a place to stay. If they had
more money. Don’t let me think of it, she thinks, don’t let me even
think of it, I know he wants nothing from me, he has told me so and it
is true. (204)
In these narratives Western readers are forced to reverse their automatic
responses to Bali as a place to visit for “a good time” and perhaps to bestow their
friendship or love upon a Balinese recipient. But as with any direct reversal, the
structure itself is not necessarily dislodged as much as disturbed by this move.
Nevertheless, it represents a first step in undermining stereotypical patterns of
colonial thinking in relation to the other.

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Gerson Poyk: Bali from a Balinese Perspective
Gerson Poyk’s short story “Kuta, di Sini Cintaku Kerlip Kemerlap” (“Kuta,
Here My Love Flickers Brightly”) provides an interesting cultural counterpoint to the
Australian perception of the tourist relationship to Bali and suggests a far more
complex and compromised situation for the Balinese ‘playboys’. (The translations in
this section are my own,)
A relatively young, and unnamed, Balinese man, who narrates Poyk’s story,
opens the narrative by offering an illuminating description of the modern world, the
world of tourist Bali, a description that emerges out of his relationship with an
Australian tourist, Regina:
Kuta! Here, on your beach, my love flickers brightly along with the
algae and the fireflies. Here, at the restaurant table and hotel, my love
is like a bright candle which is suddenly blown out by the sea breeze,
then rekindled again with all the fervour of my love, but do you know
that this world is no longer the loving world of the villagers where the
beloved goes down to the water spout and bathes naked, and
afterwards goes home to the village carrying water for her lover. This
world has become so large and the lover is like the modern dog’s flees
which can jump from continent to continent, for instance from New
York to Bali, and then hops on again to Paris.
Kuta! Your beach has provided a new challenge for my zeal for my
love… my love comes, my love goes, ah, she goes too far for me to
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reach her. Yes, love has become like the modern dog’s flees that
jumped from one city to another city far away. (7)
This opening describes the narrator’s feelings that he, along with his fellow-
Balinese, has been imprisoned in a pre-determined space of poverty and immobility, a
primitive enclosure virtually inescapable for the inhabitants, but readily accessible to
the jetsetting tourist. The images that his sense of betrayal generate bear some
comparisons with Aldous Huxley’s “Savage Reservation” in Brave New World.
As Adrian Vickers explains in Bali: A Paradise Created, up until the
beginning of this century, Bali was most commonly characterised as Savage Bali.
Once conquest (of a ferocious and uncompromising Balinese population) was no
longer the central goal of western concern Bali came to be seen first as “the museum
of the ‘classical’ culture of the Indies” (80) and then, with the emergence of a western
interest in travel and tourism, an island of culture and a “disappearing paradise” (98)
The European and American artists and academics who visited in the 1930s were
crucial contributors to this task of constructing Bali as paradise:
Spies and others… formed a profound image of Bali as a culturally
developed, folk-based society in which the figure of the witch and the
dancing girl were prominent… Bateson and Mead provided academic
credence to the image, and ensured that culture and art would become
the only topics in talking about Bali. (124)

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In Huxley’s novel, set in a genetically fashioned future, a primitive tribe is
preserved in its ‘authentic’ state in an area of rainforest cordoned off from the rest of
the global population. The purpose of maintaining this belatedness is to provide the
tourists of high-tech modernity with a museum of their own distant past. The Warden
of the Reservation informs the characters, Bernard and Lenina, (who have jetted in
from ‘civilisation’) that, “There is no escape from a Savage Reservation…Those who
are born in the Reservation are destined to die there” (84).
While the tourists experience the typical responses of revulsion and
fascination at the behaviour of this primitive humanity, we are told that the natives in
the “Savage Reservation” have learned to fulfil their role in relation to the appearance
of visitors from the outside: “[R]emember” the [helicopter pilot] added reassuringly
to Lenina. “they’re perfectly tame; savages won’t do you any harm. They’ve got
enough experience of gas bombs to know that they mustn’t play any tricks” (86). The
“Savage Reservation” exists and is maintained in its ‘authentic’ state for the pleasure,
the horror and the titillation of the tourist. Enclosed by its electrified fence it is
preserved as a quaintly and shockingly primitive state.
The narrator of “Kuta, di Sini Cintaku Kerlip Kemerlap” describes the tourist
enclave at Kuta Beach in a similar fashion. He sees himself as being trapped in a
kind of cultural and geographic stasis for the pleasure, and at the mercy, of the
wealthy and mobile foreigner.

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Poyk’s narrator is a guide who seeks out tourists to transport around the island
on his motorbike, for a suitable fee. As a guide who has to be away from his wife
and children for days or weeks at a time, he is given great freedom by his wife in
order to support the family. This freedom, born of necessity, leads him into a range
of situations which challenge traditional values and family loyalty. He is, for
example, drawn into what he describes as “dunia malam” (the dark or night world),
mixing with the female prostitutes and their pimps who flourish because of the
“tuntunan turisme” (tourist demand). In the midst of enormous competition for the
tourist dollar he feels compelled to use a method that he describes as “bermodalkan
handuk” (modeling a towel) to win his female customers. This involves traveling to
Kuta beach and following the tourist behaviour of sunbathing naked, in order to strike
up a conversation with the tourist girls. When he tries this with Regina, an Australian
tourist, she suspects him of being with the police but he informs her of his real
profession (as a guide) and convinces her to use his services.
The sexual relationship that develops between the narrator and Regina is used
by Poyk to illustrate the complexity and ambivalence that the tourist issue raises for
the native Balinese, and acts as a metaphor of a broader sense of exploitation and
disempowerment in Bali. While traveling around the island they talk about their
differing cultural perspectives. He tells Regina that he lives the life of a guide
because the alternative would be to return to the rice field as a farmer which he
claims is the most despised vocation in Bali, outside of prostitution. Ironically and
tragically, as the narrative progresses he is forced to consider the possibility that in
his eagerness to avoid farming he has become the thing he despises most: a prostitute.
It is a further irony that the despised role of the rice farmer is precisely the idealised
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“authentic” role that tourists seek for, and celebrate in, their photograph albums and
store of memories of that “real” Bali.
Initially he sees himself as a willing sexual partners but as the journey
progresses he begins to contemplate the power differential in their relationship and
the fact that she is in reality his employer. One night Regina wakes him from an
exhausted sleep so that he will listen to and translate her poetry into Indonesian.
Afterwards when they “bercinta” (make love) he begins to feel resentful of her
demands. The fact that he drives the motor bike all day and has a different sleep
pattern means that he is often exhausted by the evening and ready to sleep early. But,
on Regina’s payroll as a guide, it seems he must also be at her sexual beck and call.
Despite his attraction to her he feels increasingly torn about the role he is apparently
expected to play. He writes: “In the end I felt that I was a milking cow” (36). 112
It is prostitution, in the narrative, that comes to represent the complexly
ambivalent relationship of the Balinese to the tourist West, the difficult mixture of
desire and revulsion, gain and loss. A great deal is made of the fact that so many
Indonesians, especially the Javanese migrants, are forced to commodify their
sexuality (menjadi komoditi seks (21)) in order to survive in tourist Bali. As the
narrator considers the difficult nature of his relationship with Regina he remembers
the way that the Governor of the province had tried to get rid of prostitution in Bali
by sending the Javanese prostitutes back to Java and how, because of the tourist
demand they soon returned. He has even heard stories of Balinese young men being
112
“Akhirnya, aku merasa bahwa aku adalah sapi perahan.”
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used by the Western tourists and begins to wonder about his own role as a guide to
the tourists:
For a long time, I have not heard, that there are women who search for
male prostitutes, so that I had almost came to disbelieve it, and soon I
came to disbelieve it completely, until my travels with Regina. But I
am not a prostitute. I am an unofficial guide, an unregistered guide
who rents his motor bike, who by chance meets beautiful women. But
she is an educated woman, a university graduate, and over and above
everything a poet. Thus, although I am extremely tired, and feel as
though I am a milking cow, and all at once I am thinking about male
prostitution as has happened with friends who are unofficial guides,
nevertheless I am sufficiently relieved, because I have not fallen too
far into the tourist garbage heap. (38)
When he considers the possibility that she may be using him as a prostitute he
consoles himself with the stories he has heard of Indonesian boys receiving huge
sums of money from female tourists who have become infatuated with them. Thus
his experience with Regina takes him to the place where he has become, both a
horrified victim of tuntunan turisme and a hopeful participant. His role, in all its
contradictoriness and complexity, is a metaphor for Bali itself in relation to Australia
and, more generally, to contemporary Western cultural and economic structures.
He, like many of the other Balinese (and Javanese) men and women caught up
in the tourist industry, inhabits a world with its own rules, a world with a special and
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separate morality, in which certain cultural values and practices have been suspended.
The way in which traditional values are put on hold when the interruption of tourist
demands and desires requires it, is clearly enunciated by the narrator when he says to
Regina:
You are truly a modern person. Different than Indonesian women.
Different than Indonesian people. If I meet an Indonesian woman
who is not a prostitute who does not ask for payment, the Hansip [the
neighbourhood patrol] will surround the house, and the people together
with the Hansip, catching me in the act with the Indonesian woman,
will herd us to the office and we will be ordered by the Hansip to
marry. But with a white woman everything is safe. We must provide
facilities for all the tourists who come to Indonesia. They can enjoy
the scenery, the Legong dance and the Indonesian boys. (17)
Even his wife, who may or may not suspect his infidelity but is forced to
accept his almost continual absence, is infected with the excitement of what appears
to be easy money:
When she sees the five thousand rupiah note which is still new, she
stops me hugging her, then she dances the Janger Bali for a moment,
then she exhorts me with complete happiness, “Go, go, go again and
get lots and lots of money”. (50)
She does not know that her husband in his eagerness to gain sufficient money
to set up a restaurant in Bali has made plans to leave her and marry Regina so that he
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can work in Australia. Although he is conscience stricken when he considers leaving
his children he consoles himself by deciding he will leave Regina in turn, once he has
sufficient funds and return to his children in Bali. In this relationship then, he is both
the exploited and the exploiter, or at least potentially so.
At the same time that he appears to plot his road to riches, he is conscious
that he has probably fallen in love with Regina and in terms of their plans to marry he
no longer feels that he is prostituting himself to her. When Regina returns to
Australia, she leaves him some extra money and promises to send more so that he can
“…jump like a modern dog’s flee to the kangaroo continent” (53.)113 But after a
year without hearing from her he comes to realise that now she is far away, she has
escaped his reach (and reproach). He realises, bitterly, that she will not even take the
time to send him a letter of regret. He feels, once more, that the wealth of the West
has exploited his poverty by buying his company and sexuality and then, through the
mobility that he is denied, has escaped any of the social or moral consequences:
I took a deep breathe and I realised that man is indeed like a dog’s
flee, like a dog’s flee he easily hops from one town to another. After
he has made a distant leap, the modern man sunbathes on the beach,
travels through the scenic regions, eats at the restaurants and has sex in
the hotels. And the love that the modern man has could perhaps be
called the love of a dog’s flee. (54) 114

113
“Melompat bagaikan kutu anjing modern ke Benua kanguru itu.”
114
Yapady Wolf has provided a first-hand observation of this inequality, in an article titled “The
World of the Kuta Cowboy”, in response to the question of what tourism means to first world
tourists. She suggests that for those westerners who consider themselves travellers, travel represents
a voyage of discovery. In comparison with this if you asked a local “in a third world tourist
destination” :
They may well tell you that it’s about selling; selling their environment, their
culture and their services to the guests. It then starts to figure that many tourists use
the word ‘discovery’ in the same sense that their ancestors in the colonial era did
when they set off to ‘discover’ and plunder ‘new worlds’. Just like their ancestors,
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After denigrating the life of the farmer in Bali to Regina and desperately
attempting to avoid its claim on him, he decides it would be better, after all, to return
to the plot of land he has not yet sold. He sells his motor bike and “burns the
immoral towel” (54). 115 After this return to the traditional lifestyle he concludes
with the words: “And I am immediately cured of the wound and deception of the love
of a dog’s flee” (54).116
I have used Gerson Poyk’s narrative perspective in “Kuta, di Sini Cintaku
Kerlip Kemerlap” to provide a new perspective on tourist Bali, a largely unheard and
uncared-about version of the tourist experience, told from an Indonesian perspective.
His description of the personal humiliation and familial stress that the Western dollar
brings with it, represents a critical challenge to the stereotypical production of the
Balinese playboy as scheming and greedy, through its portrayal of a reversal of
exploitational practice. Poyk’s text, and the playboy point of view that it purports to
represent, deals with only one, very limited aspect of modern Balinese life in terms of
influence of tourism117 from an Indonesian perspective.118 Nevertheless, it represents
one interchange between culturally divergent texts that suggests the fact of
misunderstanding on both sides, as well as opening up the possibility of dialogue.

most first world tourists tend to take home with them copious amounts of ‘booty’
from their forays into the third world. Meanwhile, stuck in their base of economic
inferiority, the locals have little hope of conducting reciprocal tours of discovery in
the tourists’ backyards. The relationship seems hardly equal. (13)
115
“Membakar handuk maksiatku”
116
“Dan aku segera terobat dari luka dan tipuan cinta kutu anjing”
117
Adrian Vickers notes (if such a singularity can be said to exist) it has been and continues to
be the overriding paradigm of Western and Indonesian analysis:
For most Balinese tourism does not determine how their culture is organised on a
fundamental level, but it is the arena in which public discussion over the direction
of Bali’s culture takes place. Thus important decisions about Balinese religion and
art are made either by Balinese or by authorities in Jakarta with reference to
tourism… (194)
118
Poyk himself is not Balinese but Timorese, which generates a range of different questions
concerning the voice we are hearing.
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(ii) The Traveller’s Tale: Matt, Marla and the Ideal Bali
The second approach to otherness in the Bali novels is represented, I will
argue, by a postmodern shift toward cultural diversity. This involves, as I have
suggested earlier in the chapter, a recognition of the heterogeneous nature of cultural
value but at the same time a disavowal of its claim to genuine cultural difference.
According to this strategy of discursive control otherness is released from the
arbitration and domination of the ‘higher’ cultural values of the West, but is re-
contained within the limitations of Western epistemology.
This re-construction of the other as cultural exhibit, as divergent but not
alternative, is achieved, in large part, by setting up a narrative dichotomy between
tourist and traveller cultures. While both The Edge of Bali and Troppo Man elaborate
the negative influence of the tourist, they devote a large proportion of their textual
space to developing, and at times satirising, the role of the anti-tourist character, the
Western traveller. The tale of the traveller (in both novels) takes place, not in tourist
Kuta, but in the relative back blocks of Ubud.119 Both Marla, in The Edge of Bali,
and Matt, in Troppo Man, consider themselves, and are determined to be considered
by others, to be travellers. Both claim to be in search of the ‘authentic’ Bali and both
make concerted efforts to reject the tourist rationale. For each of them, however, the
road traveled produces dramatically different outcomes.
119
Ubud was the site of the anthropological / artistic focus of the 1930s.
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In Troppo Man, Matt, who is boorishly serious about his version of Balinese
culture, despises and frequently denounces any signs of conventional tourist
behaviour. When an ex-student of Matt’s (he is a school teacher by profession)
appears in Ubud from Kuta, Matt, is desperate to avoid him, largely because he feels
he will be implicated as a tourist by association. Pete, the ex-student, seems to be the
typical young Aussie tourist type, interested in a good time and devoid of cultural
pretensions. For Matt, he represents the offensive face of Western tourism in Bali:
Can’t you see what you’re doing here? Appearing in your Rip Curl
shirts, your Rip Curl boardies. You’re offensive. You brought a surf
board into an environment like this. Its so insensitive. (82)
Pete, however, proves himself to be largely inoffensive and far more attentive,
in his rough and jokey manner, to the feelings and interests of the locals than Matt
who is constantly spouting off about cultural correctness. It is Matt’s earnest pursuit,
and imposition, of Balinese ‘authenticity’ that ironically causes offense and confusion
amongst the Balinese as well as the expatriates.
Perhaps the central paradox on which Lee’s novel tilts is located in these
reversals of Matt’s insensitive, ham-fisted attempts at relating to the culture and
Pete’s easy going, take-me-or-leave-me capacity to make real, if rather superficial,
cross-cultural connections. A simple example of this occurs when Matt tries to set up
an art gallery with Nyoman, a well-known Balinese conman, and ends up alienating
the local community after Nyoman uses Matt’s money to put an old man out of a job.
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Pete, on the other hand, without idealistic considerations but a certain basic sense of
decency and fair play, starts up a small workshop by making drawings which the boys
at the guest house “colour in” and sell on the road to passing tourists. Pete, free of
the restrictions of a textually constructed Bali is able to interact with his environment
in ways that Matt’s prescriptiveness will not allow. The Balinese people actually
benefit from Pete’s unsophisticated enterprise.
When Burdett, an American academic who appears to be settled in Ubud, asks
if Matt will be “taking in a few of the attractions around town” (28), Matt says that he
would never think of doing such a thing:
Tourism is an incredibly destructive force. All those people at Kuta
and Sanur… I don’t intend being part of that. I think it says a lot for
the Balinese culture that it can survive a million tourists a year. That’s
virtual rape…” (28)
Burditt’s response goes some way toward summing up the novels view of the
divide between the “enlightened” traveller and the rampaging tourist. Tourists are
contained and they spend money (which might not be so bad), Burdett suggests, while
travellers intrude more deeply into the Balinese world and ultimately demand so
much more. Burditt tries to explain this to Matt when he tells him:
Like you Matt, Barb and I don’t consider ourselves tourists either, but
those of us who want the soul of the country I think are the ones to
watch. We come here with a spiritual vacuum and really, we fuck the
place over, we suck the spirit out of a place like this. The people get
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attached to us, they love us and when we go, they cain’t [sic] pack up
and follow. So sometimes, you know, I think maybe we’re the rapists.
(28-29)
In this way Troppo Man opens the agonistic and disarmingly ambivalent
relationship between ‘West and east” that persists despite postmodern good
intentions. This reveals the transgressive / dialogic project of the Lee text (which will
be explained more thoroughly later in the chapter). The strategies of postmodern
concealment (like those of the postcolonial) tend, when pushed to the extreme, to
exacerbate the contradiction which underlies them.
In part two of Baranay’s The Edge of Bali, Marla, a middle aged Australian
woman emerging from the breakup of a long-term relationship and reassessing her
values, settles in a bungalow in Ubud where she meets Carlo, a gay dancer she knew
in Australia. Both repeatedly reflect on their determination not to be mistaken for
tourists by enunciating to one another the attitudes and activities that qualify them for
a traveller status:
A house in the rice fields was one badge of ‘authenticity’ for a white
native. Marla was ‘only’ in a bungalow at the Katak Inn. Carlo was
clearly just that bit more the white native than she. He kept insisting
he was not a tourist. That’s either the first sign, or the ultimate
delusion, Marla thought. (90)

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Like Matt, the first step on the traveller’s road in Bali is out of Kuta and into
Ubud. Unlike Matt, Marla and Carlo are steeped in the Western mythology of Spies,
Mead, Bateson, McPhee, Vicki Baum, Covarrubias and Ktut Tantri. Like Matt,
however, Marla’s journey through Bali is determined throughout by the search for
authenticity, for the ‘true Bali’. It is ironic (and an irony that Marla at least touches
on with some awareness) that this authenticity which is pursued by the traveller is, in
large part, a construct of Western idealism, and to some degree, the hybrid outcome
of its influence. Adrian Vickers in Bali: a Paradise Created, describes the way in
which the ‘authentic’ Bali came into being in the Western mind as, in large part, the
outcome of an artistic and anthropological process of selection and emphasis which
emerged from the celebrated group of Europeans and Americans centred in Ubud in
the 1930s.120
Baranay’s Marla is committed to her search for the values of the true Bali.
She spends a good deal of time in the Ubud area and then after traveling through rural
Bali arrives at a palace where she has been told the ‘real’ Trance Dance’ will be
performed. In this place, with its well preserved palace ritual and careful control of
tourists, Marla seems to have entered the world of the 1930s, the idealised space of
cultural diversity and cross-pollination, a place she has read about and known before
her arrival. The further she travels away from the tourist centres toward the
‘authentic’ (as she understands it) the closer she comes to a world that is relatively
free of the commercialised and hybridised Bali (and yet closer to the classic hybrid
which has been constructed as the ideal or ‘authentic’ Bali). It is a world less
shocking to her, and less likely to challenge her sense of identity. The trajectory of
120
A direct European influence is even argued by Vickers in terms of Spies contribution to the
Balinese painters’ development of style and choice of subject matter.
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Marla’s cross-cultural relations at this point is non-dialogic tending toward a reversed
monology in which the values of otherness are merely exchanged rather than
negotiated.
Marla is looked upon favourably by the elderly Head Prince of the palace,
who recognises her serious pursuit of truth and readiness to fall into line with
Balinese value. He sets aside time each day to gently interrogate her about Western
customs and answers her queries in return. She becomes in this role more fully the
observer of alterity, a kind of Margaret Mead, studying the riches of Bali’s mystical
rituals and beliefs. But it is important to recognise that while she becomes attuned to
otherness as a result of this direct contact with the other, there is no unraveling of her
native values, as she maintains the observer’s distance, the ethnologist’s objectivity.
Marla’s is a case of successful textualisation, the experiential containment of
Indonesian difference within the semiotic stronghold of Western epistemological

121
limits.
Seen from this perspective the production (or maintenance) of the ideal Bali
(Bali as paradise) “simply constitutes one more use that can be made of the savage in
the realm of cultural production” (Bali: A Paradise Created 127). There is no doubt
that Marla’s tolerance of otherness and her eagerness to relate to it is an attractive
approach, certainly much more so than the obnoxious approach taken by Matt, or the
refusal of d’Alpuget’s characters. But Marla’s strategy of dealing with otherness is
121
This textualisation / idealisation of the other also represents a critical exploitation of the
authentic as a useful tool in the critique of modernity. As Spurr suggests :
In this regard, the idealisation of the other can be understood as symptomatic of
modern alienation and as a mark of profound self-doubt in the collective
consciousness of the west. (135)
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not dialogic in the sense that Bakhtin theorises it, nor enunciative according to
Bhabha’s conception of liminal negotiation. As such it does not produce change as a
consequence of cross-cultural agonism, nor fresh insights concerning the self as an
outcome of the process of exteriority.
Marla’s disavowal or avoidance of the challenges of difference achieves a
reversal of the strategy of denial while arriving at the same monologic outcome.
After escaping the pain of a failed marriage and a seemingly defunct career, she
attempts to escape into the romantic world of the other but thereby avoids any of the
valuable insights (as well as stresses) that can be derived from a vigorous dialogue
with alterity in which self-identity is not abandoned but enriched. Marla’s strategy
represents a disengagement from dialogue enabled by the postmodern celebration of
alterity, a retreat into a reverse monology which makes it possible for the subject to
circumvent the agonistic negotiation of otherness.
The overall effect of Baranay’s text is the maintenance of distance between
cultures, and the preservation of hierarchies, with the West safeguarding its position
of discursive authority by keeping the other within the textual framework of cultural
diversity, rather than engaging it in dialogue.
Baranay’s characters, their diegetic encapsulation of a kind of postcolonial
correctness, their all-round knowledgableness in cultural / political matters, are less
interesting and more importantly less dialogic than the more politically and culturally
contentious Matt in Lee’s novel.

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Marla tends to parade her understanding of what we (Westerners) should do
(politically and cross-culturally) in a way that at times gives the uncomfortable sense
of a tract rather than a novel. In her collection of short stories titled The Saddest
Pleasure her theoretical credentials are not even thinly disguised under the voice of
novelistic mimesis when she writes:
Is it true that the powerful, pervasive embrace of the West crushes and
smashes even what it avowedly loves? We wonder how to honour and
reclaim indigenous cultures without romanticizing them. We want to
discover what they offer that is part of a new synthesis before they
disappear. How could we keep indigenous cultures intact without
making a Disney world of them. (29)
The sentiment is fine (though I’m not sure about the idea of reclaiming indigeneity)
but the outcome is the production of a rhetorical positioning of otherness as diversity,
rather than an engagement with its difference.
Lee, on the other hand, allows his characters to stumble into the shock of
difference in a way that shows us, through its fictional qualities as Bakhtin celebrates
them, an exteriority, a fresh reflection on the self, by allowing the heteroglossic voice
of otherness to expose the limitations of that which ideology has maintained as truth.
Troppo Man takes the reader into the disturbing space between self-knowledge and a
fearful ignorance of alterity in order to challenge the Western sense of itself as the
universal.
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(iii) The Transgressor of Discourse: the Agonism of Matt and Bali
Thus, the third approach to Balinese otherness is represented in Troppo Man
through the figure of Matt, who embodies a need to discover the ‘authentic Bali”, that
is equal, if not greater, than Marla’s. Unlike Marla, Matt’s search for the Bali of the
text is constantly frustrated by his inability to match the Bali of his experience with
the idealised Bali of Western ethnography and romance. This clash of the reality and
the ideal leads him into a contradictory space which eventually generates his social
and mental (dis)orientation. Matt’s determined application of the strategy of
textualisation to his encounter with Bali emerges from his need to fend off the threat
of alterity and the shock of cultural equivalence that he encounters in the Bali of his
experience.
Textualising the Other
Said, in Orientalism, describes the ‘textual attitude’ as one that is favoured by
the traveller “when the uncertainties of travel in strange parts seem to threaten one’s
equanimity” (93). The relative security and stability offered by a text in diffusing the
threatening nature of alterity is derived from its provision of pre-determined
explanations of an otherwise destabilising strangeness.
The value of the textual construction of otherness is, in turn, reinforced by
experiences which are the product of textuality in the first place. As an illustration
of this Said suggests that the textual assertion that lions are fierce can be augmented
by the observation of a lion which is actually fierce, thus generating a “complex

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dialectic of reinforcement” (94) which can contribute to the production of new texts
on the same subject. This process of reinforcement can continue on and on in the
direction of discourse. At the same time it can generate a more prescriptive element
which demands that the other itself be true to this textual fabrication in order to
maintain the unity and stability of the original construct. As Said writes,
We might expect that the way by which it is recommended that a
lion’s fierceness be handled will actually increase its fierceness, force
it to be fierce since that is what it is and that is what in essence we
know or can only know about it. (Orientalism 94)
Matt’s experience of Bali takes the shape of a series of reinforcements and
transgressions of such textual expectations. Within hours of his arrival in Bali (for
the first time), and after a brief confrontational encounter with a Balinese hawker on
the beach, Matt is able to form a firm and authoritative view of the situation (as the
following quotation will show):
He was desperate to be alone. He needed time to think through what
was happening here, to the Balinese. It was terrible. One of the
world’s most refined and spiritual cultures had been corrupted totally.
(3)
This conclusive judgement of the nature of true Balineseness in comparison
with its contemporary corruption is reached within a matter of hours of his first
experience of Bali itself. This is possible because of his strong reliance on the textual
“understanding” which he has brought to Bali with him from outside. When
“pestered” that evening by a taxi driver who wants to take him to a “Trance Dance,
Puppet Show, Pub Crawl” he is affronted by what he feels are the evil effects of
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Western tourism and reveals the source of his knowledge concerning true
Balineseness:
The idea of a pub crawl being elevated to the status of a Balinese
dance, or the highly developed puppet show infuriated Matt. He
considered himself an expert on Bali, having seen two documentaries
on TV. The religion, the art, the ceremonies - everything was part of a
civilised way of life. (10)
Despite the theoretical slightness of Matt’s knowledge concerning the other it
is the transgression of this sense that he has of the ‘authentic’ that generates the
vehemence of his reactions to his daily encounters with Bali in the rest of the
narrative. The disparity between expectation and experience, between the assertions
of the text and face of hybrid reality begins the process of suspicion and resentment
which leads to his alienation and his final acts of madness.
The willingness, indeed in many cases eagerness of the Balinese at Kuta to
embrace tourist commercialism and ‘pollute’ their culture with Western objects and
ideas, not only angers Matt, but generates within him a growing uneasiness, and
feeling of threat. His encounters with the local traders illustrate his sense of
discomfort and confusion. When he is approached by a seller of carvings soon after
his arrival Matt expresses an interest in the ‘traditional craft’ even though he has no
intention of buying any of it. Eventually, however, after the seller proves too
insistent Matt tells him outright that he doesn’t want to buy. The seller is confused.
“You tel [sic] me you like!” the young man said, a look of pain and incomprehension
on his face” Matt compounds the evolving conflict when he tries to defuse the
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situation by saying he has no money and the seller, incredulous, pushes his hand into
Matt’s pocket to discover a wad of notes. The seller turns on Matt saying, in “a voice
with a subterranean tone. ‘OK, I tell you someting. You mas be pery carepul in Bali.
You say someting wrong, someting not true, big problem.’ ” (3).
Other hawkers come after this, including a boy selling warm soft drink. Matt,
by now bewildered and defensive, buys a drink. As the boy watches him drink it, he
suddenly remembers stories he had heard of the way in which tourists had been set up
by Balinese criminals. He fancies that two men further down the beach have been
watching him and that the boy is in on their scheme to steal his possessions:
[The boy’s] casual body language, as he turned and gazed, struck a
knell of fear into Matt. This kid was a marker. There’d been all kinds
of stories about Kuta. The Fanta was drugged with sleeping pills, or
laced with ground glass. (5)
He imagines what they will do to him after he is unconscious and tells the boy
to “piss off, OK? I don’t want another drink. Piss off!” He hurls the half finished
bottle into the surf, leaving the boy perplexed by his outburst, outraged at the waste,
and hurt by the undeserved rebuke.
This initial series of events begins the process of Matt’s alienation from his
surroundings and his retreat into textual cliché. As Said suggests: “It seems a
common human failing to prefer the schematic authority of a text to the
disorientations of direct encounters with the human” (93).

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Rejecting the Hybrid
As Matt flees Kuta which is the site of textual transgression and travels toward
Ubud, he mistakenly believes he has found the embodiment of the ideal/textualised
other:
Ubud was forty kilometers north of Kuta but the temperatures were
several degrees cooler and the blight of tourism hadn’t penetrated so
thoroughly. It was a town famous for its arts and crafts, “a place for
those who care”, as one brochure put it. Here he was (the signs of
Western civilisation diminishing) passing through patches of
rainforest, glimpsing rice paddies, mud walls and grass-roofed huts.
This was the Bali he had come to see. (emphasis added 14)
This, Matt believes, is the Bali of the text. But here too he is soon
disappointed. While at one level Ubud reinforces his textual construction of Bali
through its conformity, at another it transgresses his expectations and produces an
aporia which he must reject or attempt to reconcile. Matt’s inability to interact with
alterity on its own terms, his demand that it submit to the construct he has of it (which
Burditt later describes as his “noble savage” syndrome) represents an extension, a
continuation of a controlling binarism and rejection of the threat of hybridity.

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Arriving one night at Dewi’s restaurant, which is the meeting place in Ubud
for the group of his tourist and Balinese acquaintances, he is told that the children
will be performing a dance later in the evening. Anticipating a performance of
traditional Balinese dance, Matt attends:
A group of Dewi’s nieces, nephews and cousins, eight and nine year
olds, came out dressed like Michael Jackson, the same hair and make-
up. They stood in a line and when Made switched on the
ghettoblaster, sprang into action, copying the megastar: twisting,
turning, moon walking. The guests looked on enthralled, except Matt.
Dewi and Ketut were laughing behind their hands. Barbara, Burditt
and Pete had been drawn in. They couldn’t see, as he could, what was
happening. It would have been funny as a parody, but like this it
saddened him. He refused to clap and was glad when the kids finished
their encore. . . . (95)
When, after voicing his disappointment, he is goaded by the locals into
showing them the Balinese dance movements he has learnt since arriving in Ubud, it
is the local dance that is parodied mockingly by a local child:
A ripple of laughter went through the restaurant and then uproarious
laughter. Matt looked around. One of the kids was behind him in an
exaggerated pose, his eyes rolling, his tongue lolling, his bottom
propped out at an angle. They laughed even more when they saw
Matt’s embarrassment. He couldn’t look Ketut in the eyes. His glance

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passed across her waist where her small hand was trying to hold the
laughter in. He grabbed his journal and walked out with as much haste
as his dignity would allow. (95-96)
As the experiences of textual contradictions accumulate, rather than
abandoning or revising his idealised apprehension of Bali in the face of experience,
he continues to seek out, with growing desperation, the Bali of the text, moving
toward an obsession that is to be finally destructive.
Lee’s narrative has the capacity to produce a sense of displacement in the
Western reader by this point. Through the agglomeration of misunderstandings and
cross-cultural offences the reader is opened to the uncomfortable realisation that he /
she is also being mocked by an other who rejects the Western claim to sure
knowledge concerning the identity of otherness. Such claims, made through the
agency of Matt, are parodied and pushed into a place where they can no longer be
uncritically reiterated, but generate instead the need for self-reflection and a degree of
re-negotiation.
Transgression and Madness
Like Alex in Monkeys in the Dark Matt’s rejection of the tourist community
becomes, in the face of the reality he encounters in Ubud a rejection of the Balinese
who fail to accommodate his ideals. Unlike Alex, however, who turns back from the
void, resolving the agony of her ambivalence by performing a premature closure of
dialogue with the other, Matt’s unrelenting determination takes him into a no-mans-
land, and eventually into temporary madness.

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Lee describes the disturbing ambivalence produced by such a rigid denial of
hybrid reality in his collection of travel essays titled Eating Dogs: travel stories.
Here he writes of those who obstinately persist in their search for “the real Bali” and
the divisive outcome of such a vain determination:
Holding themselves aloof from conversation with tourists, they had
also lost the thrill of talking with the Balinese. Yet they wandered the
street like ghosts caught on the windblown fences between heaven and
earth. (74)
Late in the narrative of Troppo Man, Pete tells Matt about Burditt’s concern
that he is succumbing to the “Noble Savage Syndrome” (96)
“He says a lot of people get it the first time they come to Bali. They
think the Balinese are living in perfect harmony and can’t do anything
wrong. They treat the whole island like its a cathedral. The Church of
the Noble Savage . . . . Westerners come to places like this and try to
be one of the people and when it doesn’t work they can go nuts. (96-
97)
Eventually, Matt becomes physically debilitated (having eaten little for
several days due to his worsening financial situation) and emotionally distraught
(after a series of destabilising events). In this state, he witnesses the desecration of
the Balinese cremation by a crowd of rampant tourists. Afterwards he is pushed into
a dance with Schmetzer (a crazy German who it is generally agreed has “gone
troppo”), by a Balinese woman who says, “You wid him”, indicating the fact that
even the local Balinese have recognised Matt’s increasingly disturbing and disturbed
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attitude to Bali. Interestingly, it is only Matt and Schmetzer who have donned the
traditional head scarfs as a sign of respect for the local ceremony. Both men have
come to represent for tourists and Balinese alike the typical figure of the Westerner
who has lapsed into an extreme sentimentalisation and textualisation of an alien
culture.
In an act of acute rage Matt tries to choke Schmetzer who appears to be
mocking the traditional dance. The crowd is shocked by this transgression of the
carnivalesque and moves away leaving Matt with the woman who simply says to him,
“Pery bad, mister.” Perhaps more than the dance it is the Balinese laughter at
Schmetzer’s antics which Matt is unable to endure.
Matt, in his weakened and disturbed state, wanders across padi fields without
any sense of purpose or direction. He stumbles on a “perfect little Balinese house”
(164) and thinks that this could be his “true home” (164) but soon discovers that it
belongs to Schemtzer. Shortly after this, Matt finds Schmetzer burned to death
nearby, in a final manifestation of his alienation between worlds. Matt himself, from
this point, starts to lose control, not only of his emotions (as has been the case with
his confrontation with Wayne, a friend of Pete’s, and then Schmetzer) but also of his
thoughts. Stopping in a village he attracts a crowd by drawing shapes on the ground
and mumbling to himself:
Here was Australia, a big circle. Here was himself, a smaller circle.
This was Bali and this was the Universe. He traced a line around
every circle. Everything was connected, as Schmetzer said, everything
was a form of energy. He put arrows on two of the circles indicating
an attraction or tendency, then studied the whole thing carefully,

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struggling for meaning. When he couldn’t find one he was
overwhelmed with a sense of pain and panic. (167)
Eventually, an old woman leads him towards the edge of the village:
As she pointed a blue-gray bolt of lightning cracked the sky from
cloudbank to horizon. She laughed in her throat. “Turis,” she said,
“turis.” With a jolt of fear, Matt understood immediately what she
meant. The lightening was for him; he was going to be struck dead,
burnt alive. It would be just as Schmetzer had said. This had all been
inevitable from the moment he first set foot on the plane. (168)
He waits for his doom and when it appears that nothing is going to happen to
him begins to wander on until he sees a ball of fire rushing towards him from the sky.
He throws himself to the ground expecting to die but instead hears a passing villager
call out to him, “Why like dis?… Aeroplane only to Denpasar.” He is taken to a
house where he gives the last of his money and is provided with a prostitute. After
she mechanically performs her task, he thinks, “Hers was the smell of Bali …
Something alluring and yet repulsive” (176). But in the final ironic twist and
displacement of his idealism, she screws up her face and says, “Nor, nor Bali, I am
prom Java…Java.” (176) Matt sinks back against the wall. Even here, at the end,
authenticity escapes him.
‘Time Lag’: Ceasing and Seizing / Unpicking and Re-linking

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The kind of mental disorientation and cultural displacement, explored by Lee
through Matt’s experiences in the latter part of the narrative, are considered by David
Spurr in The Rhetoric of Empire under the heading “insubstantialization”. Spurr
cites, among other texts, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and T.E. Lawrence’s Seven
Pillars of Wisdom, as textual enactments of this process. Lawrence’s intimate
relations with the Arabs and “his effort to imitate the Arab mentality” (148),
according to Spurr, produces a bifurcation of his identity in which he enters an
intermediate zone in relation to his own sense of self. Lawrence writes of this
experience in terms that approximate Bhabha’s conception of the initial experience of
‘time lag’: “I had dropped one form and not taken on the other” (148). Spurr
describes Lawrence’s experiences as the occupation of
a terrifying in-between state, no longer English, but not yet Arab
either, in which the foundations of reality and the motives for action
suddenly lose their meaning. This absence of any firm identity takes
the form of a split in which his “reasonable mind” looks critically upon
the actions of his bodily self ; “sometimes those selves would converse
in the void: and then madness was very near, as I believe it would be
near the man who could see things through the veils at once of two
customs, two educators, two environments. (148-149)
In Wilson Harris’s words, Lawrence had entered “the boredom and the horror
of two worlds: a community in which a transforming new vision (however dark and
tortuous) is alive to redress the balance of the old.” (24). Yet, in this early stage of
disorientation no redress is possible (or even conceivable), only the displacement of
certainties and the intervention of metonymic alternatives. Lawrence’s entrance into
the insecure space between reigns and identities has something of Gramsci’s quality
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of the interregnum in which “the old is dying and the new cannot be born”.
In Heart of Darkness both Marlow and Kurtz, in journeying toward the
‘darkness’, enter this space between identity and alienation to differing degrees. For
Marlow it is a passage into “the dream sensation that pervaded all my days at that
time” (105), a subjective weightlessness that caused him to drift dangerously close to
the madness that had already claimed Kurtz. Matt enters a similar zone of
displacement between the Australia he rejects and the hybrid Bali which he cannot
accommodate.
The question that this raises is whether such an experience of disorientation
can be productive of useful cross-cultural outcomes? Normally the experience of
‘culture shock’ is seen as a negative and ineffectual instance of cross-cultural
encounter. Bhabha, in The Location of Culture, however, suggests that the silencing
in the “enunciatory present”, the momentary displacement of metaphoric signification
can, in fact, be highly productive of meaningful cross-cultural outcomes. He argues
that the experience of this discursive fracture represents a “more complex possibility
of negotiating meaning and agency through the time-lag” (183).
This “time lag” represents a type of discursive absence, described by Lacan, in
another context, as a “third locus which is neither my speech nor my interlocutor”(qtd
in The Location 184). It is a disjunction which could be described, in the cross-
cultural context, as the space between Symbolic Orders or cultures, a zone of
symbolic agonism which momentarily circumvents the repression of otherness. It is a
discursive space within which the metonymic is multiplied and the metaphoric
diminished.
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Thus, according to this description, at the threshold of inter-cultural contact a
discursive lull, “an indeterminate articulation” (179), opens up for Matt (as it did for
Lawrence and Marlow) which is not dominated by the repressive metaphors of
cultural value but in fact goes “beyond theory” (Bhabha), is “outside the sentence”
(Barthes). While the characters in d’Alpuget, Koch, Adams, and Baranay’s novels
perform a closure of dialogue by a variety of ideologically appropriate means
(orientalisation, postcolonial universalisation, diversity portrayal) and thereby
circumvent or repel the need or the imperative to dialogue with alterity, Lee
constructs an otherness which cannot so easily be closed off, that is endlessly open
and hybrid and simply different (therefore alternative to the West). The space that
opens up as a consequence of this reading is dangerous because it represents an abyss
of uncertainty, a void of ‘agonistic’ and contradictory ‘truths’ which have lost the
substitutionary power of metaphor and have slipped into the shifting chain of
signifiers, the supplementary space of the metonymic.
Into this space, according to Bhabha, a mediated, hybrid word can be spoken
which is open to negotiation. In “the temporal break in representation” (185) in
which the subject is cut adrift from the world of ‘truth’ (the stability of the symbolic
order), by the encounter with alternate subjectivities “the sign ceases the
synchronous flow of the symbol, it also seizes the power to elaborate - through the
time lag - new and hybrid agencies and articulations” (emphasis added 191-192). I
would stress the essential nature of both the ‘ceasing’ and the ‘seizing’ in the process
of making new and hybrid cross-cultural meanings.
According to Bhabha’s theorisation, change or cultural emergence is always

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silenced at the moment that such change occurs and signification can only be
retroactively applied to describe the inarticulation of experience and the altered
perceptions that have resulted. This happens because the inability to speak or name
the other is the central condition for the negotiation of alterity. Bhabha writes “we
identify ourselves with the other precisely at a point at which he is inimitable, at the
point which eludes resemblance” (184). We are able to enter into the experience of
the other only at that intersection at which we cease to be able to speak about or
position him. ‘Time lag’, in these terms, represents a temporal space in which ‘the
articulation of the tongue, not the meaning of the language” (180) causes us to resist
the propensity for closure.
This ‘contingent, indeterminate articulation of social ‘experience’’ (179),
according to Bhabha, represents a moment of displacement in which the subject is
positioned outside the circumscription of identity and beyond the strong metaphors of
its own culture. As the first stage of real cross-cultural negotiation it represents the
“ceasing” or “temporal break in representation” (191)
The second stage of time lag, as Bhabha describes it, occurs retrospectively,
after the moment of discursive displacement. Bhabha asserts that because meaning
cannot be made in the space in-between, where the power of the symbolic has been
stripped away, it must occur later when the subject comes back to add language and
make sense of the experience. Here, in the moment after, the hybrid outcome can be
spoken or written aloud (184). Bhabha describes this moment as ‘time lag’:
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The time between the event of the sign…and its discursive eventuality
(writing aloud) which exemplifies a process where intentionality is
negotiated retrospectively. (183)
By this means closure is deferred (due to the lack of a suitable signifier), until
the moment of discursive repetition. The period prior to production of the signifier
represents a ‘negotiating space’ in which the other is approached, the edges of
cultural identity are loosened and re-entangled in an emergent hybridity. Bhabha
makes an important explanatory statement in this regard when he writes:
My contention, elaborated in my writings on postcolonial discourse in
terms of mimicry, hybridity, sly civility, is that this liminal moment of
identification - eluding resemblance - produces a subversive strategy
of subaltern agency that negotiates its own authority through a process
of iterative ‘unpicking’ and incommensurable insurgent ‘relinking’.
(emphasis added 184-5)
This ‘unpicking’ emerges out of the experience of silence, the indeterminacy
of the voice of cultural certainty at the point of encounter with an ‘alternate egology’
(a legitimate other). It is a consequence of Bakhtin’s exotopy, the experience of an
other view of self, an other way of seeing the ‘truth’; and is also the result of
Levinas’s ‘troubling of good conscience’ (103) which sees the other as legitimate and
the self as therefore in some sense belonging to it.

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Bhabha suggests that the experience of entering the in-between (‘beyond
theory’) leads into a difference or emergence, not only an ‘iterative unpicking’ but
also an ‘insurgent relinking’, in which the self is altered, hybridised by its genuine
encounter. Bhabha’s elaboration on Lacan’s idea of the ‘temporal break’ in Ecrits ,
elaborates this point :
The process of reinscription and negotiation - the insertion or
intervention of something that takes on a new meaning - happens in
the temporal break in-between the sign, deprived of subjectivity in the
realm of the intersubjective. (emphasis added 191)
Matt’s retrospective change is extremely limited, but it is nevertheless a first
step toward an openness to difference. Coming out of his “madness’ when he returns
to the wisma, where he and Pete are staying, Matt comes to see the fallacy of his own
self-righteous, “enlightened” liberal position, recognising through the trauma of his
own experience, that it conceals a deeper self-centredness, a greater hegemony. (As
Burditt suggests, “perhaps we are the rapists”.)
After he has recuperated, he attends Schmetzer’s funeral. A Balinese man
noticing the ceremony on the beach asks if it “Balinese or Turis?” “Turis,” Matt says
(181). This readiness to speak that which he previously resisted so violently
represents a first step toward a ‘seizing ’ and ‘re-linking’ to a different, hybrid sense
of truth after the ‘time lag’. Pete later probes Matt to know how he feels after his
experience and he says he feels nothing. “Yeah you do”, Pete suggests. “Ok, I feel
like a turd.” “Pete smiled. “You mightn’t realise this, Mr Walker, but that’s a very
good thing…sir.” (184)

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It is at this point in the narrative that Lee draws his character back from the
negotiation of otherness, and applies closure. This represents, in turn, the limit of the
Australian fictional engagement with Indonesian otherness, the failure to seize the
negotiable possibilities that have opened up. To take the process no further than: “I
feel like a turd.” is a rather embarrassing illustration of the Australian refusal to enter
willingly into the hybrid experience. Nevertheless, it suggests that there is a way, a
space that might be entered.
While the figure of Matt is taken into an agonistic encounter with alterity in
which the positioning of otherness as an object of the Western gaze is subverted
through the unwillingness of the Balinese characters to submit to the controlling
discourse of diversity (i.e. the ‘unpicking’ of postcolonial ideology), Lee closes the
narrative before any ‘relinking’ or hybrid outcomes are allowed to emerge. Thus,
although Matt enters the time-lag, the retrospective stage of re-narration which is the
enunciation of the outcome of dialogic encounter, the revelation of the hybrid form, is
short-circuited.
Gordimer and the Western Hybrid
This response to cultural displacement illustrates the relative ease with which
the tourist (or embassy writer, or journalist) in the Australian novel is able to retreat
from the disturbance of such an encounter. It is only those, like Dewi’s Aryani, who
are in a position where disengagement would prove too costly so that ongoing
negotiation (‘an insurgent relinking’) actually takes place. This relates once more to
my stress on the third criterion of genuine cross-cultural negotiation: material change.

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Other novels by writers with a Western orientation have attempted to explore
this kind of entrance into new meanings, into the temporal break between signs, and
to negotiate alternative outcomes. The reason for the greater openness and
willingness to experience the disorientation of dialogue exhibited by such writers has
to do with the inescapable pressure brought to bear by the characters (and, of course,
the author’s) material position in relation to otherness. Such texts provide an
invaluable source of the cross-cultural experience of agonistic negotiation. Elsewhere
I have described the impact of Nadine Gordimer’s novel July’s People as one
122
example of the capacity of the West to engage more genuinely with otherness.
The approach taken by Gordimer in this text reflects Bhabha’s stress on the
value of liminality, of cross-cultural agonism and displacement in the production of
new, hybrid identities. I have suggested that Gordimer’s writing “represents a way
forward for Australian fiction in its negotiation of Asian alterity.” It is worth
referring to Gordimer’s novel, and my article, at the conclusion of this chapter
because of the way in which it reflects the power of material change to contribute to
the process of negotiating otherness and also provides an example of the way in
which the Western hybrid novel has the capacity to enter into the space between, and
expose the experience of, cross-cultural negotiation to the reader. This fictional
exploration is particularly relevant to the deconstruction of liberal assertions of cross-
cultural tolerance.
Gordimer’s novel, July’s People, centres on a white South African family
(Bam and Maureen Smales and their three children) who have escaped from
122
“The Voyage Out: An Australian Dialogue with Asia.” Antithesis 7.2 (1995): 155-171.
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Johannesburg during the long-expected black uprising, and are being sheltered in the
village of their black servant, July. Gordimer places them in this setting, and the
inverted relationship to their ‘servant’, in order to explore their reactions. The
narrative of the novel focuses on the unravelling of their identities as they attempt to
negotiate the shock of extreme cultural change.
Gordimer places the character of Maureen, and her troubled relationship with
July, at the heart of her novel. In her enormously altered circumstances Maureen is
quickly made conscious of the tremendous reversal in the balance of power and
dependence that has been brought about by the black uprising when July begins to
challenge her assumptions concerning their past and present relationship.
Maureen has always considered herself liberal and progressive in her
treatment of July and has tried to encourage him to think of himself as their employee
rather than their servant. The gradual exposure, to Maureen, of her attempts to hide
the truth of their relationship behind a morally acceptable veneer exemplifies the
writers attempt to peel back the seemingly endless layers of self-deception and
cultural misinterpretation, built up over generations, to reveal the complex nuances of
alterity and hegemony.
Eventually, after a series of incidents involving July, Maureen begins to see
her past attitudes reflected in July’s bitterness. She tries to justify her position (“If I
offended you, if I hurt your dignity, if what I thought was my friendliness, the feeling
I had for you-if that hurt your feelings', 'I know I don’t know'), but it becomes clear
that she is, in fact, frantically attempting to protect her own dignity and identity as
decent and non-racist. In order to avoid the implications that she is racist, she returns
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to confront July on three separate occasions. Each encounter brings her closer to a
painful reality.
After their final clash, from which there can be no reconciliation, her positions
begins to alter: Maureen takes July’s cultural perspective into account for the first
time. She begins to realise what she has done to July over the years, her
identification with ‘moral’ causes, and ways of speaking, has been little more than a
strategy to protect her from this awareness. She is, by this point, being forced to re-
negotiate her relationship to otherness in the light of an unmediated proximity, and,
on this basis, she is caused to wonder, 'What he had to be, how she had covered up to
herself for him, in order for him to be her idea of him'.
For Maureen, the crisis is also associated with a challenge to her sense of the
truth of fundamental human relationships. The subsequent process of reevaluation is
very sensitively explored by Gordimer, as she attempts to navigate the unmapped
terrain of the culturally dislocated psyche. The village and its ways of seeing and
reacting to the ‘world’ is, for Maureen and Bam, like the geography of the moon, a
place without points of departure or arrival that disorients and then gradually steals
their identities.
When she observes the way in which July maintains two wives, one in the city
and the other in his village, without any apparent sense of guilt, she is forced to
reassess her understanding of relational morality, which she had thought of as
culturally universal. This further unsettles the foundations upon which she has so
long rested the axiology of her existence.
The humane creed (Maureen, like anyone else, regarded her

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own as definitive) depended on validities staked on a belief in
the absolute nature of intimate relationships between human
beings. If people don’t all experience emotional satisfaction
and deprivation in the same way, what claim can there be for
equality of need? There was fear and danger in considering
this emotional absolute as open in any way. . .Here the sacred
power and rights of sexual love are formulated in a wife’s hut,
and a backyard room in a city. (65)
By the conclusion of the novel, this erosion of the once clearly delineated
lines between right and wrong and the dilution of the solid code of absolutes, creates
in Maureen a sense of social and moral displacement. In the closing section of the
narrative, Maureen appears to be fleeing from otherness, but not before she has
entered into a dialogue which has made her ask deep questions about her own cultural
values and the foundations upon which they were based. The suddenness and
completeness of her encounter is destructive, but nevertheless points to the potential
that dialogue with other cultures has for the understanding of self.
It is such an acute and sensitive examination of the pretentions and self-
deceptions of postcolonial, liberal attitudes to racial /cultural otherness which have
yet to be explored in Australian fiction in relation to its near Asian neighbours

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CONCLUSION
I have argued, in this thesis, that the Australian literary response to alterations
in the relations of power with Indonesia in the last twenty years has been, on the
whole, strategic rather than dialogic. Each shift in emphasis has represented an
attempt to aesthetically resolve contradictions and thereby maintain the binary
opposition which favours Western dominance. At the same time, the attempted
‘aesthetic resolution’ of splits in Australian literary discourse concerning otherness
has been considered necessary in order to sustain the illusion of social and moral
progress and liberal-mindedness.
I have also suggested that, as the faultlines in the Australian construction of its
relationship to cultural alterity have widened with the political and philosophical
shifts into postcoloniality and postmodernity, the capacity of literary texts to maintain
discursive cohesion has rapidly diminished. In those novels designated as

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postcolonial the strain of holding together the contradictions in Australian discourse
concerning the other has become progressively more difficult to sustain.
While some might argue that the contribution of liberal humanist discourses
over the last fifteen to twenty years has achieved a greater degree of understanding of
the Asian other and thereby deepened Australia’s interaction with difference, I have
tried to argue in this thesis that liberal constructions of the other, represented by
Australian literary texts, have, in large part, simply constituted newer, more culturally
acceptable, strategies of control.
Following on from the postcolonial / liberal-humanist (re)constructions of
Asian subordinance, more recent postmodern trends toward the dispersion of self-
evident centres of truth have concealed an epistemic realignment of domination which
has enabled the centre to maintain its control of cross-cultural discourses while
avoiding a more genuine and costly engagement with the ‘face’ of otherness.
In contrast to these two postcolonial phases of strategic response, I have
argued that the most recent period of material (political and economic) pressure on
Australia has generated the first signs of a more productive phase of cross-cultural
negotiation. Rather than the mere shift from one position of discursive control to
another (the (re)production of the Asian subject in more ideologically ‘tolerant’
terms), Australia is being pressed toward actual engagement with otherness, an
engagement in which it will be progressively less able to impose its own will.
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In relation to this later shift I have argued that the more recent constructions
of otherness in Australian literature (published in the 1990s) have represented both
the expression of more contemporary strategies of control (through the postmodern
‘disavowal of difference’) and the first steps toward a genuine engagement with, and
negotiation of, the threat of alterity. The latter more dialogic approach represents the
difficult journey into cultural hybridity which has already been traveled by the non-
Western other and retold in the richly nuanced voice of the hybrid Third World
novels of Naipaul, Rushdie, Achebe and so many others.
This retelling of the journey into otherness and its agonistic, negotiated
outcomes, is missing from Australian fiction as it relates to Indonesia. In general
terms the absence of an Indonesian influence on the development of Australia’s
literary identity means that what the Australian / Indonesian hybrid experience might
be has yet to be told in Australian fiction.
While Third World writers, due to the pressures of colonial materiality, have
journeyed into the centre, exploring and exposing colonial and postcolonial outcomes,
we have no clear knowledge through Australian fiction of what a journey into
otherness might really mean or what it might promise us in the future. White
Australia, which has so determinedly separated itself from its Asian neighbours
throughout its short history, can not draw on the kind of cross-civilisational memory
(available to Naipaul, Harris or Rushdie) to write the “hybrid novel”. Such a project
(potentially) lies in Australia’s future, in the train of a concerted endeavour to cross
cultural barriers through dialogic interaction.

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In this thesis, through the examination of Australian literary texts which
enunciate key stages of Australia’s cross-cultural engagement with its nearest Asian
neighbour, I have suggested123 that three elements would need to come together
within a single social or cultural context for a genuine cross-cultural dialogue to be
achieved.124 Each of the three requirements that I have proposed as a necessary
prerequisite of genuine cross-cultural negotiation has to some degree become
apparent in the chronology of fictional discourse described in this thesis.
The first is the requirement that the constructed nature of cultural value and
meaning be recognised and understood, and to some degree accepted, as the basis of
the interactive process. The Australian prose texts, examined in chapters 2, 3 and 5,
appear to reinforce the view that the Western political, social and ethical perspective
continues to represent, in the Western mind, ‘universal’ (non-negotiable) truth and
therefore something more than a political/ cultural construction. Truths, therefore,
which transcend the demands of cultural specificity and the interruption of cross-
cultural dialogue.
In Chapter7, however, with the appearance of the Australian Bali novel and
the growing influence of postmodern ways of seeing otherness, I have argued that we
are beginning to encounter a literary voice which has taken the first steps toward
recognising the constructed (rather than apriori) nature of its own cultural value.
Such an altered perspective, in Bhabha’s terms, loosens cultural value from
previously immovable links to epistemology, enabling the negotiation of ‘truths’

123
Drawing heavily on the theories of Homi Bhabha and Mikhail Bakhtin and on the suggestive
(but rather indefinite) remarks of Wilson Harris
124
By ‘genuine’ I mean interaction which does not merely represent the concealment of
hegemony.
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which are perceived as enunciatory or discursive.
The second element or process that I have suggested is required for the
production of genuine cross-cultural dialogue and transformation is the shift away
from the theorisation of otherness, towards a stress on the value of proximity to, or
social engagement with, the other. Such a process has the capacity to dislodge the
certainties of thematisation through the interaction of liminalities i.e. a movement
away from substitutionary effects of the metaphoric clash at the centre of difference.
This movement toward the experience (rather than the mere textualisation) of
otherness has come closer to realisation in the context of Bali as an affordable
destination in the 1990s. The narration of the experience of the “tourist” has
generated fictional texts which are forced to deal with the more realistic and down-to-
earth journey, rather than the larger-than-life adventures of the pioneering colonial,
journalist or embassy official. In this form the other has ceased to be merely read
about in the travel literature and fiction of the few, becoming instead a description of
the experience of the many. This engagement with the human face of the other has
contributed to new ways of seeing and speaking about otherness which are connected
to issues of cross-cultural dialogue.
Despite these first signs of the opening of dialogue, however, proximity, as a
force of change in Australia, has generated limited cross-cultural interaction in the
Australian relationship with Indonesia to this point. This, I would suggest, has to do
with the minimal effects that have been felt in Australia in relation to the third
prerequisite of cross-cultural negotiation.

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This third element or process is an outcome of the pressures of ‘material
change’, altered material circumstances that necessitate either a willingness to
negotiate with alterity or a determination to withdraw from it. From an Australian
perspective a heightening of the effects of material change has been demonstrated in
the novels and short stories: starting with the ease with which the characters in the
earlier novels are able to retreat from dialogue when it becomes too difficult or
confronting, to Dewi’s fictional portrayal of Aryani bound to her negotiation of
alterity through marriage, and Matt’s stubborn (and misguided) determination to
discover the ‘real’ Bali which embroils him in otherness to such a degree that he must
negotiate alterity in order to survive it.
In relation to this last prerequisite I would suggest that Australia stands on the
brink of a profound shift in relation to its region. In the first few decades of the new
millennium, Australia faces a period of much more extreme material pressure in
which it will have to make much clearer and more difficult choices. The
destabilising effects felt in Australia over the last year as a result of the recent
meltdown in Asian economies have brought home to its political and business
leadership the extent of Australia’s entanglement in its region. This, in turn, has
triggered unprecedented gestures of moral and economic support from the Australian
government, to the degree that it has sided with Indonesia against the IMF and the US
in relation to bailout requirements that might (and in fact did) compound social
problems in Indonesia in mid-1998. In these pragmatic terms Australia revealed that
it was beginning to feel the pressure to renegotiate its traditional allegiances and ways
of constructing global realities in order to protect its own economic and strategic self-
interests.
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In the last two decades East and Southeast Asia have emerged as economic
influences with which the West, and Australia in particular, has been forced to
reckon. The regions increased economic clout and trade potential in the 1980s and
90s has given it a greater global capacity to speak out, in particular, about its
alternative methods of business and political practice. The West, impressed with the
rate of East Asia’s economic growth and effected by its aggressive production and
marketing methods, has been encouraged to listen to (not speak over) the other in
order to develop strategies by which it might maintain its accustomed dominance.
Western observation of, and adaptation to, Asian economic growth, however,
has rarely extended beyond a focus on Asian cultural values as they have contributed
to business management styles and labour relations. Cross-cultural negotiation in this
form has not been the outcome of a threat of domination (which Asia has experienced
under Western colonial rule) but rather of economic competition. Such a limited
focus has generated a very narrow and selective interaction of ideas and values (quite
unlike the overwhelming and invasive effects of colonialism on the other). The West
has maintained its distance from the broader elements of cultural otherness during this
period, while developing from its observation of an emergent other strategies to
maintain its economic and discursive control.
In contrast to the general Western response to Asian emergence, however, the
Australian experience has proven to be more complex and demanding. After two
decades of political rhetoric concerning the importance of Australia’s future

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relationship to Asia, Australia’s economic entanglement has never become more
apparent than it was in 1998 when it appeared that its own currency would be sucked
into the tail of the Asian downturn.
Asia’s difficulties impacted on Australia in a way that no other Western
country experienced, simply in terms of the international perception that it was to
some degree a part of Asia. Political and economic events in the last few years have
generated a greater degree of awareness that Australia is not only locked in to its
region by trade necessities but recognised to be so by international currency traders
and financial institutions. These institutions have to some degree collocated Australia
with the troubles of its neighbours despite Australian political assertions that it is not
part of Asia and that its economy, in comparison with several Asian economies, is
structurally sound. The slide in the value of the Australian currency in mid 1998 as it
became caught up in the perception that it was at least economically part of Asia
brought home, more vividly than Asia’s previous show of economic strength, the
extent of Australian entanglement in the region. With housing and dollar values on
the line, Australia was being forced to deal with the reality of its connectedness with
Asia’s future in a way that would have been unthinkable in the early 1980s. This, in
turn, generated a resurgence in political talk concerning the need for Australia to take
its regional identity more seriously and accelerate the process of negotiating its
unique cultural position between east and West.
Thus, at the historical point of crossover between millennia a major source of
material pressure has become the global markets, which have the capacity to generate
fundamental re-considerations and alignments. In relation to the contemporary

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Australian / Indonesian relationship, the effect of global markets appears to be
generating a distorted version of Harris’s conception of pressure, an effect not driven
by the emergent other as much as the financial markets of the centre which have
drawn Australia into the paradigm of economic otherness.
As a consequence of the pressure being felt from global markets what
realignments have occurred in Australian thinking in the late 1990s in regard to
Australia’s relationship to Asia? Primarily, I would suggest the change from the
Australian conception of itself as an independent Western nation on the borders of
Asia, to a realisation of its more recent identity in global perceptions as a Western
nation deeply (and inextricably) entangled with a region to which it does not belong,
but on which it has increasingly come to depend for its economic survival. In the
late 1970s, at the time of the publication of The Year of Living Dangerously, the
concept of Australia as a dependent, in some ways subordinate, nation renegotiating
its future identity in the light of an emergent and increasingly outspoken Asia, would
have been unrecognisable. Today, in the wake of Asia’s emergence and the crippling
effects of its current decline, it is becoming an inescapable reality.
In a widely discussed article (mentioned in Chapter 1) titled “The Clash of
Civilizations”, Samuel Huntington argued that civilisational blocs will supersede
ideological divisions in the formation of post-Cold War global groupings. He
suggested that the civilisational differences coming to the fore in this period will form
unscaleable barriers to the development of close cross-civilisational ties. While I
reject Huntington’s notion of civilisational clash, which assumes the monolithic,
unchangeable nature of cultures within oppositional blocs (the entire premise of my

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thesis supports and argues the capacity of cultures to interact and hybridise), it is
useful, I would suggest, to consider one aspect of his argument in relation to my
concluding comments.
In the same article, Huntington asserted that there are countries, due to
economic necessity and geographic reality, which are being forced to consider the
prospect of a civilisational shift. He describes them as ‘torn countries’. Huntington
applied this concept of civilisational disruption and displacement to Asian and South
American (i.e. Turkish and Mexican) attempts to cross over into Western
organisational groupings. Owen Harries in an article in The Australian applied the
notion of “torn countries” to Australia, suggesting that it is showing signs of
becoming a “torn country in reverse” (Huntington 45). Their were indications, he
argued (in 1993 under a Keating government), that Australia was attempting “to
defect from the West, redefine itself as an Asian country and cultivate ties with its
neighbours” (Huntington 45).125 Harries and Huntington, according to the central
thrust of their arguments, suggested that such a transfer is clearly unachievable.
My argument in this thesis is that such a shift is not only achievable but an
inevitable cultural movement that Australia will need to negotiate in the early part of
the new millennium. However, contrary to the implications of Huntington’s thesis,
and in keeping with my interpretation of Bhabha’s theory of liminality, this shift will
not involve a transference from one civilisational bloc to another, but rather a
125
Owen’s argument was directly responded to by Huntington in his original article in Foreign
Affairs “The Clash of Civilisations”, Owen having read and written about an earlier pre-published
draft of Huntington’s article.
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disentangling and re-entangling at the edges of civilisational / cultural difference that
will progressively generate hybrid / dialogic outcomes.
Huntington’s idea of civilisational transfer reveals an impossibly rigid view of
cultural / civilisational existence, and the failure to recognise the fluid and continually
hybridised reality of cross-cultural contact, particularly in this period of globalisation.
Despite his rather dated conception of cultural interaction, however, the idea of
tearing identities accurately reflects, I would suggest, the extraordinary difficulty
inherent in the process of cross-cultural dialogism, particularly across civilisational
groupings.
Australia in many ways is a “torn country”, in keeping with Harries’
definition. The rapid emergence of, and popular support for, “Hansonism” and the
One Nation Party represents a telling illustration of the sense of threat felt in the
Australian community as we face a period in which Australia is increasingly tied in to
the East Asian bloc. The traumatic nature of the current debate around issues of race
reflects the enormous pressure that this has placed on postcolonial strategies of
resolution and concealment, and the tearing away of the coverings of political
correctness that may precede a more genuine negotiation of difference in the future.
I have suggested in this thesis that such a negotiation will not involve more
“tolerant” constructions of Asian alterity but a direct and uncomfortable engagement
with it.
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In relation to this costly process of crossing the barriers of alterity I have
argued throughout this thesis for the unique capacity and contribution of the prose
form. Drawing on Bakhtin’s argument concerning the effects of doubly oriented
speech in novelistic discourse, I have argued that prose fiction has a unique capacity
to explore the social / dialogic space which is particularly useful in the examination of
cross-cultural threat and negotiation. In the years ahead Australian fiction writers
will have the opportunity of exploring the experience of alienation and cultural
displacement that emerges out of such interaction in a way that is both peculiar to
their form and essential to Australia’s future in its region.
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Reviews and Articles Consulted on the Novels and Short Stories:
Blanche d’Alpuget articles:
d’Alpuget, Blanche. “Jakarta, Jerusalem and the Caves.” Island Magazine 34/35
(Autumn 1988): 71-76.
Dutton, Geoffrey. “Australians Through Ethnic Looking Glasses.” The Bulletin 12
May 1981: 89.
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5.
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Literature Review 16 (Winter South 1988): 31-37.
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40.4 (1981): 522-28.
Christopher Koch Articles:
Koch, C.J. “The New Heresy Hunters.” Overland 102 (1986): 43-46.
---. Crossing the Gap - A Novelist’s Essays. London: Hogarth P, 1987.
Maes-Jelinek, Hena. “History and the Mythology of Confrontation in The Year of
Living Dangerously.” Kunapipi 8.1 (1986): 27-35.
McKernan, Susan. “C.J. Koch’s Two-Faced Vision.” Meanjin 44.4 Dec. (1985):
432-39.
Roskies, D.M. “A View of Asia from Down Under: The Politics of Re-Presentation
in The Year of Living Dangerously.” World Literature Written in English

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29.2 (1989): 35-50.
Sharrad, Paul. “Pour Mieux Sauter: Christopher Koch’s Novels in Relation to White,
Stow and the Quest for a Post-colonial Fiction.” World Literature Written in
English 23.1 (1984): 208-23.
Thieme, John. “Re-mapping the Australian Psyche: The Asian Novels of C.J.Koch.”
Southerly 47.4 (1987): 451-61.
Tiffin, Helen. “Asia, Europe and Australian Identity: The Novels of Christopher
Koch.” Australian Literary Studies 10.3 (1982): 326-35.
Yong, Margaret. “Explorations in the Heart of Darkness: Turning Landscape into Art
in Slipstream and The Year of Living Dangerously.” Discharging the Canon:
Cross-Cultural Readings in Literature. Ed. Peter Hyland. Singapore UP:
Singapore, 1986. 10-37.
Dewi Anggraeni Articles:
Dewi Anggraeni. “From Indonesia to Australia and Back: Cultural Sensitivities.”
Crossing Cultures: Essays on Literature and Culture of the Asia-Pacific. Ed.
Bruce Bennett, Jeff Doyle, Satendra Nandan. London: Skoob Books, 1996.
59-70.
---. “The Politics of Neighbourhood Watch: Australia and the Delicate Art of
Indonesia-Watching.” Eureka Street 4.6 August 1994: 14-16.
Gerard Lee Articles:
Jamieson, Anne. “Troppo Man Thrives on Art of Madness.” The Australian 2 July
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1990: 5.
Russell, Keith. “Not for Anyone Bali-Bound.” The Newcastle Herald 30 Mar. 1991:
2.
Shapcott, Thomas W. “It’s Hard to Like a Wimp Like Matt.” Australian Book
Review 123 (1990): 5.
Glenda Adams Articles:
Adams, Glenda. “Letters from Jogja.” Australian Cultural History 9 (1990): 3-13.
---. “Calling up the Spirits.” Island 47 (1991): 26-29.
Cresswell, Rosemary. “A State of Would-Be Traitors.” The Sydney Morning Herald
6 Mar. 1982, The Good Weekend: 45.
Fallick, Robyn. “Strangers to the North.” Editions 11 June/July (1991): 11-12.
Holliday, Brian. For the Term of Its National Life: The Australian (Imagi)Nation.
Diss. Curtin U, 1993.
Manning, Greg. “Playing With Power.” Meanjin 41.4 (1982): 486-92.
Riddell, Elizabeth. “Life Under a Future Dictatorship.” The Bulletin 11 May 1982:
79.
Nadine Gordimer Articles:
Clingman, Stephen. The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: History from the Inside.
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London: Allen and Unwin, 1986.
Cooke, John. The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: Private Lives/Public Landscapes.
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Gordimer, Nadine. The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics and Places. Ed. Stephen
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21-28.
Hewson, David. “Making the ‘Revolutionary Gesture’: Nadine Gordimer, J.M.
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APPENDICES:
Appendix 1
A Journalistic Shift
This appendix has been included in order to provide a journalistic

example of the changes that I have argued (through my reading of Australian literary
texts) have taken place in the Australian postcolonial constructions of Indonesian
identity over the last two decades. It is necessary to look at the novels in the context
of wider political shifts and these appendices serve as a broad-brush contextual
reminder of the pervasive (non-literary) nature of changes that have occurred in the
last few decades in Australian perceptions of its relationship to Indonesia. The media
event that I will describe in this chapter, and its effect on the Australian portrayal of
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Indonesia in the Australian press, provides a comparison with, and reinforcement of,
my argument in the body of the thesis concerning the effects of material change on
Australian discourses about Indonesia. The value of including the examination of a
journalistic discursive shift in a thesis that focuses on the reading of Australian and
Indonesian literary texts is to be found in the way in which it provides a non-literary
instance of discursive adaptation to material pressure in the cross-cultural
relationship of Australia with Indonesia during the period under consideration.
The events which triggered this change in perceptions and subsequently in

journalistic enunciation occurred in mid-1986 when the Indonesian government,
media and public at large reacted vehemently to an article by David Jenkins
published on April 10, 1986 in the Sydney Morning Herald titled, “After Marcos,
Now for the Soeharto Billions”.
This article, and the energetic response of the Indonesian government and
media to it, appeared to take Australian policy makers, and the Australian press itself,
by surprise. A series of Indonesian political and media responses to the article
reinforced for the Australian media and government the emerging outspokenness of
the region.
The Indonesian Minister of Information, Harmoko, according to Merdeka,

(22 April 1986), described Jenkins article as “jurnalisme alkohol dan tidak
bertanggung jawab” (alcoholic and irresponsible journalism) (qtd. in ADMI 286126).
Jenkins’ article led Dr B.J.Habibie, the then Minister for Research and Technology,
to cancel an official visit to Australia on April the 12th , blaming feelings of distress
and outrage for his decision. Restrictions on entry visas to Australian journalists
were extended, reducing the Australian media to an almost total dependence on other
foreign agencies for information about its near neighbours and culminating in a direct
refusal to allow two Australian journalists to cover President Reagan’s visit to Bali.
The Indonesian government went as far in its reaction as to cancel an agreement
allowing visa free entry to Australian tourists, stranding 180 Australians at Denpasar
airport.127 On the 17th of April the government also postponed negotiations on the
Timor Gap Treaty.
The Indonesian media’s reaction to Jenkins’ article was equally unexpected in

its vehemence. Through both the agency of the journalists association (Persatuan
Wartawan Indonesia) and its various news outlets, the press vented their displeasure
regarding their Australian counterparts, in an extended series of articles in a number
of Indonesia’s prominent newspapers. The Jakarta Post, on the 14th of April,
questioned Jenkins sensitivity and understanding given his extensive experience of
Indonesia
Without disputing the right of the paper’s foreign editor to write these
stories, we would expect that, given his background and cultural
exposure to Indonesia, he should have shown more in-depth approach
[sic], sensitivity in style and choice of words. above all, what is
lacking, in our view, is the historical vision that sees Indonesia
moving in its long march toward a strong Pancasila democracy. (qtd.
in ADMI 282)
126
ADMI is my abbreviation of the title of the collection of Indonesian newspaper articles
Australia di Mata Indonesia.
127
Within 36 hours the agreement was reinstated.
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According to Drs. Ign. Kristanyo H. in Sinar Harapan (21 July 1986)

Jenkins’ article did not surprise Indonesian observers, but rather brought to a head the
Indonesian perception of long-term antagonism within the Australian media towards
Indonesia. Kristanyo suggested that although the Australian press does not reflect the
attitude of the Australian government it has a powerful influence on the thinking of
the Australian public and has contributed, in large part, to the development of
antagonistic attitudes towards Indonesia “The news that is carried by the Australian
private mass media is capable of influencing the Australian public.” “Berita yang
diungkapkan oleh media massa swasta itu dapat mempengaruhi sikap masyarakat
Australia.” (qtd. in ADMI 317)
While protesting the undesirability (and impossibility), in a democratic

system, of curbing the media, the Australian government made certain suggestions
(to the Australian press) concerning a more sensitive approach to news reporting in
regard to Indonesia. On one hand, Prime Minister Hawke defended the the rights of
a free press, while on the other he encouraged Australian newspapers to take greater
responsibility (show greater cultural sensitivity) in their editorials and news reports
on Suharto and Indonesia in general.
For the first, or at least the most clearly defined, time Australia’s freedom
to say what it liked about Southeast Asia from its assumed position of superiority was
brought into question by an emerging Asian nation. The view that Australia had long
taken of itself as regional moral arbiter, a role which it had inherited from its
identification as a Western nation (and its own experience as colonial master in New
Guinea, The Trobriands and its application of colonial practice on its own indigenous
people), was being directly challenged by an independent and increasingly
economically robust Indonesia.
The Indonesian denunciations of the Sydney Morning Herald article and

the heated defence made by the Australian press of its traditional role as moral
spokesperson for the region represented a realisation on both sides of the Timor Sea
of the shift that had already taken place in the regional balance of power.
Australian journalists who initially found themselves attempting to justify

their right to say whatever they liked (as long it reflected what they believed to be
true) were forced to re-examine practices and codes of conduct long taken to be their
cultural birthright. The strength of the media challenge, backed by the threat of
economic and political reprisals from an Asian nation less dependent upon Australia
than Australia was upon it, forced journalists and academics to debate a range of
philosophical and practical issues.
Suharto as a New South Wales MP
One issue that surfaced during this period involved a discussion concerning the
accuracy of the assertion that Australian journalistic reports, disclosures and
editorials on neighbouring non-Western nations represented nothing more than the
standard practices of a free press in Australia. This argument contained within it the
assertion of an Australian tradition of free expression which is deemed essential to
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democracy, and is applied equally to the reporting of political events in Australia and
overseas.
Robert Haupt, in an article titled “What if Suharto was an MP in NSW?”128,

suggested that such assertions, relating to the claim made by Australian journalists
that they were not treating Indonesian politicians any differently than their own,
contained an underlying untruth. Haupt suggested that Australian journalists are in
reality a lot more careful about getting their facts right when their stories concern
Australian politicians than they are when writing about more distant political events
and figures. “The closer you are to home the greater the pain of disclosure”, he
wrote.
Haupt interrogated the Australian claims of always needing to tell the

truth no matter what the consequences. He suggested that Australian journalists in
fact have always been susceptible to pressures to censor their own writing in order to
maintain strong connections with important political sources and avoid giving offense
to those who have the power to facilitate successful (or unsuccessful) career
outcomes:
Are we quite sure of our ground when we tell the Indonesians that the
Australian press never pulls its punches... Distant scandals are fun;
disclosures at home can affect advertisers, readers, friends and
connections and are mostly no fun at all.
Haupt implies in this article that the effect of material pressure from local
political institutions and figures generates a different set of (unwritten) journalistic
guidelines than those applied to more distant subjects, in regard to what is, and is not,
publishable. Geographic distance and the relative absence of political repercussion,
Haupt suggested, have contributed to the ‘fearlessness’ of Australian journalists in
their pursuit of the ‘truth’ when it relates to Third World targets:
The Australian media, as a whole, is not as free to criticise and
disclose as the ‘clash of cultures’ argument implies. It is hemmed in
by the laws, harassed by politicians and, in part, compromised by the
government. It is no use saying that our press is freer than
Indonesia’s. This is not the point. What we have to ask is do we
apply the same standard to Jakarta and Sydney?
According to Zainu’ddin, a Minangkabau diplomat married to an

Australian academic, this tendency of Australian journalists to more readily resort to
stereotype (rather than to more careful research of their subject) with the increase in
cultural difference and distance, has a further implication. The apparent readiness of
Australian journalists to seek out and print the worst possible constructions of
Indonesia has been fortified, he argued, by the public willingness of Australian’s to
believe in it. In elaborating this point Zainu’ddin notes the cynical nature of the
Australian public in regard to the truth of media reports concerning Australian issues,
and he questions the disappearance of such critical discernment when the focus of
media attention moves overseas, especially into non-Western contexts. He notes that
in regard to Australian reportage of its own political scene the Australian public
128
Robert Haupt’s article was closely examined during the development of my argument in this
thesis. However, I misplaced my copy of the article and despite exhaustive attempts to track it I was,
at the time of submission, unable to locate the source reference. After consulting my supervisor it
was decided because of the importance of Haupt’s argument in relation to this appendix that the
quotations that I have included should be retained despite my inability to cite them correctly.
RANKIN 440
maintains a critical reserve and even suspicion of its own media:

This is true about local news and even national news because people
have a gut feeling as to the truth or otherwise simply by being
Australians. They have learned to be skeptical about things they read
in the papers on local and national issues but where the news or
information is about other countries, especially countries with a very
different culture, it is a different kettle of fish altogether. Uncritical
acceptance of news items in the media seems to be positively
correlated to the distance between the reader and the source of the
news! The further away a reported happening is from the reader or
listener the more likely he or she is to accept the media version of it;
the lower the level of gullibility. (40)
According to this view the ideology behind the construction of Indonesian

alterity continually reinforces itself through an endless round of production and
agreement between the writer and the reader, with each side recognising in the other
a ready accomplice in the work of unexamined cultural and racial reiteration.
Nearer and Dearer: Responsibility and Proximity
From a political perspective, however, it was the recalculation of the issue

of distance (driven by the shift in economic centres of power) which was most
productive of change in the Australian media construction of Indonesia in the mid
1980s. The perception that a fundamental alteration in the relations of power was
taking place in Australia’s region became especially apparent, I would argue, in the
aftermath of the Jenkin’s article. Many Australians, and in particular many
Australian journalists, were suddenly faced with the realisation that the distance
between Australia and Indonesia had been dramatically reduced. The process of
closing the distance had been gradual but the realisation came in a relative instant, on
the back of Indonesia’s vociferous reaction to the Sydney Morning Herald article.129
129
Tempo’s reporting of Lee Kuan Yew’s advice to Australian journalists at the National Press
Club in 1986 is a useful example of the altered sense of empowerment and disempowerment between
Asia and Australia that was emerging at that time and the underlying connection between the
freedom to say whatever you want (or believe to be true) and the consequences that must be faced
having said it:
Lee reminded the Australian press. Soon they would be forced to make a choice
between the name of press freedom and the call not to undermine their own
national interests. When the Australian press chose to judge the leadership of
Third World countries, said Lee, it was seen as a humiliation and invited feelings
of hostility. “Not only towards the press but towards the Australian public as a
whole.”
Lee mengingatkan pers Australia. Mereka pada waktu dekat ini akan dipaksa
mempertanyakan pilihan atas nama kebebasan pers atau panggilan untuk tidak
merugikan kepentingan nasional mereka. Bila pers Australia memilih
“menghukum” pemimpin negara Dunia Ketiga, kata Lee, hal itu dianggap sebagai
suatu penghinaan dan mengundang rasa permusuhan. “Bukan cuma terhadap
media massa khususnya, tetapi juga terhadap Australia pada umumnya. (ADMI
321)
Lee’s actual words on this occasion were:

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As the importance of Indonesia to Australia as a trading partner and entry point into
Asia has been more frequently and volubly touted by politicians, and the awareness
of a fundamental link (in Indonesia’s mind) between outspoken media criticism and
bilateral relations has been repeatedly demonstrated, the degree of media ‘courage’
(or carelessness) has apparently diminished.130 In a reversal of Haupt’s dictum of
distance, the rapid increase in Indonesia’s economic influence in the region has meant
an equally rapid decrease in its distance from Australia. 131
In June of 1986 David Hill, the Managing Director of the Australian

Broadcasting Commission, visited Indonesia in an attempt to convince the Indonesian
government through the Abri Commander General Benny Murdani that the ABC
should be allowed to re-open its operation in Indonesia. As John Hurst noted, this
process involved an attempt to convince Indonesia of a changed approach by the
Australian broadcaster to its reporting of Indonesian affairs:
To convince Murdani that the ABC wished to be fair and objective in

its news coverage, Hill indicated that a lot more positive reports about
Indonesia were being broadcast by Radio Australia than at any time in
the previous eight years. He also told Murdani that if the Indonesian
government agreed to the ABC’s request it would appoint as its
Jakarta correspondent John Lombard, presently based in Singapore,
whom he described as a journalist with positive views and an
understanding of Indonesian traditions and culture. (“A Clash of
Cultures” 355):
Hill’s reassurances indicate, implicitly, that a crucial shift had been made in
Australian journalistic culture, and that Suharto was beginning to look more like a
NSW MP than he had before April 1986. This was the work, I would suggest, of
“material change” which imposed its own demands for cross-cultural negotiation, i.e.
to consider the cultural sensibilities of otherness.
Consistent with this shift toward developing stronger cross-cultural ties, a

sense of restraint in the press reporting of Indonesia and a degree of circumspection
in relation to press freedom continues to be evident in Australian articles and
editorials, even in the wake of the currency crash. The degree to which the distance
has been shortened over the decade or so since the realisation triggered by Jenkins’s
article is apparent in Greg Sheridan’s 1995 description of the changes that followed
Keating’s elevation of Indonesia’s importance to Australia:
The further we were away from a country, the greater seems to be our
I would like to believe that sooner or later media men have to ask themselves
whether their highest duty is to publish and be damned in support of the freedom of
the press, or whether they do not also have the obligation, as citizens of their
country, not to undermine or demolish their own national interests. When
Australian journalists censure Third World leaders, especially very close
neighbours, they arouse intense enmity, resentment and antagonism, not against the
Australian media but I fear against Australia generally. (“A Clash of Cultures” 345-
346)
130
131
Even in the midst of the current economic crisis in Indonesia the Australian government and
large sectors of the press have maintained a far more circumspect approach in their editorials of
events in Indonesia.
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moral intensity, they say. Thus we were free to be maximally morally

outraged about apartheid in South Africa, and to give maximum
expression to that moral outrage. In contrast, so this argument goes,
we are sotto voce about Indonesia. Cartoonists have routinely drawn
maps depicting the diminishing force of our moral denunciations as
the subject of those denunciations grows nearer. (132)
Articles written in The Australian from February to April of 1998, at the

height of the monetary crash, also signal a drastic change in the role of the press
when certain journalists suggested that the media should help in preserving
Australia’s bilateral relationship with Indonesia in the midst of the Asian economic
crisis. Articles like Greg Sheridan’s “Treading the very fine line of friendship”
(March 1998), Paul Kelly’s “Challenge lies ahead for Howard” (February 1998) and
Rawdon Dalrymple’s “Jakarta’s woes are ours, too” (February 1998) represent a
more pragmatic (self-interested) recognition (on the part of the news media) of the
need for the Australian government, and the independent media, to avoid offending
their interests in Indonesia. Sheridan stresses the importance, even after the
economic downturn, of protecting “the enormous Australian interests, which involve
security, trade, economics, population movements” and the crucial differentiation
which must be made in the Australian mind between Indonesia and the Suharto
regime of that time: “Canberra is doing its best to help Indonesia, not Suharto”.
Dalrymple (a former ambassador to Indonesia who frequently provides editorial
commentary to The Australian) highlights the sense of permanent perceptual change
that has taken place despite the weakening of Asian economies and the beginning of
Indonesia’s drastic slide:
Indonesia is strategically vital. Eventually it will become a power and
by far the most important one in our immediate region. It has the
potential to be one of our top trading partners. There continues to be a
lively awareness at the highest levels of government here that we must
preserve a strong, sound relationship with Indonesia. (“Jakarta’s
woes.” 13)
Here, therefore, is a clear indication of discursive change in the face of

material reality, a recognition, not on the basis of social / moral ‘enlightenment’ but
rather of a pragmatic realisation of a definite alteration in the relations of power, that
a different discursive strategy needed to be adopted in relation to the Indonesian
other.
Appendix 2
Human Rights as an Australian Strategy of Control
In the Australian / Indonesian relationship, a crucial and useful example of the

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Western propensity to adapt its strategies for the domination of otherness can be seen
in the emergence of human rights as a universal discourse (i.e. intrinsically human
rather than localised and intrinsically Western) since the second World War. The
brief consideration of the human rights discourse that follows in this appendix
represents only a single aspect of the Western strategy for the re-tooling of its
discourses in order to maintain its control over the other, but it is an aspect which has
been particularly visible and influential in the Australian / Indonesian relationship
over the past ten years. I have included, therefore, a cursory analysis of the timing of
the shift from the local to the universal in order that the Australian stress on issues of
human rights in relation to Indonesia might be positioned as at least partially
strategic.
Western humanist constructions of this phenomenon (i.e. of the emergence

of human rights as a global discourse) would suggest that such a development reflects
the progressive march in Western awareness, a further stage of the enlightenment
project. Foucault, on the other hand, would approach the appearance of the discourse
of universal human rights from a quite different perspective, asking:
How is it that at certain moments and in certain orders of knowledge,
there are these sudden take-offs, these hastenings of evolution, these
transformations which fail to correspond to the calm, continuist image
that is normally accredited? (“Truth and Power” 112)
Foucault suggests that the way in which such questions about the alterations
and emergences in discourse can best be resolved involves a re-direction of the focus
away from who it is that applies power and effects change (therefore the originary
subject) toward an inquiry into what the change is that has occurred in discourse and
how and why it has occurred:
At this level it’s not so much a matter of knowing what external power
imposes itself on science, as of what effects of power circulate among
scientific statements, what constitutes, as it were, their internal regime
of power and how and why at certain moments that regime undergoes
a global modification. (“Truth and Power”?)
In relation to the content of the discourse of human rights as it has been

propagated by the West since the Second World War it must be determined what
shifts have occurred in the content of the discourse and then, in the next stage,
attempt to trace these discursive discontinuities or emergences back to identifiable
alterations in the relations of power.
In the first place, according to this formula, it must be asked what alterations
have occurred in the discourse and what consequences have these alterations had on
existing power relations. During the period of Western colonial dominance
application of the principles of equality of rights was largely restricted to the welfare
of individuals within Western societies. The proposition that all “men” were equal
(simply because of their shared humanity) and therefore deserving of equal rights and
treatment was not seriously contemplated in regard to non-Western peoples, nor were
there any political forms of this principle of equality enacted in the colonial setting.
After 1948, however, the year of the United Nations “Declaration of Universal
Human Rights” the discourse of human rights expanded to include and embrace all
‘men’ both Western and non-Western. The shift from localised (to the West) to
universal represents, I would suggest, one of Foucault’s “sudden take-offs”, a
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“hastening of evolution”.
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the United States constitution
asserted the equality of “all men” but in practice this did not extend to the indigenous
American peoples when their claims to equal rights, in regard to land ownership,
became an obstacle to white American demand for more territory. The European
conception of the inalienable rights of the natural man to liberty, security and equality
could hardly have been said to apply to the African’s enslaved and exported to the
Americas, nor yet to the white Australian treatment of the Aboriginal people on their
own continent.132
In Australia during the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries, human
rights, on the whole, meant ‘white rights’. In relation to Australia’s Asian
neighbours, Australian writers and politicians, during the same period, continually
called for the defense of Western (white) rights and the protection of superior
Western culture in Australia against the imagined threat of the ‘yellow hordes’ and
the contamination of the “darker races”. The White Australia Policy derived its
rationale and impassioned support from the narrowly argued belief in ‘white’
racial/cultural superiority and the perception of the disaster which would follow the
“unequal yoking” of Western and Asian values. As Andrew Jakubowicz explains:
From the outset of the Australian nation, human rights issues have
been central - the nation was concerned with democracy and equality -
but it was equally as concerned to define the non-human and extra-
national and constitute them as outside the acceptable and thus without
rights. (7)
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries debate did emerge
regarding the rights of colonised peoples which at times questioned the self-evident
superiority of Western societies and cultures. Where the principles of the inherent
equality and rights of the individual were applied to the other, however, they were at
best applied conditionally, normally to the degree that otherness was willing to adopt
the standards and values of the European.
In Indonesia, for example, at the end of the century Dutch reformers

introduced the Ethical Policy to the East Indies based on the perception that the
Netherlands had a moral duty to educate a percentage of the Indonesian population
(mainly the priyayi class) and provide limited health facilities to the nation from
which it had so long profited. However, this voice for reform, for the introduction of
human rights to the other, was hardly an espousal of egalitarianism. Indonesian
‘advancement’ continued to be subject to the overall purposes of colonialism and
even in the most liberal circles the Ethical Policy remained a highly ambivalent
expression of a ‘shared humanity’, fatally complicated by colonial hegemony. As one
source has noted “it was not until after the War …that active concern for human
rights on the international plane truly came of age”. (660) 1
132
Keeping in mind the fact that the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen” was
written in 1789, “The Bill of Rights” in 1791, and the Constitution of the U.S. in 1787 (and that
John Locke’s ideas, which were the basis of these later political documents were propounded in the
seventeenth century), slavery was not officially abolished in France until 1848 and the U.S. until
1865.
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Even the establishment of the League of Nations in 1919 was unable to

produce a formal recognition for the idea of universal human rights on “a principle of
racial non-discrimination as requested by Japan owing predominantly to the resistance
of Great Britain and the United States”. (660) The two nations which after the war
were to push hardest for the universalisation of equal human rights. After World War
Two the establishment of the United Nations affirmed a “faith in fundamental human
rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and
women and of nations large and small”. And in 1948 the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights was adopted without dissent by the General Assembly
The expansion of the scope of influence of human rights, however, did not
mean the reciprocal influence of the non-Western nations in the production of these
‘universal’ values or a universal dialogue between cultures, but rather it meant in
effect the delimitation of human values to specifically Western terms of reference.
One of the central arguments made against the Western demand that Asia submit to
the present construction of human rights is that it represents a largely Eurocentric
view of values. Koo VanderWal in an article titled “Collective Human Rights: A
Western View” quotes Eddison Zvobgo’s 1979 statement that “were the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights to be debated again in the General assembly, the final
draft would be significantly different from that which was adopted in 1948”. Vander
Wal goes on to argue that Zvobgo’s:
new declaration would not just entail a shift of emphasis here
and there [in the content of the original declaration] but, much
more fundamentally, require a change in the view on man and
society that is at the background of the declaration”. (83)
In 1986 the Organisation of African Unity, under the auspices of the UN

Commission on Human Rights, ratified the “African Charter on Human and Peoples’
Rights” which diverged from the American and European conventions in its special
stress on social and cultural rights as well as political rights.
The Third World assimilation of the so-called universal values has contributed to
the production of speaking sites for historically marginalised voices in the Third
World and opened a range of critical debates in relation to internal injustices.
However, an important critique of the post-war production of a policy of
universal human rights has (in recent years) been directed toward the perceived
cultural specificity of value underlying the proposed universality of human nature
and society and those human rights which have been attached to them.
The Third World critics who have claimed that the discourse of global human
rights and equality as it has emerged in the post-war/’post-colonial’ world bears
the marks of an overwhelmingly Western philosophical/ethical perspective have
received some support from Western critics. Bryan Turner in his article, “Human
Rights: From Local Cultures to Global Systems” stresses the influence of recent
academic trends and mainstream theoretical reconstructions of social/ethical
theory, for example, postmodernism which suggests that
global notions and universalistic presuppositions of modernism
such as individualism, justice, equality, happiness and progress
are merely fictitious constructions which mask much more
dangerous attempts to instil coherence and coercion upon
different social groups and separate cultural traditions”. (7)
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I would argue that the other’s incorporation into a “global equality” has
brought it back under the authority of the abiding voice of Western values. I would
further suggest that the sudden emergence of a Western belief in global equality,
regardless of race, was at least in part a strategic response to the dramatic changes
thrust upon the West by an irresistible push by non-Western nations for
independence. With the loss of colonial dominance the imposition of the Western
logos onto an ‘inferior’ other was no longer tenable, yet it would appear that the
perpetuation of the moral superiority of the West could be sustained by re-positioning
Western values as the actualisation of human aspirations. Thus the West maintains
the superiority of its values and the belatedness of an other to which they remained
largely foreign.
Western values no longer called “Western” or “American” but designated as

“universal” or “human” achieved a more subtle, less visible prisonhouse of discursive
control; a discursive control both adapted to the shift in political realities, and
emergent ideological transformations, and appropriate to the postcolonial context as a
largely invisible and justifiable form of dominance.
This, I would suggest, is the radical nature of the shift that has occurred in
Western discourse concerning the other in relation to human rights, the global
modification in the discursive statement. No longer a question of cultural or
civilisational specificity, the superiority and educational value of the Western
contribution to the other, but rather of universal equality in which Western attitudes
of superiority and practices of hegemony are concealed beneath the enunciation of the
discourse of political correctness.
The next or second question that Foucault suggests should be asked in a

genealogical examination relates to the how and why of these global modifications in
discourse. The fact that the applicability of the human rights of the individual
expanded quite rapidly and suddenly to include the non-Western world, after the
unstoppable momentum of decolonisation had come to be recognised by the West.
This recognition of colonial loss was made unmistakable by, for example, the Indian
(and Indonesian) non-violent (and violent) resistance to the continued imposition (and
reimposition) of colonial control after the Second World War.
It could be suggested that the timing of the shift in the Western application of
human rights from a discourse largely restricted to the West to a discourse which
embraced the non-West emerged after decolonisation both because it was, for the first
time, possible to speak of global equality and because it was necessary if the West
was to maintain its moral authority in the postcolonial context. The reason that it had
become possible was that the West was no longer in a position of direct material
mastery of the other, a mastery which needed to be concealed under the guise of
philanthropy (therefore, the education and cultural elevation of the other to the
standards of the West). While the West could not speak of non-Western equality as it
continued to dominate and suppress the non-Western world during the period of
colonial rule, after decolonisation the West could not afford to speak otherwise if it
wanted to maintain its habit of influence over otherness.
Thus, it could be argued that the necessary adaptation of colonial power to

material and epistemological change in the post-colonial world demanded the
RANKIN 447
construction of new spaces of domination and the re-production (re-construction) of

knowledges in the maintenance of control. These new spaces were necessitated by
the twofold assault on Western predominance: the material ejection of the West from
its sites of domination; and the relativisation of Western cultural values. Without the
opportunity of maintaining a physical presence in the Third World to compensate for
the erosion of its cultural control, the West became more vulnerable to the dissipation
of its discursive influence.
The process of relativisation did not take place merely in the non-Western
world as an outcome of independence but also within the West itself. The process of
colonisation itself opened the West to the first stages of this weakening of its moral
authority; the subversion of its absolute standards through the encounter with cultural
heterogeneity and the production of hybridity. Where once the West could hold its
own truths and social practices up as the example and destination for the Other, it was
forced to weave its domination into a new design superficially consistent with
postcolonial/postmodern values. As I have already argued in some detail the West’s
strategic response to these historical and discursive effects took the form of a
transference of Western values onto a presumed or concocted universal. Therefore,
rather than setting for itself the task of raising the other up to the standard of the West
(which was, prior to decolonisation, overtly represented as the standard of
universality), it widened the embrace of Western control by incorporating the other
into a fraternal hegemony through the strategic substitution of the terms ‘global’ for
‘Western’, and ‘universal’ for ‘European’.
The focus of argument here therefore (regarding the strategic value of the
human rights discourse in Australia’s recent relations with Indonesia) is less
concerned with the content of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights than in the
timing of its emergence and application (although it is the Eurocentric nature of this
construct which causes it to be useful as an hegemonic tool); less in the fact that its
content fails to address inter-cultural difference than in the fact that it provides the
West with an antecedence that once more positions the Other as belated. The
proliferation of this construction of fundamental human values allows the West to
retain its centrality while forcing the Other back to the margins where it is again made
to measure itself according to the Western standard. 133
As Eugene Kamenka has pointed out, while the demand for human rights in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was “a demand against the existing state and
133
Yet ‘universality’ implies a willingness to open up to cross-cultural negotiation of
the question of how human dignity is best nurtured and sustained, a willingness to consider what
represents the most valid expression and means of engendering and protecting human dignity and
happiness in non-western cultures. As Kishore Mahbubani comments:
All discourses between Asians and Westerners on human rights and freedom of the
press should be based on mutual respect. In the face of growing evidence of social,
economic and occasionally moral deterioration of the fabric of many Western
societies, it would be increasingly difficult for a Westerner to convince Asians that
the West has found a universally valid prescription for social order and justice.
(FEER).
The questions that such a dialogic would raise for the Centre, however, relate to the extent
to which it is willing to disturb its own dominance and cultural identity in order to pursue cross-
culturality. The difficulty for the West is that this would entail a readiness to receive the critique of
its claim that its own ethical and philosophical construct of social justice is culturally contingent, not
transcendent or universal.
RANKIN 448
authorities” the demands of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been a “claim
upon the state, a demand that it provide and guarantee the means for achieving the
individual’s happiness and well-being”.(5) The argument of this thesis is that the
demand for universal rights in the ‘postcolonial’ era has to some degree been a claim
upon the other, a demand that it submit to the Western voice of authority and
leadership all over again.134
Appendix 3
Passages from Debu Cinta Bertebaran:
Kita punya hak untuk berlainan daripada orang lain, kita punya hak
untuk menyeleweng dari aliran dan pendapat umum. Itulah hak asasi
manusia, sejoli dengan hak memilih kehendak, selera dan kesenangan
kita sendiri. (21)
...kedua anaknya sendiri, pendiriannya itu rupanya sangat sukar untul

dipraktikkan. Mungkin karena dia menganggap anak-anaknya itu
belum cukup dewasa ...Atau mungkin juga, karena yang dipilih dan
diikuti oleh anak-anaknya itu merupakan hal-hal yang terlalu negatif
dan berbahaya. Misalnya terlibat dalam kebiassan-kebiasaan Hippie
dan penghisapan marihuana dan obat bius lainnya. (21)
Anak-anak jaman sekarang kan lain. Punya kemauan sendiri. Dulu,

jaman saya lagi muda, biar umur sudah lewat 20, kemauan orang tua
masih merupakan undang-undang bagi kami. Tidak berani melanggar
begitu saja. (282)
“Kucing sudah ditangkapi semuanya. Algojonya datang sendiri.

Sudah diangkut semuanya dalam beberapa karung untuk digas di
penjagalannya . Kasihan...”
134
From a different perspective therefore, the struggle within Indonesia (by Indonesians like
Mulya Lubis and Nasution) for recognition of the validity of the discourse of individual human rights
represents “a demand against the existing state and authorities”, and from another perspective the
Indonesian demand (at a national and an individual level) against the West that the Indonesian voice
(ie the peculiarly Indonesian ways of seeing human rights) be given a role in the production of a
universal human rights discourse represents a demand against the existing state and authorities which
are international or more truly western .
RANKIN 449
“Itu adil,” kata Pak Hermanus. “Menurut ‘common sense’

tetangga kita...” tambahlah kemudian sambil melirik ke dalam wajah
Maslan dengan sedikit tertawa. (112)
tercerminkan pula dalam dasar-dasar dan cara pendidiknya

yang...sangat mengutamakan kebebasan individu dan “academic
achievement” serta kemakmuran materi alias “progress”. (284)
“. . . masyarakat kapitalis yang sudah bobrok macam America and

Australia...hanya dapat berobah kalau penduduknya semuanya
membiasakan diri untuk mengambil LSD. ““Bayangin deh, seluruh
masyarakat menjadi linglung, karena tiap orang melihat
hallusinasinya masing-masing. Yang satu melihat pohon seperta
ularnaga, yang lain melihat Empire State Building seperti raksasa
...Bayangin,” kata Maslan. “Kacau.”
“Apalagi lalulintas, takkan mungkin lagi,” Rivai menambah.” (290)
orang mengadakan pembatasan-pembatasanya samasekali

bertentangan dengan hak asasi manusia yang merupakan salah satu
soko guru demokrasi yang terpenting, iaitu kebebasan untuk memilih;
dalam hal ini, memilih teman untuk menjalankan sex, baik sebelum
maupun, sesudah nikah. (327)
Apa betul dia serius dengan nasehatnya itu? Ataukah tidakkah ini
mungkin akibat kebebasan individu yang tanpa batas samasekali?
Orang disuruh tak peduli akan pendapat orang lain, sekalipun
pendapat itu dari orang tua sendiri? Tak peduli si ibu sedih, si bapak
marah...? (334)
telah membikin nafsu sex dan keplesiran-keplesiran duniawi itu

sebagai dasar hidupnya yang dihubungkan dengan etika dan estetika
yang tinggi dan telah berhasil menciptakan suatu kebudayaan dan
perabadan yang tetap akan menimbulkan kekaguman orang sampai
akhir jaman. (328)
sangat informatif. Bermanfaat sekali bagi kami. Kami juga satu

bangsa yang sedang mencari nilai-nilai baru yang lebih sesuai dengan
jaman moden ini. Tapi janganlah kami sampai terseret oleh unsur-
unsur yang negatif. (340)
Ah go to hell dengan tatacaramu... Di sini ada kebebasan individu.

Jangan kuatir. Tiap orang dijamin hak dan kebebasannya untuk
berbuat lain dari orang lain. Hak menyelewang dijamin. (138)
bagi orang timur,” Rivai responds “jangankan untuk berdiri

RANKIN 450
terlanjang bulat sebagai model, untuk keluar rumah saja seorang

isteri harus minta izin dulu, atau sekurang-kurangnya harus bilang
dulu sama suaminya. (144)
...si isteri tentu akan berpikir seratus kali sebelum melaksanakan

niatnya. Biasanya mengalah, demi kedamaian dan kepentingan
bersama dalam keluarganya karena, bagi orang Indonesia,
keluargalah lembaga hidup yang paling penting, yang paling utama,
yang paling pokok, bahkan dianggap suci. (145)
Alasannya yang benar ialah karena pada umumnya isteri-isteri

Indonesia belum merupakan individu-individu yang bebas yang mau
berdiri sendiri, hidup sendiri, seperti juga umumnya kaum prianya.
(145)
Apakah keluarga itu tidak mungkin dianggap penting, dianggap

utama, luhur, agung, oleh suami dan isteri yang masing-masing hidup
dalam kebebasan sebagai individu . . . . (145)
Di sana belum dikuasai oleh rencana-rencana, janji-janji, formalitas-

formalitas, arjoli. Di sini, di kota Sydney, segala-galanya serba
sebaliknya. Tiap individu sangat ketat mengunci diri dari lingkungan
kepentingan dan urusan dirinya sendiri yang disebut privacy. Dengan
demikian individu yang sangat tidak dapat begitu saja menginjak
daerah kepentingan dan urusan individu yang lain. Harus janji dulu.
Harus ada kepentingan tertentu. Tidak dapat bertemu hanya sekedar
untuk ngomong-ngomong kosong belaka. Itu buang-buang waktu.
Dan waktu adalah wang. Tapi Rivai mengakui pula, bahwa batas-
batas privacy yang hampir tidak ada di Indonesia, tidak baik juga.
Orang berkunjung seenaknya saja, ngobrol seenaknya, tanpa
mengingat waktu, karena waktu belum disadari harganya untuk
bekerja. Yang baik dan tepat tentunya terletak di tengah-tengah
antara kedua ujung yang ekstrim itu. (273)
Passages from Para Priyayi:
Itu berarti sayalah orang pertama dalam keluarga besar kami yang
berhasil menjadi priyayi, meskipun priyayi yang paling rendah
tingkatnya. Itu tidak mengapa. Yang penting kaki saya sudah
melangkah masuk jenjang priyayi. (29)
…mencari dan memilih calon istrinya sendiri dan yang lebih

RANKIN 451
menyenangkan mereka bisa dan boleh berpacaran sebelum mereka

menikah. Dulu saya baru bertemu istri saya pada waktu hari
melamar. (96)
Ya, kami setuju-setuju saja, Le. Kamu sudah pernah mengalami

pilihan yang salah. Tentunya kau sudah cukup belajar dari
pengalaman itu. Baiklah, beri tahu saja kepada kami kapan bapak
dan ibu harus pergi melamar ke Wonigiri. (160)
Dalam berumah tangga saya jadi merasa tidak banyak berbeda dari
orang-tua saya. Hal yang sesungguhnya di luar dugaan saya dan
diluar bayangan saya tentang perkawinan orang zaman sekarang.
Waktu orang-tua menasihati saya dan menyuruh saya, secara tidak
langsung, agar saya mengikuti jejak mereka ... saya tidak terlalu
percaya bahkan tidak mau menuruti mereka. Tetapi, siapa nyana
perjalanan hidup saya bergerak menuju Sumarti dan nyaris tanpa
suatu romantika zaman sekarang, kami berhasil membangun suatu
perkawinan yang cocok dan menyenangkan... Kadang-kadang saya
merasa orang-tua saya selalu mengamati perkembangan perkawinan
kami itu di balik kelambu tempat tidur kami sambil tersenyum berbisik
keoada saya: benar apa tidak yang kami selalu nasihatkan kepada
kamu? (162)
Semua itu usaha saya bersama pangreh praja maju lainnya untuk
membangun barisan priyayi maju, bukan priyayi yang kemudian hari
kepingin jadi raja kecil yang sewenang-wenang terhadap wong cilik.
(63)
Mbakyu Marto itu Sembodro betul...Sebagai ibu, saya membayangkan

akan repot dan susah membesarkan anak-anak di tanah
pembuangan... Bagaimana anak-anak itu nanti kalau sudah besar.
Akan jadi apa anak-anak itu nanti?” (87)
Saya memang kagum terhadap keberanian dan ketangguhan mereka

[Mas Martoamodjo dan orang-orang seperti dia], tetapi saya juga
tidak memahami kenekatan mereka untuk berani mempertaruhkan
nasib keluarga mereka. (110)
‘ksatria yang mulia, yang mencintai rakyatnya, akan tetapi ksatria

yang tidak grusa-grusu, tidak gegabah, matang dan halus langkah-
langkahnya. Beliau menerima kekalahan dari usaha beliau tanpa
harus mencemarkan namanya sebagai pemborantak dan
mengorbankan nasib istri dan anak-anaknya. Beliau mengalah
karena ingin memberi kesempatan kepada anak-anak beliau untuk
mau dan menemukan jalan mereka sendiri. (110)
RANKIN 452
“Kau urusi suami dan anak-anakmu dengan baik... Nah, nanti pelan-
pelan kau bisa desak suamimu supaya mundur dari sangres itu.
Mungkin tanpa kau desak pun dia akan mundur sendiri.” (220)
“Mbakyu Marto tidak bikin rame soal itu, to, pak? Dia diam,
pengetahuannya disimpan sendiri, tapi dia terus dengan sabar dan
tekun memperbaiki dan memperkokoh hubungannya dengan suami
dan anak-anaknya.” (87)
Passages from Di Bawah Matahari Bali:
Kuta! Di sini, di pantaimu, cintaku kerlip kemerlap bersama

ganggang dan kunang-kunang. Di sini, di meja makan restoran dan
losmen, cintaku bagaikan kandil kemerlap yang tiba-tiba mati
dihembus angin laut, lalu kunyalakan lagi dengan seluruh semangat
bercinta, tetapi ketahuilah bahwa dunia ini bukan lagi dunia cinta
orang dusun di mana sang kekasih turun ke pancuran lalu mandi
telanjang, kemudian pulang ke dusun membawa air untuk kekasih.
Dunia ini sudah menjadi begitu luas dan kekasih bagaikan kutu-kutu
anjing modern yang bisa melompat-lompat dari benua ke benua,
misalnya dari New York ke Bali, kemudian melompat lagi ke Paris.
Kuta! Pantaimu telah memberikan tantangan baru bagi semangatku,
bagi cintaku. Kekasih datang, kekasih pergi, ah, perginya tidak
tanggung-tanggung jauhnya. Ya, cinta sudah menjadi kutu anjing
modern yang melompat dari kota yang satu ke kota yang lain yang
jauh. (7)
Sudah lama aku tidak mendengar, bahwa ada wanita yang mencari
pelacur lelaki, sehingga aku hampir tak percaya, dan kemudian aku
tidak percaya sama sekali, sampai dengan perjalananku dengan
Regina. Tetapi aku bukan pelacur. Aku seorang guide liar, seorang
guide tidak terdaftar yang menyewakan sepeda motor, yang kebetulan
menemukan seorang wanita cantik. Tetapi dia seorang wanita
terpelajar, seorang wanita tamatan universitas, dan di atas segala-
galanya adalah seorang penyair. Dengan demikian, maka walaupun
aku capek, dan merasa sebagai sapi perahan, dan sekaligus
mengingatkan aku pada pelacur lelaki seperti halnya teman-teman
guide liar yang lain, namun aku masih cukup lega, karena aku tidak
terlalu jatuh menjadi sampah pariwisata. (38)
Kamu betul-betul orang modern. Lain dengan wanita Indonesia.

Lain dengan orang-orang Indonesia. Kalau aku bertemu dengan
wanita Indonesia bukan pelacur yang tidak minta bayaran, maka
Hansip akan mengililingi rumah lalu massa bersama Hansip
menangkap basah aku dan wanita Indonesia itu lalu digiring ke kantor
RANKIN 453
dan di sama di suruh kawin Hansip. Tapi dengan wanita kulit putih
semuanya aman. Kita harus memberi fasilitas kepada semua turis
yang datang ke Indonesia. Mereka boleh menikmati alam, Tarian
Legong dan lelaki Indonesia. (17)
Ketika ia melihat uang selembar lima ribuan yang masih baru, ia

menolak pelukanku, lalu menari-nari Janger Bali sebentar, lalu
mendorong aku dengan penuh kegirangan, “Pergi, pergi, pergi lagi
mencari uang banyak-banyak! (50)
Aku pun menarik napas dalam-dalam dan aku pun sadar bahwa
manusia adalah benar-benar kutu anjing. Seperti kutu anjing, ia
mudah melompat dari kota yang satu ke kota yang lain. Setelah
mengadakan loncatan jauh, manusia modern berjemur di pantai,
menggelinding di daerah tamasya,makan di restoran dan berkelamin
di hotel-hotel. Dan cinta yang ada pada manusia modern, barangkali
bisa disebut cinta kutu anjing! (54)
1

Thesis 14

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RANKIN 1

FROM DICHOTOMY TO DIFFERENCE:

STEPHEN RANKIN B.A.(Hon.), Dip. Teach., Grad. Dip.

This thesis is presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of Murdoch

In this thesis, I examine a selection of Australian novels set in South East

Mihardja, Gerson Poyk and Dewi Angraenni.

the texts, I will adopt a postcolonial approach, with an emphasis on constructions of

however, that this apparent improvement in cross cultural relations is at best

superficial and that there is a continuing undercurrent of racism that is increasingly

masked by discursive strategies of tolerance. It is my contention in this thesis that

most of the changes in approach to Asian otherness reflected in Australian fiction in

Australian culture in general in the ‘postcolonial’ period.

In addition I assert that the novelistic attempts to aesthetically resolve the

contradictory nature of postcolonial hegemony (often through the application of

liberal / humanist notions of tolerance and equality) generate a split in Australian

literary discourse which is representative of a broader contradiction at the heart of

suggest, a consequence of the immense difficulty of attempting to hold together the

More recent shifts in the Australian fictional construction of Indonesian

something more than the mere re-deployment of Western strategies of control. In

attempts to grapple with its unique geographical context – as a Western culture

I have also attempted to identify several prerequisites to the development of

genuine and productive cross-cultural dialogue and, through the reading of

discourse have taken us closer to, or further from, their achievement.

reflects the methodological indebtedness of this project to Bakhtin’s theory of

dialogism. Drawing also upon Bhabha’s conception of enunciative presence I argue

My argument suggests that no matter how ideologically acceptable the

Western tradition of imposing orientalist conceptions may have become in recent

years (in terms of its commitment to tolerance and egalitarianism), it is no substitute

liberal / humanist approach to the construction of cross-cultural identity plays a role

in preventing effective dialogue because of the appearance of respect for otherness

that it generates. In keeping with this conception of the importance of direct

engagement in the cross-cultural process I have included and analysed several

Indonesian novels and short stories as dialogic responses to Australia’s largely

monologic production of the Indonesian subject.

The Human Other: an Ethical Obstacle ........................................................................................45

ASIAN HEROES: THE LIBERALS OF THE EAST......................................................................................255

THE SHORT STORIES:....................................................................................................................415

REVIEWS AND ARTICLES CONSULTED ON THE NOVELS AND SHORT STORIES:.....416

I would like to express my great appreciation to Kateryna Longley, who

and intellectual insights at key moments in the writing process proved to be

I would like to express a similar appreciation to Hugh Webb whose

first few years of research.

suggestions concerning theoretical direction in relation to a previous research project

to make my indebtedness known in these acknowledgements.

My long-time friend Brian Holliday and I commenced our Ph.D research

checking my Indonesian translations.

of endless typing and the requests that they: “Be quiet!”.

It will be argued in this thesis that the contemporary Australian

fit postcolonial and postmodern expectations.

The enlightenment conception of human equality when applied, in the

postcolonial context, to those non-Western subjects which remain the targets of

to resolve (without admitting the continued existence of its colonial mentality).

apparent than in Australia’s application of this strategy of concealment to its relations

with Indonesia in recent years.

The Australian psyche is not a unitary phenomenon, which has an

Orientalist piece of ideological baggage attached somehow to it. On

the contrary, it is organised around this fissure, it is this

contradiction, and typically it projects an inarticulate, egalitarian

Orientalist, a racist republican. (emphasis added xiii)

voice of ‘political correctness’ has attempted to conceal.

to epitomise, the voice of liberalism in Australia. The predisposition of these

it generates. It will be a crucial line of argument in the thesis, drawn from my