Situated Testimonies: Dread and Enchantment in an Indonesian Literary Archive

Preface

Preface When I first arrived in Java in 1972, it was before Edward Said had written his paradigm-changing book on orientalism. I left the United States and went to the “Orient” more to escape the Occident and the politics of late-1960s America than to seek the exotic. I did find a certain exoticism that soon became mundane as it also allowed the Occident I had left to come into focus. Perhaps by the 1970s, some who found themselves in the “Orient” were not always—as Said suggested—aware they were there to master it. It took me over twenty years to unravel the orientalist fantasy of Java as I worked my way through the academic maze and became an orientalist myself: one who can speak with a certain authority about some piece of the “Orient.” This economy of power and loss works itself out in the interdisciplinary text that unfolds here. I question the boundaries among fiction, memoir, and history by focusing on novels as situated testimonies, stories of the habits and beliefs of day-to-day life. Having taught and written Southeast Asian histories for almost three decades, I find the histories more difficult to tell as I have realized how profoundly the teller shapes the tale. To show the beauty and inconstancy of memory, I have chosen to begin with the work of a Dutch author who spent thirty years in the Indies before World War II and whose own work stretches the boundaries of story, history, and colonial critique. Thus begins this reflection on desire, gender, black magic, and trauma. By juxtaposing psychoanalysis with stories of imperial literatures, perhaps I might open up new conversations across disciplinary borders. Even though some Euro-American scholars today argue that psychoanalysis is a Jewish or a European methodology, others have seen it as a transnational discourse of desire. As explained by Freud himself in his autobiographical study, some of the basics of the psychoanalytic field arise out of Darwinism and new theories of electricity and the idea of energy charges. These ideas of overstimulation and excess energy and their connections to the production of neuroses and psychoses are thought-provoking for the experiences x Preface of Europeans in the colonial world in general and in the Indies in particular . Although earlier ideas exist, theories of “racial degeneration” in the tropics in the fin-de-siècle period can be traced back to both eugenics and Freud’s discussions of the “primitive.” Where do Freud’s ideas of stasis as an ideal condition originate? Are they Austrian, Central European, Jewish, or Greek? Why do Javanese psychologies posit similar ideas but come to different conclusions? Is psychoanalysis a “Jewish science,” or are Freudian ideas and insights universal? Are the relations between trauma and psychoanalysis embraced by modernity and modernist paradigms generalizable to parts of the world outside of Euro-America? A series of mental illnesses experienced by the children of close friends sparked my interest in Freud and psychoanalysis. Children who had so recently been loving members of warm and wonderful families seemed to become different people. To some extent, this happened also within my own extended family. Finding a way to understand these occurrences haunted my intellectual life. Issues of blame and other familiar family narratives rose quickly to the surface as friends and family talked secretly about these illnesses. The North American medical world is now almost universally reliant on psychopharmacology. But psychosis calls for more than a theory of chemical imbalances in the brain, and we seek answers that doctors cannot provide. Some experts tell us that memories created in delusional states are as real as any other memories. Memory becomes more and more elusive. Thus my interest in the relationships among history, memory, and archive became both personal and professional. My intellectual turn to literature came as I found that psychoanalytic theory, Freudian, Kleinian, or Lacanian, did not satisfy my need for an understanding of trauma. The experiences I was seeking to understand were best expressed in literature, most powerfully in the works of the Dutch authors Louis Couperus and Maria Dermoût and later in works by Indonesian authors. By reading the novels along with Freud and his interpreters , I could begin to understand the theory, and the theory helped to explain the traumas, delusions, hallucinations, and rewritings of the past. This allowed me to face the challenges in my personal life, in the lives of my family and friends, and in my work on...