Situated Testimonies: Dread and Enchantment in an Indonesian Literary Archive

Introduction: The Afterwardsness of History

InTroDuCTIon The Afterwardsness of History I began with the tetralogy Bumi manusia [This Human Earth], particularly working on the currents that ebbed and flowed during the period of Indonesia’s National Awakening. And so there came to be a new reality, a literary reality, a downstream reality whose origin was an upstream reality, that is, a historical reality. A literary reality that contains within it a reorientation and evaluation of civilization and culture, precisely what is not contained in the historical reality. So it is that the literary work is a sort of thesis, an infant that on its own begins to grow in the superstructure of the reader’s society. (Toer, “Ma’af, Atas Nama Pengalaman”) I would like to say that Freud’s concept of afterwardsness [Nachträglichkeit] contains both great richness and a certain ambiguity, combining a retrogressive and a progressive direction. I want to account for this problem of the different directions, to and fro, by arguing that, right at the start, there is something that goes in the direction of the past to the future, from the other to the individual in question, that is in the direction of the adult to the baby, which I call the implantation of the enigmatic message. This message is then retranslated, following a temporal direction which is, in an alternating fashion, by turns retrogressive and progressive (according to my general model of translationdetranslation -retranslation). (Laplanche, Essays on Otherness) The late Indonesian writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer makes a distinction between a “downstream” literary reality and an “upstream” historical reality . Pramoedya suggests that literature has an effect on the upstream flow 2 Introduction of history, that it can change history. Situated Testimonies follows and illuminates this process through considering a selection of Dutch Indies and Indonesian writers whose works span the breadth of the twentieth century and beyond. The book suggests that literary works can bring ineffable experiences of trauma into narrative form. Pramoedya’s books on the turn-of-the-twentieth-century writer Tirto Adhi Soerjo, one of the writers discussed in Chapter 2, have changed the history of Tirto himself and the history of what Pramoedya calls Indonesia’s National Awakening. Soewarsih Djojopoespito, the only “Native” Indies individual to have written a novel in Dutch, was asked to translate her own Dutch novel into Indonesian thirty-five years after it was written, changing and, in effect, doubling the original.1 Holland’s prolific twentieth-century writer Louis Couperus’ time in the Indies in 1899 changed his novels about Holland. Dread and enchantment haunt twentieth-century Dutch Indies and Indonesian literary archives. Literary works, seen as situated testimonies, offer a method of reading the traces that elude archival constructions— emotional traces that historians may fail to record or witness.2 My use of Haraway’s notion of “situatedness” reiterates the idea that all of us speak from somewhere.3 Testimony, especially eyewitness testimony, is a gold standard in historical methodology. The authors of literary works are eyewitnesses of their time, but literary works are first of all written as literature . Literary or formal aspects cannot be ignored in the attempt to unravel the secrets and mysteries that literary works contain. In addition to formal analyses of “literature,” some literary works can then become situated testimonies to be placed in historical archives. In a figurative sense, as this book illustrates, an archive is a site of exclusion, haunting, and lack. In a literal sense, archives point to collections of documents and written testimonies that exist in institutional forms and spaces. How political factors influence processes of shaping and preserving archival materials has become the focus of scholarly work that looks at archival constructions under colonial conditions or in the face of postcolonial state repression.4 As Pramoedya explained, colonial and postcolonial literary works influence the way the past has been narrated in particular Indonesian archives. This way of reading follows the logic of French psychoanalyst and philosopher Jean Laplanche’s notion of “afterwardsness,” as explained in the second epigraph opening this introduction. Afterwardsness is Laplanche’s preferred translation of Sigmund Freud’s idea of Nachträglichkeit, usually rendered as “deferred action.” The Afterwardsness of History 3 Jean Laplanche is best known in the United States for the loved and occasionally hated dictionary of Freudian concepts and terms that he cowrote with Jean-Bertrand Pontalis in 1967.5 Beyond the field of psychoanalysis, Laplanche’s newer work from the...