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ABSTRACT
This essay uses Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of the “chronotope” to analyze the little-known novel The Girl from the Coast (written 1962; first published 1987) by the Indonesian author Pramoedya Ananta Toer (1925–2006). It identifies three specific chronotopes—the house in the city, the village, and the road—which structure the narrative. Each of these chronotopes represents a stage in the development of the novel's anonymous female protagonist, who has grown up in a small village on Java's coast and at the age of 14 is handed over by her parents to a nobleman in the city to become his “practice wife.” By breaking out of her spatial marginalization, the protagonist simultaneously also develops a more complex sense of time, not only through an awareness of her country's troubled past, but also of its future potential. The novel can be read as a critique of power structures not only in place during colonial times, but also in Indonesia after its declaration of independence.
Notes
1. Pramoedya describes these events in Exile (72–75) and Essay en Interview (49–51).
2. See Essay en Interview (17) and Teeuw (355–56n11).
3. See Teeuw 356n11.
4. For a convincing reading of Pramoedya's Buru Quartet that seeks to read the cycle as a contribution to a transnational form of postcolonial literature that is not reactive to the West's heritage (9), see the chapter “Meanwhile, on Buru” (140–206) in Hitchcock.
5. Aamir Mufti retraces the link between literature and globalization (eventually called “world literature”) to European colonialism (for instance, 3–4, 18–19, 34–35). See also in this context Pascale Casanova's deliberations on the use of “cosmopolitanism” in determining a literary text's value (21–23, 30) and her arguments for Paris as the “capital of the literary world” (24). On the importance of “world literature” for Indonesian writers after 1945, see Murtisari (16–17). For a critique of such attempts to explain Indonesian literature on the basis of Western/European models by P. Casanova and Franco Moretti, see Day (174–77). Day's own reading of Pramoedya's short story “Revenge” in tandem with a twelfth-century Javanese poem is entirely plausible, even though some of what I will say in the following will point to the author distancing himself from native Javanese culture. The key to understanding Pramoedya's literary output is that he experiments with many different aesthetic models.
6. An example mentioned in This Earth of Mankind is G. Francis's Malay novel Nyai Dasima (see Niekerk, “Modernity” 89–90). In many respects, The Girl from the Coast mimics the popular genre of the nyai tale in Dutch or Malay, as identified by Chris GoGwilt (154–55). Nyais were concubines and housekeepers of European men; The Girl from the Coast thematizes its native equivalent. Sumit K. Mandal pointed out that in the 1950s, Pramoedya researched popular Melayu-Tionghoa (Malay-Chinese) literature from the turn of the century (47).
7. Nell Freudenberger in a predominantly negative review of The Girl from the Coast in The New York Times (Sunday Book Review, August 11, 2002) wrote of a “saccharine story line,” described the story as moving quickly “but often at the expense of credibility,” used the term “melodramatic,” and criticized “the author's crippling omniscience.” This last observation is questionable from a narratological point of view, because most of the story is told from the protagonist's perspective, and precisely, her (in)ability to see her own situation in its broader historical contexts is a major factor in the development of the novel's plot.
8. The Girl from the Coast was translated into English (2002) following the commercial and critical success of Penguin's release of the Buru tetralogy in the United States (1996–1997) and after the English-language publication of Pramoedya's autobiography The Mute's Soliloquy: A Memoir (1999–2000). One can speculate that it was the success of these texts that made it possible for a text like The Girl to be introduced to an international readership. In his study Forget English, Aamir Mufti pointed to the paradoxical role the English language plays in the global distribution of non-Western writing. Literature originally written and published in English, the “preeminent medium of cosmopolitan exchange” (146), has an advantage over literatures in other languages. And yet, once a text is translated from one of these other languages into English, it can potentially profit from the cosmopolitan status of English as well.
9. The one scholarly article published about The Girl from the Coast includes a comparison of the text to a canonical English-language text; see Raybin. Recently, however, a dissertation was published that compared The Girl with Katharina Susannah Prichard's Coonardo, a text that focuses on the plight of native women in Australia (see Puspita). Puspita pointed to several “graduating papers” (honors theses) by undergraduate students at Indonesian universities dedicated to the novel (15).
10. The (auto)biographical background is gradually revealed in the “Epilogue” written specifically for the 2002 English translation of the text (Girl 279–80); see also The Mute's Soliloquy 107–08.
11. As Puspita pointed out (104), it is not clear whether the parents receive money in exchange for the girl, but later, after she is divorced, the father receives a substantial sum in compensation.
12. In the village, people are referred to through their social function (father, village headman), while the Javanese elite, of which the Bendoro is part, are addressed by their title (Puspita 105–06).
13. This argument may have something to do with the fact that the Dutch during the colonial period decided to build their system on already-existing precolonial social and racial hierarchies to establish a trade-driven economy on the Indonesian islands. Both aspects of the Dutch colonial ideology in the Indies are criticized by the nineteenth-century colonial official and critic of Dutch policies, Multatuli (Eduard Douwes Dekker, 1820–1887), whom Pramoedya admired and whose criticism he endorsed (see Niekerk, “Rethinking,” esp. 59).
14. See Loomba 12, 204. In a recent programmatic essay, David D. Kim explained it as the task of postcolonial studies to point to the “continuities and discontinuities between colonialism, anticolonialism, and postcolonialism” (527).
15. The main text in which Mikhail Bakhtin develops his theory of the chronotope is the essay “Forms of Time and the Chronotope in the Novel” in The Dialogic Imagination (84–258). For a scholarly discussion of the role of the chronotope in Bakhtin's work, see Bemong and Borghart (3–16) and Michael Holquist's chronological overview (19–33). All authors have noted that Bakhtin has trouble giving a precise definition of the chronotope, something that has resulted in the term being used in many different ways (see Bemong and Borghart 5; Holquist 19, 27).
16. See Hitchcock 4–5 for a discussion of the usefulness of the “chronotope” as a “constitutive problem of transnational narration” that can be used to characterize locally and historically specific modes of postcolonial writing, an insight that later in his study he applied to the Buru quartet (154, 159, 171, 183–84, 199–200, and 202).
17. The function of such major or dominant chronotopes is organizational; they unify many other local chronotopes present in the same text (Bemong and Borghart 7).
18. Holquist noted that the visual component of the chronotope is important, particularly in Bakhtin's early writings (26).
19. Bal defined the concept of “place” as “related to the physical, mathematically measurable shape of spatial dimensions,” while “space” is used when it is about the “perception” of place (133).
20. “Bendoro” is a title of a high-ranking official during the colonial period that could be translated as “sir”; it can also mean employer. See the Indonesian version of Wiktionary: https://id.wiktionary.org/wiki/bendoro [accessed 29 Feb. 2016].
21. See in this context also a remark the girl makes upon embarking on her trip to her parents after having spent two years in the city: “Two years and I could only hear the sound of the sea from inside my room” (144). This remark suggests she has not left the house since coming to the city.
22. Puspita spoke in relation to the village of a “mythology of equality” (109; see also 96–97).
23. This statement is confirmed by an observation by the Bendoro, who clearly does not approve: “About ten years ago, I visited your village. It was dirty, the people were poor, and nobody prayed. A person of faith could never approve of such filth. People who live amid filth incur God's wrath” (35).
24. Pramoedya describes this early secular history of Indonesia in The Chinese in Indonesia, in which he refers to the country's isolated villages as examples of “primitive communism” and describes the introduction of Hinduism (118–19). See also the novel The Stream from the North (Arus Balik, 1979), which documents the introduction of Islam in Indonesia during the sixteenth century.
25. For Pheng Cheah, such remnants of older, precolonial narrative forms can function as “a resource for resistance and the projection of a future, alternative modernity” (232, see also 313). For Cheah, the “experiential and communal character of such narratives are important and lead to “an inexhaustibility in meaning” (322). Pramoedya is more ambivalent regarding such precolonial narratives; they can conform to existing hierarchies (as in the wayang plays) or question them (as in Dul's songs).
26. This postal road on Java is a recurring theme in Pramoedya's work. His last published text in Indonesia, The Postal Road (not published in English), details the building of this road “by Indonesian slaves under orders of the Dutch colonial government. Like everywhere else in Asian countries, modernity was acquired at a great price, the price of at least 12,000 human lives” (Lee 8).
27. See Bakhtin (127–28) for basic definitions of these terms. Anthropologists today caution against conceiving of cyclical and linear time as mutually exclusive opposites characterizing different cultures; the idea of a cyclical time is rather a construction by Western anthropologists and ethnologists seeking to prove the primitive nature of non-Western societies (see Fabian 2, 41). This is in line with Pramoedya's argument that these experiences of time are both accessible to his protagonist (but dependent on her location).
28. Starting in November 1959, Pramoedya published Hoakiau di Indonesia, a defense of the Chinese in Indonesia, first in the form of a series of letters to a Chinese friend printed in a prominent Indonesian newspaper, Bintang Timur (see Mandal 37–38; see also Miller 19–21), and in 1960 in book form, later translated into English as The Chinese in Indonesia (2007). The book is a protest against government measures banning ethnic Chinese from owning shops in rural Indonesia. In it, Pramoedya calls the treatment of Chinese in Indonesia a form of “racialism” that ignores the fact that all Indonesians have foreign roots, and he argues that it makes no sense to speak of racial purity (73–76). On Pramoedya's detention without trial, see Mandal 42–43. More than 100,000 Chinese left during 1960 to 1961 as the result of the government's anti-Chinese measures (Mandal 53). In Pramoedya's novel Guerilla Family (1950), a Chinese neighbor, Giok, who has lost his entire family, is one of the few who is willing to help the protagonists' family in their difficult circumstances (170).
29. The figure of the prostitute as a legacy of Indonesia's colonial period is also an important theme in contemporary Indonesian author Eka Kurniawan's Beauty Is a Wound, in which one of the protagonists, the mother figure in the story, is forced to prostitute herself during Japanese and Dutch occupation, while her children seek to get away from this legacy of their family's past.
30. As I have argued in an earlier essay on This Earth of Mankind, Pramoedya is interested in a reconsideration of the “modern” from a non-Western perspective that, instead of defending one homogenous vision of modernity with roots in the West, allows for multiple trajectories for modernity (see Niekerk, “Modernity”).
Additional information
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Carl Niekerk
Carl Niekerk is Professor of Germanic Languages, Comparative and World Literature, and Jewish Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. He is currently the editor of The German Quarterly and a coeditor of the Lessing Yearbook. Pramoedya Ananta Toer's The Girl from the Coast is one of the texts discussed in a general education course Niekerk teaches at the University of Illinois on the history of sexuality in its Western and non-Western contexts.