The evolution of Java-men and revolutionaries: A fresh look at Pramoedya Ananta

Toer's "Buru Quartet"

Author(s): Tiffany Tsao
Source: South East Asia Research , MARCH 2012, Vol. 20, No. 1 (MARCH 2012), pp. 103-
131
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.

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 The evolution of Java-men and
revolutionaries

A fresh look at Pramoedya Ananta Toer's Buru

Quartet1

Tiffany Tsao

Abstract: This article undertakes an in-depth exploration of the trope of human

evolutionary development undergirding Pramoedya Ananta Toer's Buru Quartet
- a trope that has hitherto received no detailed critical attention in Pramoedya
scholarship. Drawing on the traditional Javanese values of Pramoedya's child
hood and the Marxist ideological values of his early adulthood, the Quartet
casts the individual's moral development from selfish individualism to selfless
community-mindedness as the development from animalism to 'modern hu
manity'. In the context of traditional Javanese and Marxist cosmologies, such
self-denial ends in victory: respectively, the accumulation of personal power
and the successful revolutionary replacement of capitalism with socialism.
However, during his brutal imprisonment in the Darwinian wilderness of Buru,
Pramoedya experienced an environment that rewarded animalism and made
it difficult for those ascribing to 'human' values to survive. Originally com
posed in Buru, the Quartet bears the mark of its origins and its author's
disillusionment, portraying the attainment of Javanese and Marxist standards
of humanity as a decision to defy the laws of natural selection and overcome
one's instinct for self-preservation. By dissociating the acquisition of human
ity from the acquisition of power, the Quartet produces modified versions of
the Javanese and Marxist moral human development based not on the expec
tation of success and the will to live, but on the expectation of failure and the
determination to die.

Keywords: evolution; socialism; Pramoedya; Buru; Javanese; Indonesian

Author details: Dr Tiffany Tsao is an Honorary Associate in the Department of

Indonesian Studies, A18, University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia. E-mail:
[email protected].

When the Indonesian novelist, short-story writer and essayist Pramoedya Ananta
Toer passed away at the age of 81 in April 2006, he left behind a legacy that few,
if any, Indonesian writers could rival. His literary output was tremendous: more
than 30 published works and hundreds of articles and essays, among them his
most globally renowned work - the four-part novel series known as the Buru
Quartet (1980-88). The only Indonesian writer to gain such worldwide recogni
tion, Pramoedya was nominated multiple times for the Nobel Prize for Literature,

Many thanks to those who reviewed this article, whose insightful comments and suggestions
were invaluable in producing the final version of this piece.

South East Asia Research, 20, 1, pp 103-131 doi: 10.5367/sear.2012.0088

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104 South East Asia Research

and his work has been translated into over 30 languages. Pramoedya's fame sp
not only from his literary accomplishments, but also from his extraordinary
ience in the face of tyranny: 14 years of imprisonment without trial under the N
Order [Orde Baru] regime in Indonesia left him unbroken and more determ
than ever to continue speaking against the dictatorial Suharto government an
injustices in his country until the day he died.
In his criticisms of the New Order, which lasted from 1965 to 1998, Pramo
often compared it to the self-important, power-hungry and oppressive Java
governance of yore. A personal essay originally penned by him in 1992 ent
'My apologies, in the name of experience' \Maaf: Atas Nama Pengalaman
clared the New Order to be the modern incarnation of Javanese civilization and
culture - the kampong" [village] civilization and culture' belonging to a 'peo
ple who are isolated, who feel insecure and threatened because of their own acts',
and who once gloried in bathing in the blood of their own sons and daughters in
order to retain power, or at least the semblance of power (1996, pp 6, 12, 3). The
passionate intensity with which Pramoedya denounced the cultural system in which
he himself was raised remained forceful and unequivocal throughout the rest of
his life. In fact, in an interview conducted just three years before his death,
Pramoedya blamed 'Javanism' [Jawanisme] for promoting 'obedience and loy
alty to those higher than oneself, eventually leading to fascism' and, more
specifically, the fascism of the Suharto era (2006c, p 45).
In addition to condemning the New Order's adherence to 'Javanism', Pramoedya
levelled criticism at its adherence to capitalism, which he aligned with imperial
ism and colonialism, and which he described as 'the same everywhere. Its only
goal is to make the greatest profit possible.' (Toer, 2006c, p 115) Professing him
self to be 'against capitalism', Pramoedya often used terms associated with Marxist
ideology to express his views (Rothschild, 1999). In his opinion, the post-inde
pendence regime under President Sukarno and the subsequent dictatorial Suharto
regime were a thesis and antithesis in a national process 'still heading for its syn
thesis', and in 2003, he maintained that only a 'total revolution' [revolusi total]
would be able to save Indonesia (Toer, 1996, p 8; Toer, 2006c, p 121).
The Bum Quartet could certainly be read as a literary incarnation of Pramoedya's
condemnation of Javanese culture as well as his espousal of Marxist ideology.
Minke, the Javanese protagonist of the first three novels, frequently expresses
anger and frustration at the backward mindset of his family and people: his fa
ther's preoccupation with maintaining his aristocratic status, his mother's pleas
that he should submit to the powers that be and stop helping the lower classes, and
the peasantry's fatalistic fidelity to hierarchical feudalistic traditions. Minke's own
transformation from a self-centred adolescent infatuated with Western culture into
a selfless leader in the early Indies nationalist movement is driven greatly by the
example and sayings of the young Chinese nationalists Khouw Ah Soe and Ang
San Mei (whom he later marries), as well as the radical and anti-capitalistic Dutch
journalist Ter Haar. In this respect, the course of Minke's life bears some resem
blance to that of his creator - Pramoedya's attempt to divorce himself from his
Javanese cultural origins in his late adolescence and the admiration he developed
in the 1950s for the People's Republic of China (Toer, 2000, p 128; Liu, 1996).
Indeed, in light of Minke's own explicit condemnation of 'Javanism' and even
tual espousal of socialism, as well as Pramoedya's expressed opinions regarding

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 Pramoedya Ananta Toer's Buru Quartet 105

both 'Javanism' and capitalism, the Quartet's opposition to traditional Javanese

culture and its sympathies with Marxist values could not be clearer or plainer. Or
so it would seem.
Ironically, the conviction with which Pramoedya often stated his views on Java
nese traditions and values, and on the evils of capitalism and the necessity for
revolution, may actually obscure the more complicated nature of Pramoedya's
relationship to his Javanese cultural roots and to Marxist ideology. For example,
in an interview conducted in 2003, he laughingly dismissed the observation that
his novel, The Girl from the Coast [Gadis Pantai], expressed a love and under
standing of Java and its culture: 'Is that how you saw it? Of all that makes up
Javanese culture, I only like gamelan music.' (2006c, p 73) When the interviewer
pressed the issue, saying that non-Indonesian readers did not read the work as
wholly critical, Pramoedya insisted, 'But it really is,' and went on to say that he
might have portrayed things differently in the earlier Tales from Blora [Cerita
dari Blora], but 'didn't see the situation then in its entirety as I see it now. Back
then, I only wrote what I saw.' (2006c, p 73) In the face of such authorial certainty
concerning his own low estimation of Javanese culture, his work's unequivocal
condemnation of Javanese culture, and the relative ignorance of his previous por
trayals of Javanese life, even the reader most determined to avoid the intentional
fallacy may find it difficult to read his fiction as anything but the unambiguous
expression of an unambivalent distaste for all things Javanese.
While critics have long observed the presence of Javanese cultural and linguis
tic inflections in Pramoedya's fiction, especially in his novels and stories from the
1940s and 1950s, it is only more recently, with Tony Day's work (see Day, 2002)
that scholarship has become more open to the possibility in Pramoedya's work of
ambivalence towards his Javanese heritage - one belying Pramoedya's own vehe
ment renouncements of it. With some variance, the conventional stance has been
that the early stories - written in Indonesian rather than in Javanese - enact the
rejection of a pre-modern past in order to embrace the new reality of unified post
colonial nationhood. Village and town, province and island must be subsumed by
the larger Republic of Indonesia; affinities and loyalties to one's family, neigh
bours and people-group [suku bangsa] must expand and be transformed into
consciousness and solidarity on a national level; vernacular languages, such as
Javanese, must give way to Indonesian Malay - the lingua franca of the newly
created nation.
In a brilliant and moving analysis of Pramoedya's 'Things Vanished' [Yang Sudah
Hilang], an autobiographical short story published in 1950, Siegel observes that
the narrator's relation of episodes from his childhood in a village by the Lusi
River serves not to recover the past, but rather to effect its disappearance. It is
implied repeatedly in the story that to speak, to convert events 'into signifiers,
into words emptied of their meaning' enacts an expulsion of the residual emotions
and sensations from those events from one's self. 'In this way the past is emptied
of its significance and of its resonance. One is released from it.' (Siegel, 1977, pp
96-97) Siegel reflects briefly on the Javanese word for 'vanish' - Hang - which
carries the same meanings as the Indonesian word for 'vanish' - hilang - and has
two additional ones: 'to be remiss; to disregard' and 'to cure an illness'. To write
of one's Javanese heritage, to evoke the Javanese language of one's past self and
one's parents is to make it vanish, to be 'remiss toward those vanished, of voices

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106 South East Asia Research

about whom one speaks, (including, of course, one's own former voice). On
turning his back on those voices, regardless of whose they are, can Pramoed
cured of them.' (Siegel, 1977, p 97)
Siegel's reading of 'Things Vanished' manages to capture the wrenchingly
ter-sweet quality of Pramoedya's turning away from his Javanese heritage t
Indonesian present and future in a way that Anderson's readings of the early
stories refuse to do. According to Anderson, Pramoedya weaves Javanese im
and linguistic inflections into the Indonesian language of short stories such
'Houseboy + Housemaid' [Djongos + Babu] and 'Revenge' [Dendam] in ord
reject his native culture and language outright: 'One can almost see the sm
the writer's face as one foot flies back to kick Javanese traditional culture in the
teeth' (Anderson, 2006, p 221). Classical Javanese literary conventions are emu
lated for the purposes of parody and ridicule; the 'solemn rigidity' of
Javanese-inflected passages is juxtaposed with passages that employ the full 'free
dom and inventiveness' of the Indonesian language, pulling its Indonesian audience
out of the stagnant past and into the exhilarating future of modern Indonesia
(Anderson, 2006, p 226).
It is Anderson's reading of these short stories 'as a decisive triumph over the
postcolonial tyranny of the author's mother language' with which Tony Day has
taken great issue. In a 2002 essay colourfully entitled, 'Between eating and shitting',
Day calls for a reconsideration of the dynamics between Javanese and Indonesian
in the earlier fiction, turning our attention to a newspaper article written by
Pramoedya in 1956, which speaks of the advantages of writing in the vernacular
and the disadvantages of adopting the new lingua franca: while the regional lan
guage of one's childhood 'can express a human being's most intimate emotions,'
Indonesian still has an 'awkwardness and stiffness' about it (Day, 2002, p 218;
Toer quoted in Day, 2002, p 218).
Moving on to an analysis of several short pieces from the early 1950s, Day
observes that in stories such as 'Things Vanished' and 'Revenge', scenes of do
mestic intimacy that 'Indonesian readers would tend to access and remember far
more intensely through their regional languages' are repeatedly evoked, but only
highlight the inadequacy of the Indonesian language being used to relate them
(2002, pp 225-226). In the stories from the collection Tales from Jakarta, the
depersonalizing irony and caricature used to describe the characters' thoughts and
lives exclude the possibility of any sympathy or intimacy one might feel for them.
If Indonesian is inadequate for the task of portraying 'the world of family inti
macy', '[i]t is perfectly suited to represent a world of foreign objects rather than
familiar emotions', and the 'human debasement and isolation' of modern city life
(Day, 2002, p 228). This gulf between the Javanese and Indonesian languages is
the dwelling place of the newly post-colonial national consciousness - a 'third
space' which 'lies between the two worlds of the region and the nation' {ibid, p
226).
Although Day focuses more on the issue of language than culture, his re-evalu
ation opens up a 'third space' in considering the role of both Javanese language
and culture in Pramoedya's work, identifying a period of doubt about the merits
of shifting from the vernacular to the official language of the new nation that, by
extension, leads one to wonder whether Pramoedya may ever have had similar
reservations about turning his back on Javanese cultural values. After all, Pramoedya

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 Prcimoedya Ananta Toer's Buru Quartet 107

tended to see the Javanese language as inseparable from the culture that gave
birth to it.2 Yet, Day's analysis eventually restates the premise shared by both
Siegel and Anderson: Pramoedya turns away from Javanese in order to embrace
Indonesian - just more slowly and with more hesitation. By the time we reach the
Buru Quartet, it is clear that 'the language issue in Pramoedya's mind has been
resolved beyond equivocation in favor of Malay' (ibid, p 234).
In his more recent work, however, Day has begun to challenge this premise,
pointing out the fallacy of viewing the usage of Javanese imagery and language as
inherently oppositional to the modern Indonesian national consciousness. Rather,
he exhorts us to recognize not only 'that Javanese language and aesthetics con
tinue to exert a powerful influence on Pramoedya's Indonesian style, just as they
do, in general, on the national language, Indonesian,' but also that the choice to be
Indonesian can be, in the words of Sheldon Pollock, '"cosmopolitan-and-vernacular"
rather than "cosmopolitan-or-vernacular'" (2007a, pp 293, 179). Instead of meas
uring the 'modernity' and 'Indonesianness' of modern Indonesian literature by
the extent to which it purges itself of Javanese elements and exhibits the arche
typal features of national identity as expressed in the West, Day argues that
Indonesian writers have the agency to employ Javanese to create a unique type of
national identity. Regional linguistic and cultural elements are not obstacles to the
creation of national consciousness, but rather, can be altered and appropriated in
its service (something that Keith Foulcher has occasionally implied in passing
comments on the Javanese elements of Pramoedya's fiction, but has not yet treated
in detail).3
Day makes a similar point about agency and appropriation in an essay on mod
ern South East Asian literature, in which he observes that the individual 'takes
possession of and exploits landscapes, languages and religious beliefs in order to
express himself/herself' (2007b, p 24). Even Malay, which was in existence as the
predominant language of trade in the archipelago long before Indonesia adopted
it as its national language (Bahasa Indonesia), had to undergo an 'Indonesianization'
in Pramoedya's works to emerge as 'an authoritative, autonomous national lan
guage capable of exploring subjective dimensions of personal identity' (2007b, p
27). By virtue of the points made by Day, it would make sense to consider whether
Pramoedya's works enact a reappropriation of Javanese culture as well as of lan
guage, rather than the rejection of either.
In particular, I would like to propose a re-evaluation of the Buru Quartet, which
has overwhelmingly been read as a work 'where Pramoedya attacks every aspect
of Javanese culture as an obstacle to the formation of the Indonesian nation', and
which condemns Javanese culture as 'a stagnant premodern culture of death' (Day,

To Pramoedya, the hierarchical aspects of Javanese culture found their expression in the hierar
chical quality of the Javanese language. In an interview conducted in 2003, Pramoedya stated
that he did not speak Javanese at home: 'I oppose its usage because the Javanese language is very
hierarchical, very stratified, and as I've already said, leads to fascism of Java! For me, speaking
Javanese is a suffering.' (Toer, 2006c, p 48)
In an essay on Pramoedya's early fiction, Foulcher notes that a certain writing style 'in which the
authorial intention stands fully revealed and which statements on the nature of human existence
form a distinct part of the narrative, probably also has affinities with traditional Javanese modes
of rhetoric, making it all the more easily assimilated into Pramoedya's experiments with an "In
donesian" literature' (1993, p 201). In observations elsewhere, Foulcher observes that Minke
learns in Child of All Nations [Anak Semua Bangsa] that 'the bureaucratic and feudalistic world
of the priyayi is not the only model of what it means to identify oneself as Javanese' (1981. p 12).

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108 South East Asia Research

2002, p 219; Cheah, 2003, p 281). But what about the admiration Pramoedya
publicly expressed in the 1950s for the serious ethical and social commitment of
traditional and modern Javanese art (Heinschke, 1996)? Had that admiration truly
vanished by the time he wrote the Buru Quartet? And what about the implicit
affinity for Javanese culture implied by the presence of traditional Javanese rhetoric
in his early fiction (Foulcher, 1993)? Was all that remained of that affinity bitter
contempt? Foulcher has recently drawn attention to the continuity and consist
ency of Pramoedya's ideological outlooks during his life, calling into question
the orthodox separation of Pramoedya's ideological life into two discontinuous
phases (2008, p 1). I argue that similar continuity exists in Pramoedya's relation
ship with his native Javanese roots - one that Nancy Florida has briefly observed
in Pramoedya's adoption of the traditional Javanese historical chronicle as a posi
tive model for his own work (1995, p 393). Instead of separating Pramoedya's life
into 'Javanese childhood' and 'anti-Javanese adulthood', as Pramoedya himself
often did when speaking of the move to Jakarta in his late teens, which initiated
his 'departure from the influence of Javanese culture', I propose that the Buru
Quartet can be read as espousing a modified form of the Javanese culture that
exerted such an influence over Pramoedya's childhood - a Javanese culture de
void of the arrogant, feudalistic 'Javanism' he so despised (Toer, 2000, p 128).
Whether or not Pramoedya himself consciously thought it possible to purge Java
nese culture of 'Javanism' (and his comments in the 2003 interview quoted above
suggest that he did not), the Buru Quartet seems to suggest that such a redemption
of Javanese culture is not impossible, but extremely difficult to enact.
Working from the perspective that cultures, languages, philosophies and reli
gions are subject to appropriation and alteration by individuals affects not only
our understanding of the Quartet in relation to Javanese culture, but also to Marx
ist ideology and the unique form of socialism it espouses. As we have seen, the
terms that Pramoedya used to describe his views on Indonesian politics, econom
ics and society ('thesis', 'antithesis', 'synthesis', 'total revolution'), not to mention
his repeated condemnations of capitalism (in the 2003 interview, he stated that
'Indonesia has become the victim of international capitalism'), all suggest a Marxist
world view (Toer, 2006c, p 4). Consequently, Marxist intellectuals such as Max
Lane, who translated the Quartet into English, have tended to foreground
Pramoedya's lifelong devotion to revolutionary ideals, reading the Buru novels as
equally 'revolutionary' (Lane, 2006a and 2006b).
Yet Pramoedya's Marxist language belies his claim that he did not subscribe to
Marxist ideology. He was never an official member of the PKI (the Communist
Party of Indonesia); he said he never studied Marxism or Leninism; he dismissed
the government charges that his books promoted 'Marxist-Leninist ideology' as
'rubbish'; and more directly, he emphatically denied that he was a Marxist, pre
ferring instead to call himself a 'Pramist' (Toer, 2007, p 174; Toer, 2006c, p xxvii).
If Pramoedya's usage of Marxist terminology has encouraged others to consider
him as at least tending towards the Marxist, Pramoedya's outright refusal to align
himself with Marxism has also made it possible for certain members of his read
ership to ignore the Marxist elements of his work altogether. Adrian Vickers has
noted the present tendency conveniently to 'forget' Pramoedya's 'radical Marx
ism', his 'nationalist enthusiasm for Sukarno' and his 'socialist enthusiasm of the
1950s' (2004, p 14). Indeed, although Pramoedya never officially declared himself

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 Pramoedya Ananta Toer's Burn Quartet 109

a communist, from 1957 up until his arrest in 1965, he not only took up leadership
positions in Lekra (the cultural organization affiliated with the PKI), but also ex
pressed his admiration for the People's Republic of China, delivered a series of
lectures on the ideal qualities of socialist-realist literature, and openly denounced
'bourgeois humanism' in favour of 'proletarian humanism'.
If understanding the nature of the Buru Quartet's engagement with Javanese
culture requires reading against the grain of Pramoedya's own stated aversion to
it, then understanding its engagement with Marxism requires reading against the
grain of Pramoedya's implicitly Marxist activities and opinions and against the
grain of his explicit denial that he was Marxist or communist. This apparent con
tradiction explains how it is possible for A. Teeuw to state that the tetralogy 'cannot
be called Marxist or socialist-realistic by any standards', even as Eka Kurniawan
pronounces it to be heavily socialist-realist and guided by the principles of prole
tarian humanism (Teeuw, 1997, p 266; Kurniawan, 2002, pp 134-135). But as
with the Javanese/anti-Javanism distinction, it may not necessarily be a matter of
'either/or'. If we maintain (as this essay does) that it is possible for Pramoedya's
works to employ distinctively Javanese elements to critique certain aspects of
Javanese culture (the 'Javanistic' aspects), it may also be possible for Pramoedya's
works to incorporate Marxist elements while critiquing certain aspects of Marxist
ideology.
In this respect, Pheng Cheah has provided an admirably rigorous analysis of the
Quartet, detailing the specific ways in which it converges with and diverges from
the tenets of classical Marxism. Cheah's reading is situated in a larger book-length
study (Spectral Nationality, 2003) on the conceptualization of the nation in terms
of 'organismic vitalism' and traces the movement of that conceptualization from
its origins in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German philosophy to its appro
priation by twentieth-century decolonizing nationalist movements in Africa and
Asia. Cheah observes that all decolonizing nationalist philosophies, including the
one found in Pramoedya's Quartet, are already at one remove from Marx's own
philosophy, relying instead on a Leninist translation of Marx's class struggle into
national terms: the struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat over the
means of production is mapped on to the struggle between the colonizer and colo
nized over control of the state (2003, p 215). However, the tropes of 'organismic
vitalism' originally found in Marx's work survive this transposition and are applied
by anticolonial nationalist texts to the attempts of the natives to overthrow their
colonial oppressors. Thus, the nationalist struggle to expel the colonizer and take
control of the state is figured as the attempt of 'an organism striving to maximize
its own capacity for life' and 'a drive towards self-preservation' (2003, p 208).
The nation, like the proletariat of Marx's original schema, constitutes 'a living
collective body that is the best vehicle for actualizing freedom' (2003, p 309).
In Cheah's reading, the nationalist will to live, to achieve physical incarnation
through the takeover of the state apparatus, is figured as the attempt of a 'good
spectre' to actualize its bodily existence and bring itself to life as a healthy, living
organism. In contrast, the attempts of the colonizer to maintain control of the state
apparatus is figured as a possession by a foreign, demonic spirit - a 'bad spectre'
whose inhabitation of the state apparatus prevents the rightful inhabitation of the
state by the disembodied spirit of the 'nation-people', thus keeping them in a state
of physical death (2003, p 303). However, in the case of post-colonial entities

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110 South East Asia Research

such as Indonesia, the enactment of rightful repossession is complicated by

fact that the 'bad' colonial state is what has made the formation of the 'go
Indonesian national consciousness possible.
As the Buru Quartet relays so effectively in its literary fictionalization of
emergence of early East Indies nationalism, prior to colonialism, there existe
conceptual equivalent to the Indonesian nation as it now exists. It was West
education, transportation networks, modern print and media technology, an
on - all made possible by colonization - that gave birth to and nourished th
Indonesian national consciousness. The entwinement of the nation-people's
tity with the colonial state makes it difficult to 'distinguish good spectre fro
bad spectre', opening up the Indonesian nation-state to the perpetual risk o
possession by the colonial spirit: 'the living nation will always be haunte
ghosts that cannot be exorcised', even after the nation has nominally achie
independence (2003, p 303). Within the Quartet, it is the class of native col
servants clinging to their positions of authority under the Dutch administra
that defers the rightful possession of the state apparatus by the 'good spect
the Indonesian national spirit. And in Pramoedya's time, it is the capitalist
neocolonial New Order - a native reincarnation of the Dutch colonial state - that
has once again displaced the incarnation of Indonesian nationalist ideals.4
On the whole, Cheah's reading is breathtakingly insightful, and his observa
tions concerning the 'organismic vitalism' of the Indonesian nationalist movement
in the Quartet resonate strongly with my own analysis, as we shall soon see.
However, his reading exhibits a certain faith in the goodness of this 'organismic
vitalism' that may not be entirely warranted. Although Cheah acknowledges that
the 'bad spectre' of colonialism and the 'good spectre' of democratic nationalism
are closely intertwined, the former originating in conditions imposed by the latter
as an anti-thesis from a thesis, he still posits that the two spectres are fundamen
tally oppositional in nature: one is death-inducing, the other brings life; one is
demonic, ghostly and zombie-like, the other dynamic, organic and alive; in short,
one is 'bad' and the other 'good'. Yet, calling one a negative act of demonic pos
session and the other a positive attempt to maximize life obscures the unsettling
similarity shared by the two spectres in their competing attempts to take posses
sion of the state. The similarity surfaces briefly in his observation that the
supernatural terms raksasa [a mythological demonic giant] and gaib [invisible]
are used to describe both colonial capitalism and the anticolonial nationalist at
tempts to organize themselves. But the likeness is once again submerged when he
explains that the terms refer to 'bad spectrality' in one instance and 'good spectrality'
and 'organicizing power' in the other (2003, p 293). Moreover, Cheah overlooks
the fact that in the Javanese cultural context, harmful supernatural entities such as
the raksasa and invisible spirits are associated with the uncultivated forest (where
they dwell) and wild animals (whom they resemble in character and appearance)
- both of which, in the Western tradition, carry associations with organic life.
Given the parallels between bad 'demonic possession' and good 'organicizing
power', it makes sense at least to entertain the possibility that the latter may be

With regard to other convergences and divergences with classic Marxism, Cheah notes that this
dilemma of 'repossession' replicates the dilemma of 'realienation' inherent in Marx's original
socialist vision, and that Pramoedya devises a separate 'dialectic between fiction and reality' to
ameliorate this problem (2003, pp 207, 261). See Cheah's work itself for more detail.

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 Pramoedya Ananta Toer's Buru Quartet 1 11

just as ethically suspect as the former, and may prove morally compromising to
the Indies nationalist cause as portrayed in the Quartet.
In the context of my own reading, this organismic 'drive towards self-preserva
tion' is precisely what the Buru Quartet identifies as the most troubling aspect of
the Marxist call to overthrow capitalist imperialism (Cheah, 2003, p 280). The
negative aspects of the 'organismic vitalism' exhibited by the Indonesian nation
alists become especially apparent when one pays attention to the narrative of human
evolutionary development that underpins the entire Quartet -a narrative that has,
surprisingly, garnered no critical attention as yet. Throughout all four novels, the
development of the individual out of selfishness and into selflessness, out of indi
vidualistic self-absorption and into community-mindedness, and out of a capitalistic
mindset and into a socialist mindset is figured as the development from animal
ism and to humanity. Although most contemporary Western readers may most
readily associate the animal-to-human developmental model with scientific theo
ries of biological evolution, the model also plays a key role in traditional Javanese
conceptions of ideal individual development and Marxist conceptions of ideal
social development. As I will show, the Quartet draws on all three expressions of
this model - Javanese, Marxist and biological (or more specifically, Darwinian) -
in its construction of a Dutch East Indies where an individual's moral develop
ment out of animalism into 'modern humanity' [kemanusiaan modern] requires
abandoning the instincts for self-preservation and reproduction, which are associ
ated with animalism and are incommensurable with the attainment of humanity.
To be more precise, the novels' characters must attain Javanese and Marxist standards
of humanity without receiving the benefits that would naturally follow in an envi
ronment structured along the logic of Javanese and Marxist cosmologies
respectively. In the context of the Javanese cosmological order, the attainment of
a Javanese standard of humanity would bestow increased power, and in the con
text of the Marxist cosmological order, the attainment of a Marxist standard of
humanity would result in a successful proletariat revolution. In both orders, the
desire for self-preservation and success is not at odds with one's moral develop
ment. However, in the context of an environment ruled by the laws of Darwinian
struggle, evolving out of animalism into humanity instead requires relinquishing
success and even life itself, both of which, in this setting, carry negative associa
tions with animalism.
Because Cheah reads the organismic will to live as a wholly positive impulse,
associating it with the achievement of Enlightenment humanist ideals and the
overcoming of colonial tyranny, the frustration of this will to live at the Quartet's
end is a wholly undesirable turn of events. However, in my own reading, it is this
will to live that needs to be overcome because it taints all endeavours to achieve
true humanity with animalism. The Quartet exhorts the individual to strive for
humanity even in the knowledge that such effort is thoroughly impractical, self
destructive, and has no hope of bringing any material benefit to oneself or one's
society. This acceptance of certain death thus proves necessary in reforming and
redeeming Javanese and Marxist models of human evolution by evacuating them
of the animalistic desire for power that ultimately compromises them. In what
follows, I will first discuss the influence of Javanese and Marxist world views on
Pramoedya's conception of human moral evolution over the first 30 years of his
life, and how Pramoedya's encounter with the brutal Darwinian wilderness of

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112 South East Asia Research

Buru may have impressed upon him the deep-rootedness of the animalism
human society. I will then examine how the Buru Quartet synthesizes J
Marxist and Darwinian elements in order to reflect on the challenge of m
ing one's humanity, even in the bleakest of circumstances.

Human evolution according to the Quartet

Scholars have read the Quartet as a tale of socio-cultural evolutionary pr
one following the birth and development of Indonesian nationalism and
awareness. Yet none has paid attention to the tropes of biological evolut
also undergird all four novels (This Earth of Mankind [Bumi Manusia], C
All Nations [Anak Semua Bangsa], Footsteps [Jejak Langkah] and Glasshouse
[Rumah Kaca\). From the very outset of the first novel, the reader is invited to
think of the protagonist's development from adolescence into adulthood as an
evolutionary progression from animalism to humanity. In fact, the narrator and
protagonist of the first novel, This Earth of Mankind, introduces himself as a
monkey. 'People call me Minke,' he tells us, and we find out shortly that 'Minke'
is a nickname bestowed upon him by an irate Dutch schoolteacher at the prestig
ious Dutch-language school he attends: 'Then, we began learning English...In
shock, my mind guessed that he had surely meant to insult me with the word
monkey' (1983, p 29).5 A little later in the novel, Minke is called a monkey again,
by the drunken Herman Mellema who is incensed at finding a lowly Pribumi
[native Malay] dining at his family table.
Additional relapses into 'monkeyness' occur in the third novel, Footsteps, which
opens with Minke on a tram bound for the capital city of Batavia, fearing that his
'monkeyness' is being exposed by actual monkeys swinging from the trees out
side: 'They had probably sized me up together, and in their own language were
crying, that's Minke, who feels himself to be a modern human being!....That one,
whose moustache is beginning to sprout, but whose chest looks weak! Yes, that's
him, a Pribumi who prefers European clothes, putting on airs like the European
youths.' (2006a, p 3) A few pages later, as the only Pribumi attending an exclu
sively European gathering in the Harmonie ballroom, Minke thinks uncomfortably
to himself, 'I was obviously a monkey in the wrong cage' (2006a, p 38).
It is made clear in Footsteps that the only way for Minke truly to escape this
unbearable 'monkeyness' of being is to become a 'manusia modern' - a 'modern
human being'. The attainment of truly modern humanity necessarily involves re
jecting the rapacious animalism of modern capitalism and imperialism, which
Minke learns about in the preceding novel from the Chinese nationalist Khouw
Ah Soe and the radical Dutch journalist Ter Haar. In the third novel, Minke also
learns from a retired Javanese doctor and his wife Mei that becoming a modern
human being requires the renunciation of selfish interests for the sake of one's
community: 'Wasn't one characteristic of the modern human being also the indi
vidual's victory over his environment through his individual accomplishments?
Strong individuals should band together to lift up those among their people who
were weak, to provide a lamp to those in darkness, and to give eyes to the blind.'

While scholars such as Thomas and Geertz have read Minke's 'monkeyness' as a reference to the
monkey-god Hanuman from The Ramayana (Thomas, 1984, p 26; Geertz, 1996, p 31), no-one
has read it in the context of human evolution.

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 Pramoedya Atlanta Toer's Buru Quartet 1 13

(2006a, p 191) The successful evolution of an individual from animalism into

modern humanity requires the rejection of capitalistic gain, the opposition of im
perialism, and the selfless desire to help his or her people also attain modern
humanity.
There are a number of sources that may have inspired Pramoedya to portray
humanity in the Quartet as the final stage of an evolution out of animalism. There
was Darwin's theory of natural selection, which he had known about since he was
at least 15 years old, and which I will discuss later in more detail (Toer, 1995, p
115). With regard to literary inspirations, the underlying bestial nature of human
ity formed a prominent theme in many of the European naturalist works Pramoedya
read in his youth, such as those by Zola and Balzac. For our present purposes,
however, I would like to focus on the contributions of traditional Javanese phi
losophy and socialist literature to the Quartet's conception of modern humanity
and the steps necessary to achieve it.
Pramoedya grew up in a very traditional Javanese-Islamic community in East
Java. His father was a schoolteacher and anticolonial activist who was a member
of the lower ranks of the priyayi [the aristocratic elite of Javanese society], and in
Pramoedya's words, 'a lover of Javanese culture' (Toer, 2000, p 4). His mother
was the daughter of a respected Islamic leader, and was herself very religious.
With such an upbringing, Pramoedya would have learned very early on about the
distinction between alus and kasar — alus denoting 'refined', 'smooth', 'civilized'
and 'elegant'; kasar denoting 'coarse', 'rough', 'uncivilized', 'disordered' and
'impure' (Geertz, 1960, p 232; Anderson, 2006, p 51; Brenner, 1998, p 58). The
alus/kasar distinction generally corresponds to the distinction between adults and
children, humans and animals, Javanese and non-Javanese, civilized and uncivi
lized, upper class and lower class, and plays an important role in shaping many
aspects of Javanese life, from notions of child development and proper adult con
duct, to Islamic theology and practice. Growing up, Pramoedya would have been
expected to conform to standards of alus-ness and shun the kasar.
Being alus in character and behaviour requires politeness, sensitivity, and above
all constant self-control, whereas uncontrolled passion and desire are kasar and
are associated with animals and animal-like beings: 'the worst behaviour is that
which is not controlled, which expresses individual thoughts and emotions based
on passions and sudden impulses' (Alisjahbana, 1966, p 87). One must instead
strive to achieve alus-ness by 'imposing a static tranquil surface atop the animal
impulses that gurgle underneath' (Peacock, 1978, p 135).
Children, who lack self-control, are considered durung Jawa - not yet Javanese
and, in a sense, not yet human, for to be human is to be cultured and civilized in
the mould of the Javanese ideal. The education of children involves teaching them
'to become "human", become Javanese': 'to know and show appropriate man
ners, to speak the right words, to maintain an orderly existence, and to respect the
social hierarchy' (Mulder, 2005, p 67). Infants are often carried around until they
can walk because crawling is associated with animals (and is therefore kasar),
and from birth, children are taught the nuanced and complex status distinctions of
the Javanese social order, along with the appropriate speech patterns and vocabu
lary for addressing others, depending on where they stand in relation to the child's
own self (Mulder, 1978, pp 60-61; Brenner, 1998, p 58). The child is also taught
to subordinate his or her own personal desires and ambitions for the sake of the

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114 South East Asia Research

community: 'it is thought that "to sacrifice for the sake of social harm
lead to the highest rewards'", and, therefore, becoming an adult particip
Javanese society - attaining humanity - involves contributing to a comm
characterized by mutual aid, cooperation, peace, and compromise (Mulde
pp 67-68).
Even Islam as practised in Javanese society has contributed to, and
enced by, the alus/kasar distinction.6 In Islam, hawa nafsu (nafs in Arabic) 'con
ardent longing or passionate desire' that the human being must keep un
trol, and '[w]hen excessively present and uncontrolled. ..can become an irr
emotion that suppresses rational reasoning and that is potentially dangero
individual, the family and society' (van Wichelen, 2007, p 201). To let on
nafsu govern oneself and lead one into disobedience to Allah is to becom
— no different from the animals. Instead, one must use one's akal, or reason, to
control and subdue one's animal passions. The Islamic education undergone by
Javanese children thus encourages a spiritual development out of animalism and
into humanity that reinforces the acculturation process undergone by children to
banish their kasar-ness and mould them into alus beings. A key component of
spiritual development and acculturation - of achieving unity with God and unity
with the community - is the practice of fasting, abstinence and other forms of
asceticism meant to increase one's control over one's hawa nafsu and to increase
one's own spiritual, physical and intellectual powers (Woodward, 2010, p 76). In
his autobiographical writings, Pramoedya recalls how fasting was encouraged in
the 'ignorant' days of his childhood, and how he himself would sometimes eat
only leafy vegetables for a week or two at a time: 'With this, I hoped my thinking
would become clearer and that I would be smarter at school...Sometimes I would
even fast on Mondays and Thursdays.' (Toer, 2000, pp 37-38)
It is important to note that the attainment of alus-ness involves becoming self
less and community-minded, but not in a completely self-sacrificing way. Rather,
becoming alus through self-denial promotes the acquisition of greater abilities,
and it is this aspect of the attainment of alus-ness that becomes especially promi
nent in the classical pre-Islamic myths and folklore which provide the primary
material for traditional forms of entertainment, such as the wayang [shadow-pup
pet] performances that Pramoedya grew up watching, and which remain popular
today among the Javanese community. Wayang heroes are invariably alus. Mem
bers of royalty or warriors of the satria caste, they are delicate-looking, slight in
frame, and most importantly, able to exercise the ascetic levels of discipline and
self-control - fasting, sexual abstinence and concentrated periods of spiritual edu
cation - which enable them to accumulate and concentrate the power they need to
defeat their monstrous enemies (Peacock, 1978, p 134; Anderson, 2006, pp 51,
55). In contrast, their enemies - demonic giants, ogres, wild men - invariably lose
because of their innate kasar-ness. They 'eventually permit their Power to be
diffused by indulging their passions without restraint', and wind up losing to the

Islam as practised on Java has traditionally tended toward the syncretic, incorporating rather than
rejecting elements of pre-Islamic Javanese culture. This began to change in the mid-nineteenth
century with reformists' attempts to purify local Islamic practice and theology (Ricklefs, 2007).
Further calls for Islamic reform have occurred periodically since then, two of the more recent
ones occurring in the 1980s and in the current post-Suharto era. It was the syncretic form of
Javanese Islam that prevailed in Pramoedya's childhood community.

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 Pramoedya Ananta Toer's Buru Quartet 1 15

hero whose consistent self-control 'insures the maintenance and continued accu
mulation of Power' (Anderson, 2006, p 25). Thus, in the Javanese cosmological
order, virtue - alus-ness - invariably results in greater power and eventual vi
tory. The truly alus do not experience defeat.
Pramoedya's emphasis on humanity as a moral evolution from animalism als
replicates tropes employed by various prominent Marxist writers who, followin
the publication of Darwin's theory of natural selection, took the opportunity t
observe how socialism would enable humanity to transcend the ruthless anima
ism inherent in capitalism. In a letter to Engels on The Origin of Species, Mar
noted that the book 'contains the basis in natural history for our view' (quoted i
Young, 1985, p 52). If capitalism implemented the merciless laws of natural se
lection in human society, socialism was a means of rising above those laws and
allowing humans to become more than mere animals, as evinced in the followin
passage from Engels's Dialectics of Nature:

'Darwin did not know what a bitter satire he wrote on mankind, and especiall
on his countrymen, when he showed that free competition, and the struggle f
existence, which the economists celebrate as the highest historical achievement
is the normal state of the animal kingdom. Only conscious organization of s
cial production, in which production and distribution are carried on in a plann
way, can lift mankind above the rest of the animal world as regards the socia
aspect, in the same way that production in general has done this for men in their
aspect as a species.' (Engels, 1960, p 19)

Pramoedya would have been more than familiar with this association of capita
ism with savage bestiality, if not through explicitly Marxist or Leninist writin
(which he claimed never to have studied), then through socialist-realist literar
works such as those by the Soviet writer Maxim Gorky and the Chinese write
Lu Xun. Pramoedya often acknowledged Gorky's influence on his own wor
he translated one of Gorky's novels (Mother) into Indonesian, and the essay, 'Th
people must know their history!' inspired him to write historically based work
including the Quartet. Gorky frequently called attention in his various writing
to the animalistic tendencies of man - the 'zoological, animal individualism' th
drives his actions, and capitalism's ability to transform the human being into
creature in which an insane lust for profit has consumed every vestige o
humanity...two-legged beasts fattening themselves on other people's strength
(Gorky, 2001a, p 82; Gorky, 2001b, p 100). In a university lecture Pramoed
delivered in 1963 on Indonesian literature and socialist realism, he included a
quote from Gorky's 1934 essay on 'Proletarian humanism' to censure the hy
pocrisy of the bourgeoisie: they 'are promoting fascism and discarding their
humanism like a worn-out mask which can no longer conceal the fangs of the
beast of prey' (Toer, 2003, p 20).
Pramoedya would have also found similar tropes of animalism and humanity in
the works of the Leftist Chinese writer, Lu Xun, who was highly acclaimed by the
Communist Party. In fact, one of Pramoedya's first visits to China involved at
tending a conference in Lu Xun's honour (Liu, 1996, p 128). Influenced by the
scientific theories of evolution put forth by figures such as Darwin and Huxley,
Lu Xun's writings grapple with the problem of animalism in Chinese society and

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116 South East Asia Research

'true' human evolution.7 In the short story, 'Diary of a Madman' (1918)- p

of which Pramoedya translated into Indonesian - the protagonist begins to
people around him, and all of Chinese society, as wild, human-eating be
are human in form, but lack true humanity (Liu, 1996). In vain, he exhor
around him to give up eating the flesh of their fellow men and to cease t
tionary regression: 'Primitive men probably did eat human flesh. But their th
changed, developed over time, and some of them stopped - they were det
to become human, genuinely human. Those who wouldn't give it up rem
reptiles, some of them changing into fish, birds or monkeys, then finally me
they remain reptiles at heart....' (Lu Xun, 2009, p 28)
According to the logic of the classical Marxist dialectic, the successful
opment of a truly human socialist consciousness in the proletarian class in
new stage of class struggle, which eventually results in a successful rev
and the replacement of the animalistic capitalist mode of production wi
ism. Despite temporary setbacks and obstacles, the proletarian class 'ever
again, stronger, firmer, mightier' and 'the victory of the proletariat' is 'in
(Marx and Engels, 2000, pp 230, 231). Although virtuous humanity is
warded quite as directly or immediately as in the context of the Javanese
order, both Javanese and Marxist cosmologies do assume that humanity
umph sooner or later and bring to those who have attained it deserved po
success. Pramoedya's own devotion to the high ideals of humanity, however
him not victory but punishment; and the 14 years he spent in prison, 10 of th
the wilderness of Buru, all too painfully impressed upon him the costs an
culties of achieving and championing humanity in a society bent on rema
a state of animal savagery.

Overwhelmed by the wilderness

The conceptualization of the human as essentially a type of animal, dist
able from other animals only by virtue of self-restraint and altruism, pre
Pramoedya greatly during his incarceration on Buru, as documented in Th
Song of a Mute [Nyanyi Sunyi Seorang Bisu] - a collection of personal no
letters he penned during his imprisonment.8 As we have seen, both Javan
Marxist world views stress that very little separates humans from anima
from 'human' conduct and behaviour. However, on Buru, Pramoedya see
develop a preoccupation with what modern science has to say about huma
inherent animalism. In a letter to his daughter Nen, he speaks enthusiast
the theory of evolution espoused by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin - a twen
century philosopher, Jesuit priest and anthropologist who postulated tha
different races of mankind had originated with different ancestral forms, an
converging towards a common higher evolutionary stage: 'Not philosoph
exclaims, 'but almost one hundred percent science with supporting evidenc
p 312). Elsewhere, he ruminates on the animal origins of humankind, re

For more on the influence of evolutionary theory on Lu Xun's work, see James Pusey
and Evolution (1998).
There exists an English translation of Nyanyi Sunyi Seorang Bisu entitled The Mute's S
but so much material from the original has been left out of the translated work that the t
advises Pramoedya scholars to consult the original Indonesian text.

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 Pramoedya Ananta Toer's Buru Quartet 117

the biology lesson in 1943 which taught him about the survival of the 'fittest', as
well as a story he once read by a Western writer about 'almost human' monkeys
and the 'missing link' (1995, p 115, English original).
Pramoedya's absorption with biological evolution and animal ancestry appears
to be prompted by his surroundings: the 'wilderness untamed by humankind',
which the prisoners are forced to inhabit (1995, p 45). Sitting in a boat, which
takes him further into the island's interior, he becomes a sort of modern-day Marlow
plunging deeper into the heart of darkness, not of Africa, but of Buru and the
metaphorical primitiveness of the Indonesian people:

'In school, we were never taught about the natural environment of Buru. Na
ture, spread out before me now, was like a textbook without contents, and this
journey upstream left an impression on me. Usually, big rivers were seedbeds
for ancient societies and cultures....the society here was still at a low stage of
civilization, and most likely, lacked order.' (1995, pp 45-46)

At certain points in the memoir, Pramoedya assumes the tone of a naturalist. He

describes the cuscus - 'a species of marsupial, indicating the resemblance of Buru's
fauna to that of Irian and Australia' - and expresses astonishment at the presence,
'in the midst of this primitive natural environment' of a particular species of mi
gratory bird (1995, p 52). At other points, he describes the natives in
anthropologist-like fashion, noting their partially nomadic lifestyle, their lack of
agriculture and their dietary restrictions. He also notes their skin, ravaged by skin
disease, and their greed for material goods, stemming from their 'bad' custom of
buying and selling women as if they were objects (1995, p 57). His adoption of a
detached, scientific tone at these moments almost seems an attempt to dissociate
himself from the 'primitive' circumstances of his situation, and perhaps from tra
ditional Javanese perceptions of the forest as 'unoccupied and dangerous, where
the demonic giants, hybrids of man and animal, rage and where they are chal
lenged by the noble heroes' of wayang lore (Lombard, 1983, p 272).9 But the
savagery of the primitive past and the mythological demons will not be held at
bay: the natives - 'wild men' - begin attacking the prisoners, decapitating two of
them and stabbing one in the stomach with a spear (1995, p 205).
As the prisoners puzzle over how to make the land yield food without the help
of any modern tools, Pramoedya feels foolish for even imagining a civilized Indo
nesia: 'I spent too much time dreaming of a higher standard of life for a free
nation like Indonesia, as was the revolution's promise' (1995, p 53). Forced to
struggle with the hostile natives, with the land they must clear for farming, and
even for their food (the prisoners supplement their insufficient rations with rat
and cuscus flesh, among other things), Pramoedya feels that the term 'survival of
the fittest' carries far greater significance than it did when he learned it at school.
'Day by day I live, carrying my body to meet the requirements needed to live, at
least to survive....My head can only nod and sway, for words are already too
heavy to utter...' (1995, p 115)
Overwhelmed by circumstances that have forced him and his fellow prisoners

'...tanah tak bertuan yang berbahaya, di mana mengganas para buta dan raksasa itu merupakan
penggabungan manusia dengan binatang dan selalu dihadapi oleh para pahlawan yang berbudi
luhur' (Lombard, 1983, p 272).

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118 South East Asia Research

to live like animals, at the mercy of prison guards who behave like animals, arres
by a government whose leaders have cast off humanity in their quest for po
human bestiality takes the form of an incontrovertible biological fact: 'peop
biological creatures, animals,' he writes at another point, and 'there are many
conditions that must be fulfilled to turn a person into a human being with dignity
self-respect' (1995, p 68). 'Animals plus reason,' he notes at another point, 'm
human beings' - a reference to the Islamic emphasis on the importance of ak
controlling one's passions (1995, p 134). It is in the depths of the Buru wilder
where Pramoedya contemplates the biological basis for the words of the Du
author Multatuli, whose voice he hears 'ever more strongly. De plicht van een
is mens te zijn - the task of the human is to become human.' (1995, p 72)
However fervent his belief that humans should 'become human,' must 'beco
human', we also find a deep undercurrent of doubt and despair as to whether beco
ing human is, in fact, possible. The brutal living conditions on Buru make civ
humane living almost impossible to sustain, serving as a small-scale metaphor
conditions in Indonesia as a whole, which make the attainment of true huma
punishable by imprisonment and death. If life on Buru and in New Order Indo
operates according to the laws of Darwinian natural selection, allowing only
'fittest' to flourish, it would seem that the laws do not actually encourage h
evolution so much as the regression into animal tendencies. Such were the conditio
that gave birth to the Buru Quartet, composed orally as a tale for the other priso
before Pramoedya was finally permitted access to writing materials.
Perhaps Pramoedya's experience of the overpowering and frightening 'na
ral environment of Buru' shaped the Quartet more than scholarship
acknowledged thus far. For in a similar way, the characters of the Buru Qua
who do successfully attain modern humanity find themselves powerless and
in an environment that rewards animal behaviour and dooms the unnatural hu
man to extinction. The heroes of Javanese mythology, the devout practitioners
of Javanese Islam and the proletariat class of the Marxist dialectic reap the ben
efits of attaining humanity, while Pramoedya's truly human characters experience
no such victories. However, it is this new understanding of the deep-seated ani
malism in human nature that compels the Buru Quartet to modify existing
Javanese and Marxist ideals concerning humanity in order to advocate an even
more alus form of Javanese humanity and an even more resilient form of socialist
humanity.

The power of the wilderness in the Buru Quartet

There is a sense throughout the entirety of the Quartet that the characters inhabit
a world fundamentally antagonistic to human endeavours to civilize themselves
and their surroundings. Undomesticated nature, such as that which Pramoedya
faced in Buru, is associated with the brutal, the animalistic and the primitive.
Notably, the rape of Annelies occurs in the only uncultivated portion of the fami
ly's otherwise orderly agricultural estate, and her rapist - her brother Robert -
transforms into 'a mad buffalo' as he assaults her (1983, p 237). In Ter Haar's
lengthy tirades against the evils of capitalism, he likens the modern city to a jungle
where vampires prey on the weak - a comparison that calls to mind the danger
ous, supernatural quality of the forests of Javanese myth (2002, p 291). The third

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 Pramoedya Ananta Toer's Buru Quartet 1 19

and the fourth novels reveal that the entirety of the Indies is, in fact, a wilderness
hostile to humanity. Nyai Ontosoroh and her family flee the 'great jungle' of the
Indies for Paris, and from there her contented daughter writes to Minke: 'It feels
as if the Indies is a jungle, utterly incomparable with life here...I don't think I'll
ever return to the Indies.' (2006a, pp 369, 365)
Minke stubbornly remains, and his attempts to lift his fellow Pribumi out of
primitive ignorance are consistently cast as a battle against the uncultivated natu
ral world and the animalism that such an environment fosters: the Dutch colonizers
have deliberately kept the Indies in a primitive state, and Minke must make mod
ern human beings out of his fellow Pribumi who are 'animals on a breeding farm',
'inhabitants of a colonial nature reserve'; he must bring light into the 'jungle of
javanism' (2006a, pp 266, 579-580). Even though Minke starts out believing that
the 'modern human being' possesses an ability to 'effect a change in reality' and
to achieve 'victory over his environment through his individual accomplishments',
as the Quartet progresses, it grows increasingly apparent that a more practical
course of action involves conforming to and working with the natural world rather
than against it (2002, p 302; Toer, 2006a, p 191). Minke insists to the leader of
another Pribumi organization - the Boedi Oetomo - that 'human beings can bring
about the birth of new conditions, new realities, and not just swim in existing
realities'; he criticizes them for complying too much with the Dutch colonial
authorities, for proceeding too 'prudently and realistically' (2006a, p 440). Yet,
the Indies 'jungle' encourages and rewards this ability to adapt: Boedi Oetomo's
conformity to 'existing realities' allows it to 'sprout amazingly, as if blown from
the stomach of the earth' (2006a, p 400). In contrast, Minke's own attempt to
create 'new realities' only ends in his arrest and eventual tragic death: Minke
emerges from his imprisonment many years later, penniless and friendless. His
wife missing, his assets repossessed by the government, and forgotten by the very
nationalist movement he founded, Minke eventually sickens and dies - murdered,
it is implied, by his lifelong enemy, Robert Suurhof (2006b, p 20).
In the world of the Quartet, animalistic nature proves unconquerable and
untameable. Where the alus hero of traditional Javanese myth gains power over
his environment by virtue of his alus-ness, and where Marx's proletarian eventu
ally gains power over his environment by virtue of his capacity for labour and the
unfolding of the dialectic of class struggle, in the Quartet, the modern human
being is unable to prevail against the uncivilized wilderness or the rampant ani
malism of his or her surroundings. The power accorded to the alus individual and
the individual with a socialist consciousness has been taken away, and within the
context of the tetralogy's universe, becoming a modern human being means ac
tively foregoing, rather than accumulating, power for oneself. The achievement
of humanity becomes incommensurable with continued survival. By taking any
personal benefit away from the Javanese alus ideal and the Marxist socialist ideal,
the novels challenge their readers to achieve humanity for its own sake rather than
for any external reward.

A more alus standard of alus

From the above description of the role played by the alus/kasar distinction in
Javanese life and folklore, one notes that the attainment of humanity, and there

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120 South East Asia Research

fore of power, requires the individual to suppress not only desires that are se
but also desires that one might consider morally neutral and necessary to
day life: for example, hunger and sexual desire. According to traditional Jav
thought, however, the denial of the self is rewarded with greater strength
ability. In the myths, asceticism enables the hero to vanquish his enemies. In
temporary practice, it enables one to become more aware of others' needs
more attuned to God's will (Errington, 1984, p 282). Such awareness and attu
have their indirect benefits: one gains a better intuitive grasp of one's env
ment, and a greater indwelling of God allows one to absorb His power (Errin
1984, p 285).
Having experienced no such rewards for his own alus conduct - either for the
fasting of his 'ignorant' childhood or for his later work for the nationalist cause -
Pramoedya subjects the Quartet's 'modern human' characters to the same treat
ment. At first, it would seem that traditional Javanese cultural values are wholly
aligned with the animalistic, uncultivated natural environment - the 'jungle of
javanism' that threatens to engulf Minke and his solitary efforts to dispel the dark
ness of his people's ignorance with the torch of enlightenment (2006a, p 580).
Such a reading would be in keeping with both Minke's repeated denouncements
of the self-glorifying ignorance of his native culture throughout the novels and
Pramoedya's numerous condemnations of Javanism in interviews and personal
essays. Yet, as one follows the actions and fates of the characters who do manage
to achieve modern humanity, one cannot help but notice that there is something
very Javanese about the definition of humanity they ascribe to and the ascetic
means by which they go about doing it. The ideal of 'modern humanity' promoted
by those who strive for it resembles the Javanese ideal not only in its emphasis on
self-denial, but also in the importance of contributing to a harmonious and coop
erative community. Unfortunately, in the Darwinian 'jungle' that is the colonial
Indies, their asceticism leads not to greater power, but to defeat, ill health and
death.
Khouw Ah Soe devotes his life's energies to awakening a socialist conscious
ness among his fellow Chinese in the Indies, and is murdered by the Indies
authorities. The Javanese noblewoman Raden Ayu Kartini, 'A modern Pribumi
human...who had to think for herself, abandoning many of the traditional pat
terns', allows her love for her father to subsume her: submitting to his wishes that
she should get married, she suffers the humiliation of marrying a Javanese aristo
crat who already has several mistresses and children, loses her freedom of movement
as a single woman, and dies in childbirth (2006a, p 146). Ang San Mei's renewed
devotion to her homeland leads her to neglect her own health and happiness: she
takes to working day and night, coming home at odd hours or sometimes not at
all. Her secrecy about her activities and whereabouts incurs Minke's jealousy, and
the happiness of their marriage rapidly disintegrates as Minke resentfully removes
himself permanently to the medical school dormitories and avoids any contact
with her. Mei also begins depriving herself of sufficient sleep and food, growing
even paler and thinner. Finally, she contracts hepatitis, which goes undiagnosed
until it is too late save her.
For the sake of others, Khouw's, Kartini's and Mei's physical bodies are respect
ively destroyed, 'imprisoned', overworked and starved. But far from providing
them with the power to vanquish their enemies, their self-denial proves ultimately

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 Pramoedya Ananta Toer's Buru Quartet 121

incompatible with the basic business of day-to-day survival and well-being. It

seems that self-destructive asceticism is also required of Minke as he gives up his
selfish impulses in order to unite the people of the Indies and fight against the
capitalist and colonial powers that be. And through Minke's narration, we gain a
deeper appreciation of the great difficulties of such asceticism.
As previously mentioned, even eating and sex - which one might perceive as
simply necessary for survival - bear traces of base animalism and must be con
trolled by the modern human being. This Earth of Mankind lays the foundation
for such associations in the rest of the Quartet. During the lunch at the Mellema
estate, Robert Suurhof eats 'ravenously as if he hadn't eaten for the last three
days'. In contrast, at the same meal, Nyai eats calmly and Annelies eats 'almost
nothing', busying herself with serving Minke instead (1983, p 22). Sexual inter
course is similarly tainted with animalism. On the first day of her forced
concubineship, Herman Mellema appears to the young Nyai Ontosoroh as a hairy
'white raksasa with the skin of a lizard', casting him as the lustful demon-king
Ravana and her as the kidnapped Sita of the Ramayana myth (1983, p 76). Mellema's
subsequent descent into kasar drunkenness and debauchery, as well as that of his
son Robert, begins with visiting brothels. The former becomes 'an animal, no
longer knowing the difference between right and wrong', and the latter, in a re
pentant letter to his sister, describes himself as 'an animal, even lower than the
horse [she] rides' (1983, p 70; 2002, p 101). Even when sex arises out of mutual
love and affection, as it does when Minke falls into Annelies's arms, its brutal
aspects persist: 'there was only she and I,' Minke recounts, 'violated by a force
that had transformed us into a pair of primeval animals...One repetitive move
ment forced us to become a couple of primeval animals, until afterwards we lay
there, sprawled out.' (1983, p 234)
In this interpretive context, Mei's poor appetite, her resultant thinness, and the
fact that she stops eating entirely when she takes up the Chinese nationalist cause
in earnest, attest to her alus-ness. Notably, she also stops coming home entirely,
the implication being that she has given up sexual relations with Minke in order to
devote herself more wholeheartedly to the Chinese people. Kartini has no desire
to get married, preferring to retain her freedom of movement in society as a single
woman. For both these characters, abstinence from food and sex seems to come
as a matter of course; but for Minke, suppressing such kasar animalism seems to
be far more difficult. At one point in Footsteps, Minke must politely suppress his
overwhelming hunger and patiently wait for a new acquaintance to arrive before
he can start his meal: '...the white rice, still steaming hot, made my large intestine
dance' (2006a, p 438). It is a comical scene, but also suggests some disturbing
parallels between him and the 'ravenous' Robert Suurhof; and even though Minke
and his other companion manage to wait for the acquaintance to return, they still
revert to animalism in the very act of eating. They descend upon the chicken with
ferocity, their mouths 'gleaming with sauce and saliva,' Minke 'growl[ing] like a
cat who had been spotted by its enemy' (2006a, p 441).
Of course, self-control with regard to food appears to be the lesser of Minke's
concerns. One of Minke's most prominent characteristics is his sexuality, or as
Pangemanann (the narrator of the last novel) describes it, his 'weakness for beau
tiful women' (2006b, p 11). Over the course of the tetralogy, he marries three
times, pursuing each of his wives in turn because of his attraction to her beauty:

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122 South East Asia Research

he boldly plants a kiss on Annelies's cheek within hours of first meeting h

drawn to Mei's pale prettiness like a moth to a flame, he follows her home th
the streets of Batavia; and when he first sets eyes on the Princess of Kasiru
looks her over from head to toe, noting her 'perfection as a young girl: her
her breasts, her hips and waist, her legs and feet' (2006b, p 458). Minke ne
engages in blatantly immoral sexual activity - he never visits prostitutes, a
only after the unfortunate deaths of his first and second wives respectively,
he let his desire roam free to settle on another. But it is clear throughout the nov
that his sexuality is only barely kept within acceptable boundaries: he purs
each of his three wives relentlessly before he marries them; his relationship
Annelies before their marriage has a certain element of impropriety to it;
while married to the Princess he gives in to Miriam's pleas to have sex with h
order to give her the child her impotent husband cannot.
Within the Javanese universal order, the reward for sexual self-control - wheth
complete abstinence for certain periods of time, or simply keeping sex withi
bounds of marriage - is reproductive power. Anderson notes that in Javanese thou
'the human seed, and especially the seed of a man of Power, is itself a conce
tion of Power and a means of its transmission' (2006, p 40). Wasting one's '
unnecessarily through promiscuity results in the diffusion, rather than conc
tion, of one's power - a notion that takes on a similar form in the present
when 'men's extramarital sexual activity is associated with uncontrolled naf
and the dispersion of family resources' (Brenner, 1998, p 168). If kept withi
proper channels, however, sexual reproduction enables one to transfer pow
legitimate successors: 'Sexuality without pregnancy, then, would have no p
cal value' (Anderson, 2006, p 40).
Here, the Quartet continues to divorce the concept of alus humanity from
associations with power, and instead, links the reproductive act with the bas
of the natural instinct for self-preservation. As noted previously, Minke view
ignorant peasants of the Indies as 'animals on a breeding farm' who only k
'how to keep themselves alive and breed' (2006a, p 266). As if actively negle
one's physical well-being were not enough, it would seem that the modern h
beings of the novels must forego reproducing themselves as well. The tetral
reformulated standard of alus humanity effectively calls for the human bei
defy the Darwinian logic of the natural world: instead of giving in to one'
stinct to reproduce and replicate oneself, and thus to succeed in the struggle
existence, the modern human being must be willing to refrain from the repr
tive act. Kartini quite literally ceases to exist as a modern human being after
marriage, dying in the very act of childbirth. Mei too dies childless. Notab
neither ever expresses any wish to have children. For both female characte
being a modern human being means relinquishing motherhood, and by the
token, Minke too must forego fatherhood and overcome his own desires for
perpetuation through sexual reproduction.
In Footsteps, Minke experiences a sudden onset of 'instinctual machismo', w
causes him to 'yearn for a child of his own' (2006a, pp 557, 564).10 He attem

The word 1 translate as 'machismo' - kejantanan - comes from the root word,jantan - the
term used for a male animal, and more often than not, in the context of breeding. Except for
excessively colloquial connotations of the word, 'studliness' might actually be a more acc
term.

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 Pramoedya Ananta Toer's Buru Quartet 123

to impregnate his wife, the Princess, but after some months of failure, Minke
discovers that he is impotent:"

'It was I who had failed as a stud. At least, I would never bear a creature whom
I could call my child during these years.'

'I felt troubled: for whom was I working so tirelessly if there would be no child
to experience the results? What was the meaning....knowing that no blood of
mine would join in flowing through the body of that people? A gaping wound
without consolation. Bare, empty. A liter of sweat every day could never close
the wound. A catty of protein and a catty of minerals and sugar every day could
never produce enough energy to fill up the hole. The desire to find comfort in
fulfilling the basic necessities of life struggled to live on, rumbled to be ac
knowledged. Silence! Silence, you. Silence.
Often, the night felt so quiet, and there appeared before me millions of flow
ers, withering, unfertilized.' (2006a, pp 590—591 )12

Here, Minke's inability to reproduce is far more than a mere affront to his manly
pride; it is figured specifically as a life-threatening physical injury to his own
body, a fatal 'gaping wound' that will never heal. The capacity to bear children
becomes commensurate with the capacity for continued individual survival, a means
of propagating one's own self into the future. Summoning together all his powers
of emotional self-control - 'Silence! Silence, you. Silence.' - Minke suppresses
his despair at never seeing his own progeny - extensions of his own self - benefit
from his current efforts at creating a democratic Indies. Instead of working for the
sake of his own flesh and blood, Minke must carry on for others who bear no
blood relation to him.

One might be tempted to say that Minke's inability to bear biological offspring
is of no real consequence, and that the fledgling nationalist movement he gives
birth to is his true flesh and blood. From such a perspective, one might read Minke's
labours, and his eventual sacrifice through his subsequent arrest and death, as an
instance of same-species altruism: Minke expends himself and ultimately dies so
that his followers - his metaphorical 'children' - can themselves continue the task
of evolving from animalism into humanity. Yet I would argue that the inability of
these three modern humans to reproduce their modern humanity through biological

Pramoedya's decision to make Minke infertile was a deliberate decision to run counter to actual
historical fact. Tirto Adi Suryo, the historical figure on whom the character was based, did actu
ally have children. Pramoedya omits this fact from his biography of Tirto (Sang Pemula), but one
of Tirto's grandchildren. Dewi Yuli, was in attendance at an event in December 2007 commemo
rating a century of Indonesian journalism.
Interestingly enough, the English-language Penguin edition (translated by Max Lane) completely
omits the section that reads, 'The desire to find comfort in fulfilling the basic necessities of life
struggled to live on, rumbled to be acknowledged. Silence! Silence, you. Silence.' [Bersenang
semata sampai butuh menolak untuk hidup terus, mendayu-dayu minta diindahkan. Diam! Diam
kau. Diam] (2006a, p 591). In the Lane translation, the entire passage reads as follows: 'Now it
was I who was often disturbed. What was I working so hard for if there was to be no child to savor
the fruits of my work? What did it mean, this "single people" or "multi-people" nation, if none of
my blood was mingling in it? It was an emptiness for which there was no answer. Limp. Empty.
A liter of my perspiration every day would not fill this emptiness. A pound of protein and another
of minerals and sugar would not produce enough energy to bear this burden. Often as I sat in the
stillness of the night I could see in my mind's eye huge fields of wilting flowers, without new
seedlings coming forth.' (Toer, 1990, p 382)

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124 South East Asia Research

reproduction cannot be so easily dismissed. Rather, their infertility is a phy

manifestation of their inability to reproduce their modern humanity in socie
large, despite their best efforts: Kartini is too weak-willed to do so; Me
quickly and it is implied that her accomplishments are meagre; and although M
appears to have some success at first, the animalism of the Pribumi nation
organizations that spring up soon after his arrest implies that Minke's labo
have failed to produce any truly modern human Pribumi nationalists to take
place. The implication is that true humanity simply runs counter to the prac
ties of survival and sustainability in the uncivilized world, and that the true hum
being must be prepared for pointless hardship and death.

Taking the struggle out of class struggle

Just as the Quartet does not so much oppose Javanese culture as call for it
form, putting forth a standard of alus that exposes traditional standards of a
still too kasar, the Quartet also makes critical modifications to classical Ma
philosophy in order to set forth a new standard for socialist conduct: one
similarly insists on the need to disconnect the acquisition of power from the achi
ment of a truly human, truly socialist consciousness. Cheah aligns Pramoed
with the Guinea-Bissauan nationalist Amflcar Cabral and the Martiniquan n
alist Frantz Fanon in the value they place on the instinct for self-preservatio
struggle in the decolonizing process. Accordingly, Cabral argues that 'the o
effective way' of achieving national liberation is 'armed struggle': 'there ca
no national liberation without the use of liberating violence, on the part o
nationalist forces, in answer to the criminal violence of the agents of imperia
(Cabral, 1979, p 134). Fanon similarly believes that 'for the native, life can
spring up again out of the rotting corpse of the settler' - the colonized peo
must become a 'great organism of violence which has surged upward in rea
to the settler's violence in the beginning' (Fanon, 1965, p 93). Flowever, the
lutionary decolonization in Pramoedya's Quartet eschews such violence, basi
itself not so much on the organismic will to live as the determination to die
more specifically, to die a purposeless death.
Death as a necessary part of class struggle and for the sake of the revolutio
cause is a relatively standard feature of Marxist rhetoric. Katerina Clark obs
that such instances of heroic martyrdom were relatively common in Soviet
lutionary novels, of which Gorky's Mother is an example. Typically, the he
death is depicted as glorious and saint-like, and beneficial to the revolution
cause: rather than dying in vain, their deaths inspire their comrades to carr
(Clark, 2000, pp 49, 64). The hero sacrifices his life, but also experiences a
after death - 'a secularized version of the Christian death-and-transfiguratio
tern: the hero's "resurrection" in the ongoing movement, often symbolized b
of his comrades picking up the fallen banner' (Clark, 2000, p 49). In contrast
deaths of Khouw, Kartini, Mei and Minke are related sparsely and briefly,
certainly not with any melodrama. Khouw, Kartini and Minke die off-page
never know their last words or thoughts. We witness Mei's last moments thr
the eyes of Minke, but he emphasizes that she dies without a word. Even tho
the late Khouw, Kartini and Mei do eventually inspire Minke to follow thei
amples, their influence ends with Minke, whose influence seems to end with

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 Pramoedya Ananta Toer's Buru Quartet 125

own self. Almost no-one remembers his accomplishments or dares even to ac

knowledge him after his release from exile; his lasting contribution to the nationalist
cause is questionable; and the only person who fully appreciates and admires
Minke's 'wholly human' character, instead of following in his footsteps, devotes
himself to destroying the nationalist movement (2006b, p 30). That person is Jacques
Pangemanann, a Pribumi policeman in the employ of the Dutch government, and
the narrator of Glass House. On one hand, Pangemanann brings about a colonial
sell-out; he is a traitor to his own people. He dutifully carries out his assigned task
of stifling nationalist opposition to the government, including spying on and ar
resting Minke. Yet he does so all the while plagued by shame and remorse over
his choice to abandon 'the human Pangemanann of old' for the sake of survival
(2006b, p 98). Given the choice between being 'eaten by the colonial officials,
who were like sharks bent on prey', and becoming a shark himself, Pangemanann
opts for the latter (2006b, p 52). But even as he works towards their defeat, he
secretly admires Minke's efforts and hopes that the Pribumi nationalists will suc
ceed and establish a free and democratic Indies.
Unfortunately, the humanity of the Pribumi nationalist movement also cannot
withstand the pressures of the colonial Indies 'jungle' to adapt and survive, and
after Minke's arrest, the nationalists devolve into a state of primitive and unculti
vated nature. At first, Pangemanann views the natural and prolific 'blossoming'
[perkembangan] of Pribumi nationalism as a sign that modern human progress is
indeed taking place in the Indies.13 Although he himself lacks the courage to defy
his colonial superiors, he takes secret joy in watching Pribumi nationalism grow
like an embryo in the womb, spring like mushrooms from the ground, swell like a
tidal wave from 'life's ocean, churning with modern elements,' which will 'ex
plode and crash leaving nothing behind'. It is part of the 'tornado' of progress
'attacking the face of humanity' (2006b, pp 260, 235, 1). The naturalized terms in
which the Pribumi are described are further foregrounded by the title of the novel,
Glasshouse or Rumah Kaca, which is also the Indonesian term for 'greenhouse'.
The title refers to the elaborate metaphor used by Pangemanann for his surveil
lance of the Pribumi nationalists: 'All Pribumi...I had put into a glasshouse, and
placed on my desk. Everything could be clearly seen. That was my job: to observe
all the movements of those within the glasshouse. That was the Governor-General
desired. The Indies could never change - it had to be preserved.' (2006b, p 101 )14
However, it becomes increasingly apparent that the nationalists' transformation
into wild-growing plants and untameable forces of nature is a sign of degenera
tion: rather than taming the wilderness, they have become one with it. While
Pangemanann first regards the colonial system as a metaphorical hothouse that
keeps the society of the Indies in a natural 'primitive' state, as the novel progresses,
he begins to suspect that the colonial system is not necessarily wholly responsible

While perkembangan can be translated simply as 'development' or 'expansion', it can also be

translated as 'blooming', 'flowering' or 'blossoming'.
Oddly enough, the obvious association of the title with a greenhouse or hothouse has been mostly
overlooked by critics, with the exception of Cheah, who notes briefly that the term 'evokes the
controlled environment of a hothouse in which plants can flourish' (p 313). Max Lane, in the
Penguin English-language edition, chooses to translate rumah kaca somewhat cumbrously as
'house of glass', and scholars such as Rudolf Mrazek and Razif Bahari have gone straight for the
high-flown theoretical implications of the metaphor, reading it solely as a Benthamian panopticon
- the ultimate symbol of the ultimate surveillance and policing power of the state.

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126 South East Asia Research

for the Pribumi's primitiveness. Pangemanann grows increasingly disillusio

with the Pribumi nationalists who follow Minke and with their inability to
ure up to the standard set by him. Even the outspoken socialists among them
to meet the mark (2006b, p 30).15 After Minke's departure, the squabbles am
the Pribumi leaders become more prevalent, and Pangemanann begins to re
their astounding proliferation with scepticism and some trepidation, growing
convinced that the greenhouse of colonial control is not so much isolating
Pribumi from the modern world as simply keeping their natural wildness in c
the colonized Pribumi are ferocious 'tigers' who have been tamed into 'over
domesticated cats' (2006b, p 267). Pangemanann is certainly no supporter of
lonialism, despising it as a form of barbaric animalism; yet he fears that gran
political independence to the people of the Indies will result only in the re
ment of one set of animals with another: '...they might become a pack of w
wolves who knew no limitations....Self-rule was surely a beautiful dream fo
Pribumi, for it would let them fulfill their dreams of unleashing all their a
appetites, which till now had been pent up by the fear of the Government.' (2
p 606) The rapid multiplication of Pribumi organizations and leaders produc
infighting rather than cooperation: 'In the Indies, for the peoples of the Indi
seemed that each person was afraid to lose his place and fought to dominat
(2006b, p 602).
It is revealed that the same hunger for individualistic gain exhibited by t
European imperialists also drives the Pribumi nationalists' participation in t
struggle that will overthrow those very imperialists. The Quartet implies that
revolution - the replacement of barbaric jungle with a society of civilized hu
beings - will only occur when class struggle is no longer a brutal Darwinian strugg
for existence; when animalism will not be countered with animalism, but inst
with actions befitting modern human beings, whatever adverse consequences
result. As Pramoedya wrote in The Lonely Song of a Mute concerning the d
pointing development of the Indonesian Revolution, 'It turned out tha
ideologues, the Brahmin political leaders, were not as revolutionary as their
teachings... what developed were old conditions in new circumstances: thepri
the satria caste whose satria-ness had already faded, determined everything
entirety.' (2000, p 178)
For Pangemanann, exceptional individuals like Minke, Kartini and Ang
Mei are admirable because they have remained true to the ideals of socialism
even in a world where true socialism cannot sustain or reproduce itself. In tr
the almost imperceptible devolution of the early twentieth-century Indies so
ist-nationalist movement into animalistic squabbles for power, the Bum Qu
provides an indirect commentary on the transformation of the newly indepen
Republic of Indonesia under Sukarno's socialist leadership into the capitalist
and corruption-ridden New Order under Suharto's reign. Just as the Indies nation

15 Even those who bear more resemblance to Minke - the communist-nationalists Marco Kartodikromo
and Semaoen - fall short of the example set by Minke. Marco returns from exile only to lapse into
silence, failing to make good on his vow to re-establish the reputation of his former teacher
Minke; moreover, he retreats from the public arena, penning anonymous articles that exhort oth
ers to take action. Semaoen is passionate and outspoken, but is described as somewhat vain and
out of touch with the common people: 'He stirred up passion as if this world already belonged to
him....you could be sure that this teenage boy didn't yet fully understand the meaning of the
words he loved so....Semaoen failed to understand his own people.' (Toer, 2006b, pp 609-611)

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 Pramoedya Ananta Toer's Buru Quartet 127

movement becomes a means for individuals to obtain greater influence for them
selves, the ostensible protection of Indonesia's democratic ideals against the threat
of communism in 1965 became a means for Suharto and other anti-Sukarno indi
viduals to overthrow Sukarno and place themselves in power.
Pangemanann's despair, his bitter appraisal and dismissal of Indonesian nation
alism, is also Pramoedya's own despair, his own bitter appraisal and dismissal of
the devolution of modern Indonesia. Pangemanann's fear for the future independ
ent Indonesian state is realized in Pramoedya's present, and with the concluding
novel of the Buru Quartet, his tetralogy becomes a scathing critique of both the
colonial Dutch Indies and the post-colonial reality of Indonesia under the Suharto
regime. Pramoedya and others jailed for their political beliefs were living proof
that the demise of the colonial era apparently did not bring about conditions any
more favourable to fostering the development of truly modern human beings. At
its core, the Republic of Indonesia was the wilderness of Buru. In the past or the
present, under imperial rule or under self-rule, it would seem that one must re
main inhuman in order to survive.
We can read the Buru Quartet as espousing a Darwinian-socialist version of the
doctrine of original sin: animalism is the inbuilt inheritance of all humanity, ut
terly inescapable, manifest in the tyranny of feudalism and capitalism, as well as
the proletariat nation's dogged determination to struggle against that tyranny and
prevail. Yet, the animal instinct for self-preservation and self-perpetuation, while
not admirable, plays a necessary role in the Pribumi nationalists' success in sur
viving and flourishing despite the colonial government's efforts to exterminate
them. And if some amount of animal barbarism is required in order to extricate
oneself successfully from the grip of colonial power, one wonders whether
Pramoedya's indirect critique of the inhuman post-colonial Indonesian state un
der the New Order is simultaneously a troubled reflection on whether the Indonesian
state ever could, in fact, have turned out differently. In the tetralogy, Indonesian
nationalism is tainted with animalism even in its earliest stages, more than 40
years before the corruption of the Indonesian state with the onset of the capitalis
tic Suharto regime. Organize and become a raksasa, Mei advises Kartini, one frail
human to another before their tragic deaths. Unfortunately, that is exactly what
the nationalist movement ends up doing. The disturbing question raised by the
Buru Quartet is this: Can the post-colonial nation - given the necessity of adopt
ing the animalistic, selfish will to live - ever actually successfully evolve into a
society of modern human beings?
As suggested by the qualities of self-destructiveness, self-neglect and infertil
ity, which Pramoedya deliberately bestows upon his truly human heroes and
heroines, modern humanity can only be truly attained by those who act not out of
a will to live but out of a willingness to perish, each alone - the likes of Kartini
with her crippling, self-subsuming love for her father and for others; Mei with her
self-imposed sleeplessness, starvation and ill health; Minke with his grandiose
and overambitious nationalist dreams - then what emerges is a socialist reality on
earth achieved not through the dialectic of class struggle - the eventual victory of
the proletariat - but rather through individuals deliberately dying, relinquishing
entirely the will to live, or even further, in order to evolve out of barbarism and
into full humanity.
At one point in Glasshouse, Pangemanann reflects on the inevitability of death,

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128 South East Asia Research

making the cynical observation to his wife that 'millions of ants...thousand

millions of insects' and 'millions of human beings have disappeared from the
of the earth....Who could be sentimental?' (2006b, p 52) In a sense, the tetr
documents the refusal of various human beings to accept the inevitable reali
their own death, and the ultimate harm caused by that refusal. The tyrann
ambitions of the traditional Javanese aristocrats, of the Dutch colonial author
and of the sugar-industry magnates obviously stem from the instinctual desi
survive and to flourish. But no less driven by that same instinctual desire ar
new Indonesian nationalists who struggle to overthrow the colonial regime
even the sudden proliferation of characters in Footsteps and Glasshouse who
don the Indies for the enlightened 'fairy-tale land[s]' of Europe and America w
they can flourish as modern humans free from the tyranny and oppressio
demic in life in the colonial Indies (2006a, p 309). To escape the 'jungle' of I
life, Nyai Ontosoroh and her new family flee to Paris, as does Pangemanan
family. Pangemanann's supervisor leaves for America - the land of the free
similar reasons. Even Pangemanann's abrupt return to the Catholic faith at
very end of the tetralogy - his 'preparation of [his] self to enter the eternal
(2006b, p 621) - is simply another version of the will to live - to procu
eternal afterlife in a heavenly realm where peace and justice already reign,
where he no longer has to live with the guilt of turning into an animal for the s
of survival. By fleeing rather than trying to effect change in the Indies as M
does, as Khouw and Kartini and Mei do, these characters evade their respon
ity to their fellow inhabitants of the Indies who remain trapped in the barb
conditions of this bumi manusia -this earth of mankind.
If the only thing preventing the full attainment of modern humanity is the over
riding desire to live, whether on earth or in heaven, then the only way for the
socialist individual actually to achieve modern humanity is to come to terms with
death as an unavoidable fact of existence - to resign oneself to the same unavoid
able fate of the millions of insignificant ants, insects and humans who have gone
before. The truly evolved community - fully modern and fully human - is not
conceived of as a community of individuals struggling to live. Instead, the social
ist community must achieve a far more difficult ideal and become a community of
individual organisms determined to face the negative consequences that result
from remaining faithful to the principles of humanity in the present, without re
gard for prolonging the future existence of themselves or their cause. This vision
is a far cry from the usual glorification of the red-blooded, lusty, fighting spirit so
characteristic of traditional post-colonial Marxism - the call for 'the forcible over
throw of all existing social conditions' and the statement that for the decolonizing
nation, 'life can only spring up again out of the rotting corpse of the [colonizing]
settler' (Marx and Engels, 2000, p 258; Fanon, 1965, p 93). Rather, life will spring
up again out of the corpses of those who have laid down their lives for the sake of
their ideals and nothing else.

The powerlessness of powerlessness

In the same 1992 essay I quote above, Pramoedya reflected on what he called 'the
problem of power' in relation to Javanese culture and civilization: 'It is necessary
that I emphasize the problem of power, because it is this that tends to turn people

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 Pramoedya Atlanta Toer's Buru Quartet 129

into bandits...' (1996, p 5). It is precisely this 'problem of power' that the Quartet
tackles in envisioning a Javanese cultural system and a socialist ideology that
value powerlessness rather than power, and that advocate attaining humanity even
when misery, loss and even death will follow.
The Quartet refuses to deny the powerlessness of powerlessness, to make self
denial and self-sacrifice a roundabout way of procuring power for oneself; and
through its refusal, it calls its Indonesian readers to face the grim reality of the
beasts that lurk within them and the uncivilized wilderness which they inhabit,
and which they have inhabited as a people for centuries upon centuries, from
feudal days to the Suharto era; and, many would say, even from the post-Suharto
era of the present. History repeats itself, the Quartet tells us: the 'heroic' felling of
one demon establishes a tyrant king in its place; the felling of one ruler only
means the rise of another; the history of Indonesia is an endless series of
revolutions.. .of a sort - cycle after cycle of political power sought and gained and
lost. With regard to the possibility that humanity will eventually triumph in trans
forming the Indonesian nation, the Quartet makes no promises; its author was
thoroughly sick of them. But in interpreting the defeat and martyrdom of truly
human individuals not as practical and nation-changing triumphs, but as triumphs
in their own right - independent and individual instances of successful human
evolution - the Quartet shows that while modern human beings may lack the
power to transform the wilderness around them, they are able to keep the wilder
ness at bay in and around their own selves. And perhaps some day, enough modern
human beings will each decide to do so communally - enough to create a civilized
space for a whole group, or even a nation, to inhabit. Perhaps. The Quartet tells us
that the responsibility rests not on some sweeping large-scale shift in power, but
rather, on each and every individual.

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