Literature or Revolution

WRITING ROBUST IN A POSTCOLONIAL METROPOLIS

It is a question of building, which is at the root of the social unrest Rudolf Mrzek
of today: architecture or revolution. . . . Architecture or
Revolution. Revolution can be avoided.
Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture (1922)

Between 1992 and 2000, on every university summer vacation,

and once in
1995 on a six-month stay, I interviewed old people of Indonesia,
mainly in Jakarta, the Indonesian metropolis, about their youths
and childhoods.1 These old people lived through the colonial period,
the Japanese occupation during World War II, and the years of the
independent Indonesia after 1949. I had expected that I would be
told about the transition from colonialism to postcolo- nialism and
about the Indonesian failed (or unfinished) revolution. I had also
hoped to learn more about the relation between written and oral
documents and, namely, how the tone and accent of both an
interviewer and the inter- viewees may cast the research and its
conclusions.
Indeed, it turned out that the most rewarding part was how the
talking went. How we moved and stumbled through a particular
landscape that was theirs and, in a revealingly different way, mine.
As I listen to the tapes (to use Le Corbusier again), The coordinated
physiological sensations in terms of volume, surface, contour and
color, now as then, afford an intense lyricism. 2

Book in a House

When I think of the insides of the homes in Jakarta, and when I

think of literature as part of the houses, I recall significance of
leaf litter rather than of bookshelves of printed pages,
paperbacks, hardcovers, some ancient and some recent, lying
where they had been laid, read or yet to be read, weighing on,
squeezing each other, moldering (in that climate), as if growing
out of the rest. Always there were some textbooks, old and
new indiscriminately in the pile; there might be an issue of
Newsweek, for instance, left by a foreign visitor before me.
Magazines and newspapers predominated, and often the hosts
used them to wrap a present, a piece of fruit, a bottle of herb
medicine, a piece of batik cloth, to send me on my way: As all
vagrants know, newspapers keep you warm. 3

Social Text 86, Vol. 24, No. 1, Spring 2006. 2006 by Duke University Press.
 In this way, the belles lettres in my recollection of Jakarta
are that kind of litter that Joyce brought to light for us by a
simple misspelling. 4
The people in Jakarta, among these books, in these houses,
open to those streets, remain in my mind as exquisitely litter-
ate. The heaps and piles of paper, by their unhidden
thingness, may be close to the remainder that Julia Kristeva
and the Indian Vedas talk about: Upon remainder the name
and the form are founded, upon remainder the world is
founded.5
This was the space of literature, architecture, and, let me say,
revolution through which I was to be passing. Halaman, indeed,
in several of the Indo- nesian languages, means page of a
book as well as yard of a house.6 I could be paging through
the (postcolonial) landscape.
Besides the litter, the Jakarta houses I had been let
into, and as I recall them now, were filled and overflowing with
sounds, voices of chil- dren, adults, birds, and vehicles from
the streetoften armed vehicles, because this was the 1990s
and thus the time of military dictatorship in Indonesia. The
remaining space of the houses, if any, seemed filled by
moments of silences, when the tape ran out, when an old
person being interviewed had to go to the bathroom, or when I
had been asked to switch my tape recorder off. In this last case
namely, ghosts would appear of dead people and of those who
disappeared in the concentration camps and prisons of the
regime and who were better not to be mentioned. These
moments especially made the houses litter-ary space
complete: Silence is [speechs] foundation and punctuation .
. . 7

Mrs. Sukarsih was in her late eighties when I met her, for the
first time, in 1997. She was the widow of a prominent
Indonesian freedom fighter. In 1935 she followed her husband,
when he was sent to the Dutch colonial concentration camp at
Boven Digoel, in New Guinea. During our first interview, I
asked her what was the single worst thing in the camp, and
she moved me deeply by saying: Mosquitoes. I wanted to
hear more and invited myself for a second time. Mrs. Sukarsih
was already waiting for me. She sat on one side of a low coffee
table, and she seated me on the opposite side. She spoke long
and monotonously, in a sweet and hardly audible voice. When
she ended, she stood up and handed me, across the table, a
couple of pages of paper. There was typed text on the pages,
and they were bound together, laminated, and, on a cover,
there was written in big ornamental letters, BoVeN DIGoeL
and her, Mrs. Sukarsihs, the authors, name. It was made

104 Rudolf Mrzek Literature or Revolution 104

 just for me. What she had told me, I later found, verbatim, was
there: a book. 8
Book as a Gift Few things

A bookand one can feel it more strongly in a (post)colony can be more

where every- thing is more normal, more developed, more
cultural, more ornamented, and more veiledis often in excess dangerous (in a
of a house.
Another old lady often returns in my thoughts. Mrs. Sosro
colony more than
was also the widow of an important freedom fighter, and she
had been a freedom fighter herself. I interviewed her several
times in the early 1990s, and, elsewhere) than
among other things, I asked her about reading. During one of her many
stays in prison, she told me, in a Dutch colonial prison, she a book given
became very
sick. In the prison hospital, one morning, on one side of her bed, there
stood a prison doctor, and, on the other side, there was a envelop
plainclothes police agent. Can she read? she heard the her like
police agent asking. of course, she is a political. of course a
she can read, the doctor answered. The two men still talked cloud,
for a while, and, as they were leaving, Mrs. Sosro told me, the to
police agent slipped a book under her pillow.9 cover
There can be few things more dangerous than a good- (explai
hearted (and colonial) police agent. Mrs. Sosros voice was n)
rising and gaining in inten- sity as she explained to me that the everyth
book was Sherlock Holmes, a Sherlock Holmes, and how she ing.
had read it. She had liked some parts of it, she had giggled at Tho
other moments, but, often, she had been bored. What she was se not
signaling to me, I feel, was something akin to what the naughty extraor
boy Jean Genet, in apparently so different a culture, signaled dinary
to his mistress: A mistress once said to him, My maid must be among
pleased. I give her my dresses. Mrs.
Thats nice, he replied, does she give you Sosros
hers? 10 consoci
Few things can be more dangerous (in a colony more than ates
elsewhere) than a book given as a gift. Through all her laughter and
and intensity, thus I recall it, Mrs. Sosro wanted to tell me, compa-
and herself, that she was tough enough, even with the book triots
given to like, to dislike, and to be bored, as she chose; that accept
the book so good-heartedly slipped under her pillow could be ed the
unmade as a gift. Mrs. Sosro was an extraordinary lady, and gift.
she was aware that the gift had been descending on her, Namely
because she was in prison, because she could not move, and , the
(which came to the very same thing) because she could read, civilize
and, thus, in that prison, hospital, and culture, she was a d, the
whole person, a modern person, and, potentially, a gift-ed one. alphab
She was fighter enough to know that the gift that she was about etical
to be given was the ultimate gift to be dumped on her, to native

105 Rudolf Mrzek Literature or Revolution 105

s, did and eagerly so. The books thus given and accepted as a gift.
the mystery stories, the love stories, the thrillers, the textbooks
(all of these books thus

106 Rudolf Mrzek Literature or Revolution 106

given instantly became textbooks)filled the space and became
the space. I had been sent to school, one of old Mrs.
Sosros friends told me, so that I would not remain buta huruf
[blind to letters] and buta pengalaman [blind to experience].11
That gift of the book, of letters, of pages turned, of pleasure
learned, was given and accepted to grow into the ultimate gift
of experiencethe experience of growing up, the standard
experience, the sensual experience, the disciplinary
experience, the patriotic experience, even,12 and, in due
course, the experience of freedomliber ty as even the
euphony of the word might have suggested: liberty growing out
and again disappearing into liber, the book.
Were that gift of a book accepted by Mrs. Sosro, and I
believe she knew it, she, a good fighter and a good wanderer,
would be launched on that shining path toward that modernity,
and that paradise. Then, at the end of this journey, she might
reach the point where the most gift-ed wanderers of modernity
Dantes wanderer the earliest among them had arrived:

In the depth [of eternal

Light], I saw contained,
bound by love in one volume,
that which [otherwise] is scattered in leaves through the
universe.13

Reading a Book

I might have guessed that, in reading, resistance could be

contained.
Roeslan Abdoelgani, as a young man, saw some action
during the physical era of the Indonesian Revolution against
Dutch colonialism, at the famous Battle of Surabaya, in
November 1945. In the independent Indonesia after 1949, he
became a politician, a minister in several govern- ments, and,
during the late 1950s and early 1960s, principal adviser to
President Sukarno in matters of ideology and state doctrine.
Mr. Abdoel- gani survived all the upheavals and purges,
even the massacres after Sukarnos fall in 196566. Recently,
in a kind of obituary by an Australian scholar, he was referred to
as a squirrel.
I met Mr. Abdoelgani in 1997, when he was in his late
seventies, in a big and empty office, and with a young and
efficient secretary, both of which he had been permitted to
keep. We talked about his (colonial) childhood, and it was, as
usual, a very nice talk. At one moment, Mr. Abdoelgani
decided that he wanted to show me something. He asked his
secretary to bring us a book from the (also otherwise empty)
cabinet in the corner of the room. She did, and he turned the
pages until he found a picture of a soccer teamsome Dutch,
some eurasian, and a couple of Indonesian boys in
sport uniforms. Mr. Abdoelgani looked at the picture for a long As we talked, he
time. The secretary, unlike me, knew that her boss was
hesitating. She reached over our shoulders and pointed at one mentioned that
of the boys in the picture: This is you, she told him. Mr.
Abdoelgani then pointed at the boy and said to me: It is me.
he had written
He said it again, and then, to make sure, he took my index
finger, and pointed with it at the boy on the page. It is you, I
said.14 t wo volumes
I met Jusuf Mawengkang, my second ideal type of
reading, in the same large and virtually empty building, about the camp.
Gedung Perintis Kemerdekaan,
the House of Pioneers of Freedom. His office, equally large and empty,
was just one floor and exactly above the office of Mr.
The first volume,
Abdoelgani. Mr.
Mawengkang was a survivor of the same eras as Mr. Abdoelgani. There
was a male secretary. Mr. Mawengkang was in his late eighties he said, hilang,
when we met this time.15 In 1936, this much I knew, he was sent
to the same concen- tration camp as Mrs. Sukarsih, but he got lost. . .
was kept there much longer, until the end of colonial rule, in
fact, in 1942. As we talked, he mentioned that he had written
. The second
two volumes about the camp. The first volume, he said,
hilang, got lost: it turned out that, when the volume had been
typed, Mr. Mawengkang and his secretary had not thought to volume, however,
use carbon paper. Just in case, he still directed his secretary to
look into a cabinet in the corner. No, indeed, it was hilang, the was extant, and I
secretary called back, lost. 16

The second volume, however, was extant, and I was shown was shown it.
it. None
of my friends in Jakarta, or any historian, I believed, had known anything
about this thick tome, again evidently typed as a single copy
only. The typescript was bound, and it had a richly
ornamented cover BoVeN DIGoeLin the same style as the
memorial that Mrs. Sukarsih had given me.17 Could I have the
book, just to photocopy it quickly and bring it back the next
day? oh, sure. (It had been, probably, somehow like this
that the first volume had been lost.)
Before Mr. Mawengkang gave me the book, however, he
pulled a little staple machine out of a drawer of his desk. Then,
with me and the secretary watching, he went on stapling
together, as far as I could see, the first few pages of the volume.
The neatness of the book was quickly gone. The pages,
clumsily stapled, bulged and swelled, and the book appeared
increasingly damaged. At one moment, Mr. Mawengkang ran
out of staples. He pointed to the secretary, who left and came
back after quite a long time with another much bigger machine.
The furrowed hands of Mr. Mawengkang clearly got weak and
they were trembling. I tried to help, and our hands touched.
(of course, as soon as I was out of Mr. Mawengkangs
sight, I, my scholarly filthy self, pulled out the staples, and I
looked in, between the pages. The lines not to be seen were
the blessing of the book by the dic- tator of the moment,
General Soeharto, who, however, as it had by now
been clear even to Mr. Mawengkang, would soon lose his
power: Dear Mawengkang, it stood there, without you and
your friends, the Freedom Fighters, I would never have become
the President.)

Reading by the other is a treacherous territory to enter. Rarely,

and espe- cially in a (post)colony, one is invited to share it.
The heavy breathing of Mr. Abdoelgani as he was pointing
with my finger on the page, and the even heavier breathing of
Mr. Mawengkang as he struggled with the staples, to me, has
come close to the rare momentto resisting a book as
something given, to reading as a dialogue, as touching, as the
rhythmic interruption of the logos.18
This is an adventure, of course, that borders on the
irresponsible. It might even come hazardously close to a
resignation of our (intellectual) power. Felicitously, throughout
modernity a full-fledged machinery of reading has been
invented to get us off the brink.
Tautogorically, as Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling put it
cat- egorically and tautologically we bore into the books
of the others, in search, say, of hidden text; thus we tend to
explain it.19 Through close reading, so we say,
signification, or re-reading (of our previous readings),
we are building up the books volumetric effect (to invoke
Le Corbusier once more): Wir . . . broschieren jetzt alles
(now, we put everything between covers), as Goethe already
knew, 20 and he could not yet have any idea what the modern,
the colonial, and the postcolonial reading would become.
In this way, we open the book for Mrs. Sosro, and close it
again. We made ourselves capable of safely reading books of,
and for, everybody, even of, and for, the most dangerous
others, and (post)colonies are full of themof the mad, those
not willing to read their books our way, and the children, those
not yet literate: The mad, once mute, today, are heard by
everyone; one has found the grid on which to collect their once
absurd and indecipherable messages. Children speak . . .
because adult reason has given itself the most subtle means to
avert the threat of their silence. 21
Yet another old man of (post)colonial Indonesia comes to
my mind as I think of reading. Andries Teeuw, through the
second half of the last century, has been the most imposing
historian of Indonesian literature. During the early postcolonial
era, in the 1950s and early 1960s, he pub- lished a two-
volume textbook, The History of Modern Indonesian Literature.
Since that time, he has been revising and reissuing it
regularly. Those among the modern Indonesian writers who
could find themselves in either of Mr. Teeuws two volumes
were in. Those who were out wrote to get in, whatever the
costs. I asked Mr. Teeuw, now in his eighties and retired in
Leiden, if he was not worried a little that, perhaps, he had been
mold-
ing, constructing the Indonesian literature. Not at all, he told
me, I am just setting a standard.22

Writing a Book

According to Georg Lukcs, the novel is the form of

transcendental homelessness. 23 In the words of Sren
Kierkegaard, similarly, The art would be to be able to feel
homesick, even though one is at home. 24
According to Theodor Adorno, who was without a home at the
moment and thus knew best:

In his text, the writer sets up house. Just as he trundles papers,

books, pencils, documents, untidily from room to room, he creates
the same disorder in his thought. . . . For a man who no longer
has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live. . . . But now he
lacks a storeroom, and it is hard in any case to part from leftovers.
So he pushes them along in front of him, in danger finally of filling
his pages with them. In the end, the writer is not even allowed to
live in his writing. 25

Book kills cathedral, in Victor Hugos famous image of

Notre Dame de Paris26 it substitutes for the dominant edifice
and dwelling place, in the modern West, and through it, the
modern world. The power of the book, using another of Le
Corbusiers terms, is in its habitable volume. 27
When it is printed in a book, even Mrs. Sosros breathing
becomes an architectural device.

As soon as anyone anywhere in the world begins today to speak

about the question of writing in Indonesia, the name of
Pramoedya Ananta Toer pops up with an almost irritating
inevitability. This is not to say that he is not a great writer.
Indeed, and with justification, if the Nobel Prize for Literature
descends on Indonesia in the foreseeable future, it will cer-
tainly descend on the head (or typewriter, rather) of
Pramoedya. 28
Pramoedya lost his house. His house in Jakarta was
destroyed, when, as a suspected communist fellow traveler, he
was arrested, in 1966. Pramoedya was put in prison and then
sent to a (postcolonial) concentration camp on the isolated
island of Buru, where he spent the next thirteen years of his life.
He elaborates: our house was destroyed. With the big river
stones that our neighbors had originally brought for building
their own new house. 29
Pramoedya is truly powerful (I believe most powerful) when
he writes about the lost house. With the ever-present anguish
of homelessness he writes as if he were building the lost house
for himself andhe lost his
 house in a countrywide wave of destructionfor others as well.
Like for the ancient Greeks, for Pramoedya building is an act
of citizenship.30
When I began my interviews, the particular dictatorship in
Indonesia had been waning, and by the late 1990s the
particular Indonesian dictator was gone. Now, Pramoedya was
back from the camp, in Jakarta, and writ- ing again. He had
also built a new house for himself, and he was building new
houses for othersliterally so.
I have known Pramoedya since my Prague time and his
Prague visit in the 1960s, but I saw him in his new house for the
first time in 1998. 31 This was a moment of riots in Jakarta, and
I was advised not to use the usual Blue Bird taxi, but a Silver
Bird much more imposing, shining black, with a wireless
radio a kind of Humvee of that time and place. As the huge
vehicle turned off the main road into the street where
Pramoedya lived, there was the usual tropical-city sight of
fruit, vegetable, and cake vendors on the sidewalk. As my car
was slowly pushing through the street that was too narrow for
it, the people on the sidewalk, without as much as even looking,
in the manner of a good-natured if a little bored traffic police
officer, waved: straight on, turn left, and there, you see, it is,
the house, the fifth on the left. Because the car was so big, so
shining, and so flagrantly from elsewhere, the people on the
street were in no doubt that I was going to see Pramoedya and
that he would talk to me about writing.
In the front room of Pramoedyas house, where we sat,
there was an enlarged reproduction on the wall of a photograph
(originally obviously beautiful, old, and gently fading) of
Pramoedyas parents, next to a cheer- ful and colorful
photograph of himself recently receiving an honorary degree
at an American university. For the rest, the long inner wall on
the left from the entrance toward the back of the house was
almost entirely covered, like a poster stand, with the enlarged
reproductions of the cov- ers of Pramoedyas books translated
into Dutch, Japanese, english, and German, as far as I could
see. 32 Pramoedya, indeed, talked to me about writing, and I
stayed until it was almost dark. With the city around us, it was
as good a house, and as safe, as a house of a writer could be.
As Bertolt Brecht, the greatest of writers (and a fellow traveler,
too), has written about his house, and about himself:

Papered inside with chilly words to

say . . . The grave soft wind
Now runs more swiftly through my
walls . . . Into me it rained. 33

11 Rudolf Mrzek Literature or Revolution 11

0 0
 Throughout the afternoon, we were almost never alone. By
the same street that my Silver Bird had negotiated, Jakarta
students were arriving,

111 Rudolf Mrzek Literature or Revolution 111

 on scooters or on foot, single or in groups, the political activists
of Refor- masi, a Reformation, to cleanse Indonesia of
dictatorship (again). As I was leaving, at the turn of the street I
saw more of them still coming. The vendors, also, were still
there, talking among themselves, still hardly rais- ing their eyes
as they, with the gestures of some elegance often repeated,
directed the students who came for the first time, up the
street, toward the great writers house. There, there it was,
veiled by hope, what Certeau described as sociocultural
tautology between its author (a learned group), its objects
(books, manuscripts, etc.), and its (educated) public.34 And,
there it was, most significantly of all, at the shining paths end,
or rather at its vanishing point, in the depth of [eternal
Light], bound by love in one volume that which [otherwise]
is scattered in leaves through the universe: the book.

Surplus Value

Karl Marx in Jakarta more than elsewhere comes to

me in my thoughts, and often he holds hands with Mrs. Sosro.
Looking with Marx, I see that the book that Pramoedya
Lukcs, Kierkegaard, or Adorno was writing appears to be
not truly a shelter, not entirely a house: the beds to rest in,
the windows to admit the light, the doors inviting out for a
journey. The book that Pramoedya and the others have been
writing, the edifice they are thus building, seems essentially
something else. Walking through the building, I find that the
book with Marx, at leastappears as a site of production.
Through willing, writing, printing, binding, and selling, the
people of the book under stress are being produced and pro-
duce themselves into categories, and are reproduced as such.
The wealthy category the capitalists of the book, own the
means of production: printing presses, paper, ink, and,
eventually, they even own the space for reading. 35 Through
reading, they suck the people out of their homes, into the
libraries and bookshops, or places that look like that. The whole
world, out of the site of production, ideally for the capitalists,
becomes eventually a bookshop, a library, or a place that looks
like that. Capitalists produce everything that may bring profit.
In this case also, they produce meaning.
The workers at this site of production, even less than
elsewhere, are necessarily like what Jean-Paul Sartre called
dirty hands, or Pramoedya, hungry class.36 They may
rather be like that kuli zetter, typesetter in one of
Pramoedyas short stories, who could not understand letters
that he setbut they want to learn! 37 Thus, more easily, they

11 Rudolf Mrzek Literature or Revolution 11

2 2
 are made a category by the book, and, after some time, they
even look like a book.
The superior They look like those men and women in the early-twentieth-
century Indonesian photographs, which Karen Strassler
workers, writers, discovered in the ateliers of Central Java: they face the camera
head-on, they hold a book as what it is, a photographers prop,
the radical and they look equally impressive: paper-thin or paper-thick. 38
These workers are readers, or they certainly aspire to it, and
among them thus they are tied to the book. At this, like at any other
capitalist site of production and more, extortion of surplus
at least, indeed value . . . presupposes . . . concomitance.39
For these workers, it is the book that gives capitalism its
evidently, feel meaning. What these workers are robbed of, and what they
are left with often just the book in their handsremains
incalculable, purely (bookishly), a value as indefinite,
the constraints
circulatory, and autotelic growth, something very close to
what Kant called a dignity. 40
of their site of There is a crucial subcategory produced at each capitalist
site of pro- duction, a superior class of workers; these are
production. what Marx called engi- neers.41 Writers are the superior workers
at this particular site of produc- tion. They are most handy
They write under with their tools, most easily and most entirely identified, and
most readily identifying themselves, with their tools. This is
a siege. Gustave Flauberta Pramoedya of nineteenth-century France
writing about himself:

What can satisfy me other than that endless pleasure of the

writing table? Is that not the most enviable thing in the world?
Independence, liberty of the imagination, my two hundred quill-
pens and the knowledge of their use? . . . I am a creature of the
quill. I feel through it, because of it, in relation to it and much more
with it.42

Naturally, Pramoedya, at a more advanced site of production,

identified himself, and was truly obsessed, with his typewriter.

I began from a presumption that what Le Corbusier had said

about building that it is at the root of the social unrest of
today could also be said about writing. The superior
workers, writers, the radical among them at least, indeed
evidently, feel the constraints of their site of production. They
write under a siege. They do feel the walls (or wall- paper)
around themwhich, of course, almost all is of their own
making. They kick against the walls as they write, and we
watch (read) them in amazement. Some of them may write in
broken paragraphs and partial, so it seems, unfinished
sentences, 43 or make their text to interrupt itself, believing
that at the points of rupture their texts might share themselves
out.44

11 Rudolf Mrzek Literature or Revolution 11

3 3
 To disturb
the
immuring
architecture
of a printed
page, the
superior

11 Rudolf Mrzek Literature or Revolution 11

4 4
workers of the book may write letters upside down, 45 make
them jump on and (almost!) off the line. They commit the
typographical agraphia, or they push against the grammar,
they write to freeze, even to murder, the language of the
book.46 The most daring (or the least responsible) among
them even try to empty the book of its privileged cultural
signifi- cance, or to challenge the very thingness of the book:

This object [Unhappy Readymade by Marcel Duchamp in

1919 ] was constructed from a textbooka treatise on
geometryopened face up, hanging in midair and rigged
diagonally to the corners of a porch. It was left suspended there
for a period of time, during which the wind could blow and tear
the pages of geometric formulae, the rain drench them, and the
sun bleach and fade them. Thus exposed to the weather, the
treatise seriously got the facts of life.47

That kind of writing, at its best at least, may be an

attempt at what Marx called free labor, bond of free
labor where everyone produces himself or herself not as a
category but as a subject with others and as a subject of
being-with-one-another.48 This is a wonderful conceptand
perhaps because of this, everyone, including the most radical
superior workers, stop just before making one step more or
writing one word morelike in the Chinese opera, halting just
a jiffy before hitting. Marx himself, the most daring superior
worker of all, left the question of what must be understood by
free labor, open.49
In contrast to this, we all know with some precision what
unfree labor is. The same energy that propels the superior
workers toward the realm of free labor restrains them from going
too far. They would become counterproductive, destructive not
merely to their site of production but to the meaning produced
there and, thus, inevitably, to the meaning of themselves.
Whatever they do, as radically as they do it, the writers remain
encased in their space of writing, standing at their citational
machines,50 operating their unstoppable technology of a
grammar, becoming ever more parts of the sites (and the
sieges) grammatical automation.51 This, it appears, is as far
as the superior workers, and even their dreams, may go. As
Roman Jakobson recalled in his memoirs: Still in childhood,
when I was asked what I wanted to be, I would answer: An
inventor, and if that doesnt work out a writer. 52

Moments

Dead writers, all of them, are like angels. 53 one cannot meet
them, they could not be caught on tape: their breathing and
coughing, and their
breaks to go to the bathroom. What one can do in the
driest of the Certeau tautologyis to write about what they
have written. I have met neither Marco Kartodikromo nor
Chairil Anwarmy two favorite Indo- nesian writersin
person, however much would I give for it. As so often I came
too late.

Marco Kartodikromo, during the first third of the twentieth

century at the time when also some of the best writers in the
West felt that their society . . . in a state of crisis . . . uses
a language that is too old for itwrote (at least thus I read
it) out of a pure joy of newness.54 He chose to write in
riotously new Malay, a language never before used for writing
modern literature. He wrote in partial sentences, too (as
Robert Desnos might say), and in partial wordsbecause he
wanted it, because the rawness of the language wanted it,
because he thought that the time demanded reckless and fast
writing, and, also, because his kuli zetters, the typesetters, and
other workers at the particular site of productionwho had
often been ignorant of the modern, colonial, Roman letters in
which Marcos Malay happened to be set and who, sometimes,
simply could not readwere enthusiastically writing with him.
Because of Marcos will to change the world by writing,
because of the newness, and the pleasure he took in the writing
(also because the printing machines were so basic), gloriously,
Marco was breaking up the calm- ness of the page. As one
reads (and it is a little like breathing), there is in Marcos Malay
text a word, a sentence, or a whole paragraph, jumping up and
breaking through, in Dutch or in Javanese, occasionally even
left (or recalled) in the premodern Javanese script.
Suddenly, there is a line or a paragraph made exclusively of
digits! There are neologisms and acronyms as the text flows,
which evidently Marco invented in a moment of inspiration, and
forgot at the next one, or, at least, did not think it needed to be
explained. This had happened in the colony, so ahead of
europe in what still would be done to humankind, and thus,
logically, sixty years, for instance, before, in europe, Derrida
would publish his antibook, incon- gruous texts brutally
pasted side by side. 55
The illustrations in Marcos books seem only vaguely
related to the stories told, and they often add to the hilarious
unrest of the writing. Then it appears as if they were simply
recklessly on a sudden impulse, joyfullycut from some book at
hand and pasted in the one to be sent in the world. In one of
the books, at least, the passionately patriotic Marcos young
Indonesian heroes look definitely British.56
Marco tried to stand up against the market, with the same
intensity and in the same way as he tried to stand up against
language. He produced his books as if they were roman-roman
pitjisan jang tak ada harganja, priceless
pulp fictionsso cheap they were, Marco might dream and Sixty years before
conspire, that they would flood the market.57 In Marxs sense,
Marco might have dreamed and conspired to achieve the the postmodern
magnificent feat of circulation without accu- mulation. His
books would zip around relentlessly among his readers, and the
ephemeral-
zipping would sweep away, blow out, make outmoded, all the
capitalist values oppressing the (reading) humankind; all
capitalist values, includ- ing the crucial, surplus value and architecture
(recalling Kant) that kind of dignity. Marco, in early-twentieth-
century Indonesia, might have dreamed as he experiments
wrote that his books would circulate among the readers until they would
be worn out by reading, become litter, and remainder. Sixty
in the West,
years before
the postmodern ephemeral-architecture experiments in the West, Marco
plotted ephemeral literature as a Marco plotted
weapon. 58
Like Mrs. Sosro, Marco was in Dutch colonial prison often. ephemeral
In the end, like Mrs. Sukarsih and Mr. Mawengkang, he was
sent to the truly bad concentration camp at Boven Digoel.
literature as
There, in 1936, Marco died, worn out, he and his writing
almost completely forgotten. In the few books on Indonesian
history where his name is mentioned, Marco figures as an a weapon.
Islamist-Communist, and this is also to explain his
persecution.59 His- tory, however, might have been much more
sinister. The Dutch colonial masters, exquisitely literate, might
have pounced on Marco and destroyed him, in fact, because of
his writing mode.

Chairil Anwar came merely one generation after Marco, but I

do not think he had ever heard of the older writer. Chairil
had been brought up and carried on by the next wave, a
spasm of the world and its colo- nies that looked, again,
almost like a revolution. There was World War II for Chairil,
as there was World War I for Marco. only, in Chairils case,
it touched much more closely on the colony. When the
Japanese army invaded in 1942, the Westerners in Indonesia
either left in haste or were interned. Books became cheap
they became valueless, indeed, like pulp fictions. In the first
weeks of the new Japanese era especially, as the europeans
mansions were left empty and open, the booksif one dared a
littlebecame free to take. In the public spacelibraries,
bookshops, schoolsthe Dutch (and all european except
German and early on Rus- sian) books were banned.60 The
Dutch language, too, was made illegal, and Malay, still
resembling the way Marco used to write, now called
Indonesian, had become the official medium of the new culture.
The three and a half years of war and Japanese occupation of
Indonesia that followed did to booksto the Dutch books
especially but, as there was the war and no time for anything,
to all books very much what Duch- amp did to his Unhappy
Readymade. The books and culture of the books were being
opened face up, hanging in midair and rigged, drenched,
bleached, and faded. It still remained to be seen, however,
whether the books and the cultureas Duchamp had hoped in
his attempt through this process seriously got the facts of
life.
In 1945 the Japanese were defeated, and in August of that
year what has been called the Indonesian National Revolution
began. The people in Jakarta and to an extent in the rest of
the colony rioted against many things, most visibly against the
attempt of the Dutch to return. This was a literary moment as
well. Partial sentences, with letters jumping off the line, in
Dutch, english, and IndonesianFR eeDoM oR DeATH,
WATCH FoR SPIeSrecklessly and in haste were scribbled
on the walls. Buildings, monuments, streets, and the whole
city were written over and could be read, to use Dantes
words, like scattered leaves. This became a paper
city,61 an ephemeral architecture to which Marco might well
subscribe. Virtually all the elderly Indonesians I talked to,
and who lived through it, recalled one image most vividly: the
writing on the trains and tram cars as they were stuck in, or
rumbled through, the cityliterature and architecture as one
thing, ephemeral, and passing. 62
This might have been another moment for writers and readers
to make an attemptrecalling Marxto attain the realm of,
and to engage in, free labor. What even the most unrelenting of
them got, however, it seemsin the words of Jean-Luc Nancy
speaking about Paris in 1968 was a wan- dering labor
only: Without complacency, one can read the sumptuous
graphical singularities and fleeting semantics of graffiti as one
mode of inscription of . . . wandering labor. 63
Chairil Anwar began to write during the Japanese time. In the
remains of his library in Jakarta, 64 there are Dutch, Malay,
Indonesian, German, and english books, drenched, bleached,
and faded. The names of their previous owners (and there
always seemed to be a previous owner) are still written in,
sometimes crudely half erased. Most of the books look as if
they had been snatched from the deserted european homes
during the war. And Chairil also wrote like that. While Marcos
writing reads rowdily joyous, Chairilsperhaps because he
wrote in a more advanced (colonial) modernity is grimly
violent. If the modern novel has been compared to a shelter,
Chairil wrote, so it still feels, to break in.
Chairils writing, poetry as well as prose, is nothing but
partial sen- tences. It reads best the spray painters way, like
Jakartas facades, trams, and trains of 1945. Chairil would
agree with Maurice Blanchot if he had known him that true
writing is not developed and that it can question with some
force merely by interrupting itself.65 Chairil built a bridge with
his writing, toward freedom; he wanted the bridge to be
fundamental, as he wrote, like a broken ship at the bottom of
the ocean.66
Chairil, like Marco, worked hard to produce a true writing
that would
be also withdrawn from exchange. 67 In the Marco-like yen for In the Marco-like
circulation without accumulation, Chairil wrote his texts on
scraps of paper, and many of them, indeed, made it: worn out, yen for circulation
they got lost. Chairil worked hard also to keep adrift himself,
bumming through the landscape of (failing) Indo- nesian
without
Revolution, leaving in his trail, for a fleeting moment, a
wondrous, almost unbourgeois landscape without a horizon and
a standard. accumulation,

Flying. Chairil wrote his

knowing the desert, without meeting point, without landing
the only possible non-stop flight texts on scraps of
and get nothing.68
paper, and many
Chairil Anwar died without a home, at the age of twenty-
seven, of multiple and mostly unspecified causes, certainly of them, indeed,
consumption and cer-
tainly syphilis, perhaps typhoid, in 1949, in Jakarta, on the verge of the
Indonesian compromise with the Dutch, and on the edge of the made it: worn
postco-
lonial.69 Both Chairils and Marcos writings are powerfulno more and
no less than the scattered leaves in Dantes metaphor. out, they got lost.
Which brings us back to Pramoedya.

one statement that Pramoedya likes to repeat is I do not

know my own language ! Really! 70 or, which amounts to the
same thing, I am not a good enough writer. of course
Pramoedya is an outstanding writer, and his Indonesian is
superb. To invoke Flaubert, this other genius of literature,
once more, he is known to lament over his language and his
writing skills, in virtually the same words and with the same
conviction as Pramoedya. I cannot imagine either Marco or
Chairil ever to say or feel something like this about themselves.
Marco was just gluttonous when it came to the language(s) of
his writing, and Chairil was fully absorbed in doing all in his
power to crush into pieces any language he could get a hold of.
The despair of Pramoedya and Flaubert is that of superior
work- ers, the engineers sense of imperfect competence. It
grows out of these writers engagement in writing a book as a
house is built. They, and those like them, consider themselves
as good, as good they are in their field of expertise. Not to be
good enough in the experts way would make them feel
marginal or even this is a world like a school dropouts.
In his youth, in the mid-1940s, around the time when
Chairil was still alive, Pramoedya also beganwith writing short
stories, often fragmented, and created as if in an unplanned,
spontaneous, almost surrealist way. At a certain point in time,
however, in the 1950s, at the postcolonial moment, in the spirit
of the time, Pramoedya embarked on writing as building a
new literature for his people, a new culture of the book, best of
all a true
novel, and in standard Indonesian. 71 Naturally, tenderly,
and expertly, in the process of writing, Pramoedya masoned
both Marco and Chairil into his edifice.
With the acute sense of a good builder, it was Pramoedya, in
fact, who rediscovered the virtually forgotten Marco.
Pramoedya made ephemeral Marco into a prominent
semifictional figure of the last two volumes of his Indonesian
most true novel, the Buru Quartet.72 Pramoedya brought
back to life Marcos era. He also republished a half-dozen
writers imme- diately preceding Marco. He collected the
scattered leaves originally published as cheap booklets or in
obscure newspapers into one volume bound by love. The
book has an ornamented cover, almost exactly like those of the
books that Mrs. Sukarsih gave me and Mr. Mawengkang
allowed me to copy. The title that Pramoedya gave to the
collection was Tempo Doeloe (Times Past).73
Pramoedya made Marco known again, this time as a
pioneer and thus as a predecessor. Progressively,
Pramoedya wrote. Marcos joy at the freshness of his language
joy for which it is wonderful enough to end in joyPramoedya,
affectionately, rebuilt into his own sense of either/or newness:
that which either passes with the moment or stays to serve the
future. This was not letting Marco stay on that spiral of
Aristotle that moves and quivers both and all ways. It was
putting Marco onto Hegels little machine that is only capable of
moving upward. With all his power as writer and builder,
Pramoedya subscribed Marco to his trade to modernity
[as] the dialectical image of progress. 74
Pramoedya emulated Chairil no less. He deemed and
declared Chairil the greatest poet of his, Pramoedyas,
generation.

Chairil Anwar is the writer he likes most, his language, too. He

wrote Indonesian, Pramoedya says. I say, What about
Marco? He answers: Regional, not Indonesian. I say, But
you write in Jakartan (regional dialect), too; it is clear to whoever
reads it. It is, he replies, like that: first regional, then
Indonesian, and then again regional. After this, I ask about
Pramoedyas mother tongue: Javanese? He answers,
categorically: he never uses it in his writing. But can he speak it?
of course he can.75

There is the deepest respect for Chairil in Pramoedya but,

and cat- egorically so, not for the drifting of Chairils writing.
Categorically too, Pramoedya has no respect for Chairils
wrecking his own, writers life, and, especially, for Chairils
living on the streets, apparently not lookingnot writing, not
working for a home. In this sense, and this is unacceptable to
Pramoedya, there is no architecture in Chairil.76
Thus Chairil appears in Pramoedyas own oeuvre: immensely
talented,
but wasted, and dying in the middle of the Jakarta street as well
as in the middle of Pramoedyas novel. Chairil is called Chaidir
in this text:

Ara! a man whispers in her ear. . . . Suddenly she feels

embarrassed: just to sit like that in a public place. . . . Who is this
man with the red eyes? . . . I am Chaidir; you never heard my
name, Chaidir? . . . Chaidir! You still do not remember? A poet.
Now she remembers. It comes back to her from very far away.
Ara! Do you have some money? I am hungry. . . . They sit
down on the bench of a cake vendor on the sidewalk . . . Five
cakes, Brother, and four coffees! How much? . . . Ara watched
Chaidir unbutton his shirt and throw it at the cake vendor. Take
this, he said.77

A few weeks later, Ara, the heroine of the novel, reads a

newspaper, and, there, she spots a notice of Chaidirs
death.78 The novel goes on for another hundred pages without
mentioning Chaidir, or Chairil, again.

Conclusion/Repetition

Rahmaiani Arahmaiani (her name sounds to me like Jean

Valjean) is a fine artist of the Indonesian post-Pramoedya
generation. She is outspoken and constantly rebellious; she does
not spell out IMF other than as Inter- national Mother Fuckers.
She can look outrageous, too; maybe because of that,
recently, she was stopped at the Los Angeles airport
immigration, interrogated for a few hourslike Arlo Guthrie in
1969and then let go.
I saw Arahmaianis work for the first time in 2000, in
Jakarta, at the time of the church and mosque bombings. The
drawings that she exhibited in a small avant-garde gallery were
all of the same size, small, in charcoal, and childlike as if by a
wounded child. All the figures were drawn crudely no sign,
obstinately, of schooling. As represented, the humans were
flattened and all of one piece like stains or smears of (dark
gray) blood. Most clearly, these people were destroyed; either
they were shown lying on the ground or at a dead point a
moment before falling. There was some architecture in the
drawings, too, flat and smearlike like the bodies, and some of it
still burning. only tanks, big guns, soldiers in heavy riot gear,
and armed vehiclesit was a time of military dictatorship in its
last stage were carefully pictured (as boys sometimes do);
only the hardware appeared still to have some life, future, and
perspective to it. There was an awkwardly large surface of
white paper left untouched in all the drawings, as if to suggest
that it might still become worse.
Arahmaiani is also a dancer, and her dancing reminds me
sometimes of
Marcos, and Chairils, writing. Like them, at the least-
expected moment,
Moreover, in the she can make a step very nearly beyond. She is a writer, too. A
few years ago, for instance, she wrote His Story over My
post-Holocaust Body. The story itself, shamelessly, is as banal as the stories
we all have written about a colony or a postcolony at one time
world, and or another: So graceful a land and so violent it could become !
The story, his story, our story, with the audiences
in the global watching, is being written over Arahmaianis body. She slowly
moves as they write. I recall one partial sentence, close to the
Indonesia after end of the performance, written in english (Globalish) on her
forearm: No more cry . . .
the massacres of How deeply can that writing and that overwritten body move
us? The boredom of saying dear body, dear heart,
Arthur Rimbaud wrote;79 and according to Jules Michelet, the
1965, what can
good patron of us historians: Art besmirches me like a coat of
varnish, so that whatever happens to me, good or bad, enters
an etching-deep me like the acid in engravings, and etches, just deeply enough
for a work of art. 80 Moreover, in the post-Holocaust world, and
writing on a in the global Indonesia after the massacres of 1965, what can an
etching-deep writing on a human body do?
human body do?
The suffering body was up until our own day a quivering body:
a pathos- laden body, rich with signs, clearly mixed on with an
obscure jouissance, a tormented, sacrificed body. But our
suffering body is broken, dislocated, or eaten away, without any
meaning and for no reason. It is assisted, repaired, plugged in
and again there is nothing else to say. 81

Many believe that every old person dying is a library on

fire. 82 I sometimes feel as if I were still sitting in the Jakarta
National Library, in the old building at the Freedom Square. I
open one old volume after the otherold means from the
1910s and the 1920s, of the same age as the old people,
whom I interview in the evening, after the library closes. In
books that I open, there is often a big hole containing tiny paper
flakes a cockroach family or some other literary bug has made
it in here before me. There is no air-conditioning in the old
library; the fragile paper breaks at every turn of page. It breaks
again and turns into fragments, and then into dust, which is
blown up by the fan at the ceiling and then out the open win-
dow over the hot and humid city. Dust to dust. or, to
paraphrase Martin Heidegger, through the draft the untruth
has become a truth. 83

During the late 1990s, in Jakarta, almost regularly, the student

dem- onstrations (called demo) or the angry lower-class
masses (called masa) streamed and raged through the
streets. With the rioting or even its echoes approaching,
the openings of the houses were being closed, locked,
boarded, andwhat was particularly appealingwritten over.

123 Rudolf Mrzek Literature or Revolution 123

Partial sentences and single words again, with flashbacks to the
Revolu-

124 Rudolf Mrzek Literature or Revolution 124

 tion, were scribbled over the barricaded doors and windows
graffiti- deep over Jakartas suffering body in hastily
produced big letters: W e ARe A LL THe (native) PeoPLe
HeRe, oNLY (good) MUSLIMS LIVe HeR e, No (rich)
CHINeSe IN THIS HoUSe.
Many of my interviews were conducted, and among other
things questions about literature asked, just in these wrong
places and at these wrong moments. As the shouting was
being heard from the outside, as it increased, and as my old
interviewees did not know what else to say, they broke into
silence. At these moments especially, I wished very much to
find out as a scholar that there was no conclusion to the
discussion of literature or revolution, merely unfinished
sentences and to say with my favorite Dutch painter
(describing another formerly Dutch postcolonial metropolis)
an unfinished space: The unfinished space, you know, the
buildings breaking down, and building up. . . . there is no
finished space. . . . Finish does not exist. . . . there is
unfinished space. . . . I have also to paint my paintings
unfinished . . . they tear down and rebuild. In this interim
people live. 84

Notes

1. This resulted in close to two hundred taped interviews, about

ninety min- utes each. The project was supported by the University
of Michigan and the Henry Luce Foundation.
2. Le Corbusier, in 1929, quoted in Kenneth Frampton, Le
Corbusier (Lon- don: Thames and Hudson, 2001), 23.
3. Joseph Roth, Right and Left: The Legend of the Holy Drinker, trans. Michael
Hofmann (Woodstock, N Y: overlook,
1992), 243.
4. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (New York: Viking, 1958), 107, quoted in
Joseph Leo Koerner, Paul Klee and the Image of the Book, in Paul
Klee: Leg-
ends of the Sign, by Rainer Crone and Joseph Leo Koerner (New York:
Columbia
University Press, 1991),
69.
5. Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S.
Rondiez (New York: Columbia University Press,
1982), 77.
6. Like pagina in Latin, which similarly means page as well as stage for
plays.

7. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor, Lisa
Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney (Minneapolis:
University of

125 Rudolf Mrzek Literature or Revolution 125

 Minnesota Press, 1991),
61.
8. Sukarsih, interview by the author, Jakarta, 26 June 1997.
9. Sosro Kardono, interview by the author, Jakarta, 28 July 1992.
10. Jean-Paul Sartre, Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr (New York: George Bra-
ziller, 1963),
10.
11. Moeljono, interview by the author, Blitar, 13 August 1997.
12. Myself: You already liked to read at that early age? Abdoelgani: I
did. I read Dutch social literature, Max Havelaar among others; in
school the

126 Rudolf Mrzek Literature or Revolution 126

 teacher asked me to read from the book for the classyou know, that
part, about a poor Javanese boy and how the rich Dutchman has
stolen his buffalo. Because my Dutch was good, I was sometimes
asked to read it. often, the Indonesian boys applauded (Roeslan
Abdoelgani, interview by the author, Jakarta, 24 July
1997
).
13. Dante Alighieri, Paradiso (oxford: oxford University Press,
1939), xxxiii,
8588, quoted in Koerner, Paul Klee and the Image of the
Book, 49.
14. Authors field notes, notebook 4 (summer 1997), 7879.
15. Jusuf Mawengkang, interview by the author, Jakarta, 28 July
1997.
16. So many things hilang, got lost, during the last
Indonesian century.
Photos of mothers, and photos of themselves when young; the
prime minister
Sjahrirs typewriter, library, and diaries when he was arrested; the
vice president
Hattas books, since his death and still in the process of being
borrowed, never to
appear again (Authors field notes, notebook 5 [summer
1996], 32).
17. Jusuf Mawengkang, Boven Digoel: Sebuah Cerita anak
buangan II
(Boven Digoel: A Story of an exile II) (typescript,
Jakarta, 1996).
18. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Sense of the World, trans. Jeffrey S.
Librett (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1997), 165.
19. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, quoted in Crone and
Koerner, Paul
Klee: Legends of the Sign,
viii.
20. Quoted in ibid., 50.
21. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila
Faria Glaser
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1994), 136.
22. Authors field notes, notebook 4 (fall 1994), 40.
23. Georg Lukcs, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock
(Cambridge,
M A: MIT Press, 1971),
121.
24. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard eiland
and Kevin
McLaughlin (Cambridge, M A: Harvard University Press,
1999), 218.

127 Rudolf Mrzek Literature or Revolution 127

 25. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life,
trans.
e. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso,
1999), 87.
26. This is the archdeacon talking in Victor Hugos Hunchback of
Notre Dame,
book 5, chapter 2: This will kill that. The book will kill the
edifice.
27. Bruno Chiambretto, Le Corbusier Cap Martin (Paris:
Parenthses,
1987),
38.
28. This is not a familiarity. Indonesians often use the first part of a
persons
name only, even on formal occasions. Thus, above, Mr. Roeslan or
Mr. Jusuf
would also be
possible.
29. Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Nyanyi Sunyi Seorang Bisu (Singing of
a Mute)
( Jakarta: Lentera, 1995),
1:145.
30. Robert Jan van Pelt and Carroll William Westfall, Architectural
Principles
in the Age of Historicism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1991), 306.
31. Authors field notes, notebook 4 (summer 1998), 4367.
32. Charles olson in his epic The Maximus Poems writes about
wallpaper
music. See Adelaide Morris, ed., Sound States: Innovative Poetics
and Acoustical
Technologies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997),
97128.
33. Bertolt Brecht, The Later Devotions and t he First
City Poems
19201925, in Bertolt Brecht, Poems 19131956 (New York:
Routledge, 1987),
97
98.
34. Michel de Certeau, The Historiographical operation, in The
Writing of
History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press,
1988), 65.

128 Rudolf Mrzek Literature or Revolution 128

 35. They own language, too, of course. Gottfried von Herder had
declared, towards the end of the eighteenth century, that: Denn jedes
Volk ist Volk; es hat seine Nationale Bildung wie seine Sprache. This
splendidly eng-european concep- tion of nation-ness as linked to a
private-property language, had wide influence in nineteenth-century
europe and, more narrowly, on subsequent theorizing about the
nature of nationalism (Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities:
Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism [London: Verso,
1991], 68).
36. Jean-Paul Sartre, Dirty Hands, in No Exit and Three Other
Plays, trans. Lionel Abel (New York: Vintage, 1956); Pramoedya Ananta
Toer, Stranded Fish, in Tales from Djakarta: Caricatures and
Circumstances and Their Human Beings, trans. Ray Chandrasekora et
al. (Ithaca, NY: Southeast Asia Program, 1999), 48.
37. Pramoedya, Ketjapi, in Tales from Djakarta, 139.
38. Karen Strassler, Refracted Visions: Popular Photography and the Indo-
nesian Culture of Documentation in Postcolonial Java (PhD diss., University of
Michigan, 2003).
39. Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert D. Richardson and
Anne e. oByrne (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 73.
40. Ibid., 74.
41. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fawkes
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), 1:546.
42. Gustave Flaubert, quoted in Geoffrey Wall, Flaubert: A Life (New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 170.
43. See Robert Desnos: I had been led to concentrate my attention on the
more or less partial sentences, quoted in Andr Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism,
trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1969), 19.
44. Nancy, Inoperative Community, 65. For the interruptive character of
writing, see Jacques Derrida, edmund Jabs and the Question of the Book, in
Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 1978), 7072.
45. James Joyce, as one of the first writers, did it in Finnegans Wake.
46. See The final agraphia of Rimbaud . . ., in Roland Barthes, Writing
Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1988), 75; Mallarm as a murderer of language (76); neutral modes
of writing, the zero degree of writing (5); and colorless writing, which
recounts stage by stage the disintegration of bourgeois consciousness (67).
47. Harriet Janis and Sidney Janis, Marcel Duchamp, Anti-Artist, in Marcel
Duchamp in Perspective, ed. Joseph Masheck (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, 2002), 37.
48. Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 50.
49. Ibid., 42.
50. Avital Ronell, Stupidity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 59.
51. Paul de Man, quoted in Ronell, Stupidity, 97.
52. Roman Jakobson, My Futurist Years (New York: Marsilio, 1992), 9.
53. The space that angels traverse . . . does not suffer division into homog-
enous domains . . . cannot be . . . contained in figures of envelopment (Peter
Fenves, Arresting Language: From Leibniz to Benjamin [Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2001], 250).
54. Sartre, Saint Genet, 276.

129 Rudolf Mrzek Literature or Revolution 129

 55. Jacques Derrida, Glas (Paris: Galile, 1974).
56. Soemantri [Marco], Rasa Merdika: Hikajat Soedjarmo (A Sense of Freedom:
The Story of Soedjarmo) (Semarang: V.S.T.P., 1924).

130 Rudolf Mrzek Literature or Revolution 130

 57. Tamar Djaja, Roman Pitjisan, Buku Kita 1, no. 5
(1955), 20811; reprinted in Ulrich e. Kratz, ed., Sumber Terpilih
Sejarah Sastra Indonesia Abad XX (Selected Sources for the History of
Indonesian Literature in the Twentieth Century) ( Jakarta: Gramedia,
2000), 304.
58. on ephemeral architecture, see Neal Benezra, olga M. Vico,
Michael Brenson, and Paul Schimmel, Juan Muoz (Washington, DC:
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution /
Chicago: Art Institute of Chi- cago / University of Chicago Press,
2001), 41.
59. For the best study of the historical context in which Marco
wrote, see Takashi Shiraishi, An Age in Motion: Popular Radicalism
in Java, 19121926 (Ithaca, N Y: Cornell University Press, 1990).
60. See, for example, Rosihan Anwar, ed., Jembatan Antar-
Generasi: Pengala- man Murid SMT Djakarta 19421945 (Bridge
between Generations: Memoirs of the Jakarta SMT High School, 1942
1945 ) ( Jakarta: Sinar Harapan, 1998).
61. The paper City . . . the true architecture of today is the
poster (Fer- nand Lger, quoted in Stanislaus von Moos, Fernand
Lger, La ville: Zeitdruck, Grostadt, Wahrnehmung [Frankfurt am Main:
Fischer Verlag, 1999], 2).
62. Srihadi, interview by the author, Bandung, 13 July 1992 ; see
also Asikin Hasan, ed., Srihadi dan Paradigma Seni Rupa Indonesia
(Srihadi and the Paradigm of Indonesian Art) ( Jakarta: Kalam, 1999),
3738.
63. Nancy, Sense of the World, 116.
64. The H. B. Jassin Collection and Literary Archives, Ismail
Marzuki
Gardens, Jakarta.
65. This is paraphrasing Blanchot and Alain on developed
and true
thoughts. See Maurice Blanchot, The Absence of the Book, in
The Infinite
Conversations, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press,
1993), 33942.
66. Chairil Anwar, February 1943, in The Voice of the Night:
Complete
Poetry and Prose of Chairil Anwar, trans. Burton Raffel (Athens: ohio
University
Center of International Studies, 1993), 17.
67. Blanchot, Absence of the Book, 33942.
68. Chairil Anwar, 1948, quoted and translated by Goenawan
Mohamad
in his Forgetting: Poetry and the Nation, a Motif in Indonesian
Literary Mod-
ernism after 1945, in Clearing a Space: Postcolonial Reading of Modern
Indonesian
Literature, ed. Keith Foulcher and Tony Day (Leiden: K ITLV, 2002),
198.

131 Rudolf Mrzek Literature or Revolution 131

 69. His residence was not fixed, he moved from one place to
another, from
one hotel to another . . . [He told me] I want to die in the middle of
the street
(H. B. Jassin, in Chairil, Voice of the Night, xiv).
70. See, for example, Pramoedya, quoted in Henk Maier,
Stammer and the
Creaking Door: The Malay Writing of Pramoedya Ananta Toer, in
Foulcher and
Day, Clearing a Space, 74.
71. Ibid., 81.
72. Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Bumi Manusia (The Earth of Mankind
) (Hol-
land: Manus Amici, 1980); Pramoedya, Anak Semua Bangsa (Child of All
Nations)
( Jakarta: Hasta Mitra, 1980); Pramoedya, Jejak Langkah (Footsteps)
( Jakarta:
Hasta Mitra, 1985); Pramoedya, Rumah Kaca (House of Glass) (
Jakarta: Hasta
Mitra, 1988).
73. Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Tempo Doeloe: Antologi sastra pra-
Indonesia
(Times Past: An Anthology of the pra-Indonesian Literature), 2nd rev. ed.
( Jakarta:
Lentera Dipantara, 2003). The phrase had an inimitable ring to it for
the genera-

132 Rudolf Mrzek Literature or Revolution 132

 tion of Pramoedya and a couple of generations before. Tempo Doeloe was
an expres- sion used widely and to great effect by the Dutch in the
colony. It stood for nostal- gia for their beautiful Indiessomething
more cultural, more solid, and less to be doubted than the actual thing;
something that they could, more truly than the actual thing, take with
them back to the Motherland, to Holland, to europe, as a souvenir,
as that kind of memory, a building stone, back in the West, for their
own postcolonial house. For the Tempo Doeloe lifestyle and worldview
(which still survives among the older generations in the Netherlands),
see Rob Nieuwen- huijs, over de europese samenleving van tempo
doeloe 18701900 (on the european Community of Tempo
Doeloe 18701900), Fakkel (Batavia) 1, no.
9 ( JulyAugust 1941); and Nieuwenhuijs, Baren en oudgasten: Tempo
doeloeeen verzonken wereld (Tempo DoeloeA Sunken World )
(Amsterdam: Querido, 1981). In Pramoedyas use of the title
however I am looking for itthere is no irony.
74. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 238.
75. Authors field notes, notebook 4 (summer 1998), 5859.
76. There is a parallel here, I believe, with Lenins well-known affection for
Nikolai Chernyshevskys What Is to be Done? (which, as Lenin said,
had inspired
him to enter politics), namely for one segment of the novel, The
Fourth Dream
of Vera Pavlovna. The dream, and the novel as a whole, is a vision
of the ideal
living space for the future . . . communist society, based on the
phalanstery
defined by the French utopian socialist Charles Fourier, which drew
its physical
details from the cast-iron and glass pavilion [Crystal Palace] designed
. . . for the
London exposition of 1851. Lenin contrasted Chernyshevskys true
novel with
the writing of Dostoyevsky from his underground hole. See
Richard Pevear,
Foreword and Comments, in Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from
Underground (New
York: Vintage Books, 1994), xiv,
133n15.
77. Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Larasati (Ara): Roman Revolusi (1960) ( Jakarta:
Hasta Mitra, 2000), 133,
136.
78. Ibid., 144, 149.
79. J. N. Arthur Rimbaud, Illuminations, in Complete Works, Selected Let-
ters, trans. Wallace Fowlie (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1966), 217.
80. Michelet, quoted in Roland Barthes, Michelet, trans. Richard Howard
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1987),
2425.
81. Nancy, Sense of the World, 149.

133 Rudolf Mrzek Literature or Revolution 133

 82. Marc Aug, Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity,
trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 1995), 9 (Aug is quoting
Hampat Ba).
83. This is Heideggers anecdote about a truth. A statement Here is the
chalk is written on a paper in a classroom. When the door opens
after class, the
draft blows the paper into the hall, where there is no chalk: Through
the draft
the truth has become an untruth (Martin Heidegger, What Is a
Thing, trans.
eugene T. Gendlin [Chicago: Henry Regnery,
1967], 29).
84. Karel Appel describing New York in 1956, in Dupe of Being, trans. Rich-
ard Miller et al. (New York: edition Lafayette, 1989), 8384,
58889.

134 Rudolf Mrzek Literature or Revolution 134