Popular Culture and Decolonization: Mimicry or Counter-Discourse?
Today's best-known patterns of popular literature were set by a small number of so-called classics of adventure and crime literature. Its most famous heroes, such as Robinson Crusoe, the Count of Monte Christo, and Sherlock Holmes, have long since developed into emblematic characters. They represent crucial facets of Western bourgeois history and illustrate the imagined development of a reflecting, responsible subject from the early eighteenth century onwards. Surprisingly, the specific historical context of these texts does not seem to have hindered their transfer to non-Western - and colonized - cultures, for instance to colonial Indonesia. The question arises of what could possibly account for the appeal of these European examples of adventure and crime fiction to audiences with entirely different historical and cultural backgrounds. Unfortunately, the role of popular literature in the process of cultural adaptation and transference has as yet not attracted much scholarly attention. My research project, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), is a contribution to this field of Intercultural and Literary Studies.
By DORIS JEDAMSKI
Rapid and immense changes took place in the Netherland East Indies during the last decades under colonial rule. Modernization and nationalism are only two keywords, the discovery of individualism is another. Whenever major changes occur in a society, when life-styles, social classes, and social structures are being modified or dissolving, the subject needs to be redefined and repositioned too. Literature in its broadest sense is a medium to constitute the subject most effectively. The genre of the novel offered the colonized new forms of reflection. It was the perfect means to express newly developing ideas, wishes, demands, doubts, and visions.Translation + Adaptation = Imitation?
Western popular fiction was introduced to Indonesia by way of translations and adaptations. Initially, these publications were produced by 'cultural gate-keepers', Eurasians and Chinese Malays, who very often combined the roles of translators or authors, publishers, and distributors. They could draw on a well-established element in Malay literary traditions in which the copying of foreign models has always been a crucial and highly regarded form of literary endeavour. This 'copying' was the unavoidable first step which had to be taken to allow a broader audience access to forms and ideas coming in from other cultures. If regarded relevant, these new elements would then be taken up by other authors to be developed more intensively and subsequently be 'assimilated' into the indigenous culture. Consequently, the leading criteria would not be the Western notions of originality and genius, but usefulness within cultural, social, and political discourses.
Mimicry and counter-discourse
The literary niche of translations and adaptations in particular invited Indonesians to develop a counter-discourse -- undisturbed and right under the colonizer's gaze. Heroes such as The Count of Monte Christo and Sherlock Holmes played a decisive role in the emerging discourse on modernity and identity among Indonesian authors and readers. Monte Christo, for example, provided a model of power relations which could be re-interpreted in various ways, including in favour of the colonized and against the colonizers. Most of all he offered a fantasy of how to defeat the threatening capitalistic structures by turning its prime weapon against it: money. Sherlock Holmes, the epitome of Occidental rationalism, on the other hand, apparently impressed with his demonstrations of how to read the signs of modernity. He was the hero able to put back in order what had been disintegrating, to structure the world anew. However, Conan Doyle's famous detective was soon replaced by various indigenous, master minds' often journalists -- who provided a perfect foil for the projection of Indonesian ideas of the new society. During the late 1920s, it was timidly anticipated that colonial rule might actually come to an end or, at least, would undergo drastic changes. The issue of 'revenge', ruthlessly pursued by Monte Christo, but also dealt with in crime fiction and Chinese silat stories, entailed a flood of novels about pembalasan (vengeance). These novels represent a diversity of positions, depending on the authors' ethnicity and religion. Western-oriented Eurasians, Sumatran Muslims, or Javanese Chinese Malays (some of them again Muslim converts) all contributed to this discourse.
The colonial power forced to 'write back'
There is thus no suggestion that this 'imitation' of Western classics by indigenous writers represented some form of imposition of colonial culture, such as is usually seen to be the case with the teaching of European literature in the colonial classroom. The opposite is true. For a long time the colonial power seemed concerned only with the indigenous press and failed to ascribe any great social or political potential to popular literature - or to any kind of literature. This situation only changed in the last decades of colonial rule. In fact, it was the colonial power itself that was forced to 'write back' - in the languages of the colonized. The emergence of the colonial government's publishing house, Balai Poestaka, can also be seen as an attempt to control the process of 'imitation' that was gaining ground in indigenous society of the time. Balai Poestaka set about developing and establishing a modified type of the Western psychological novel in the Indies. Only when the Dutch officials realized that they could not expect any early success in 'counterbalancing' the newly developing forms of indigenous literature by establishing the affirmative model of an indigenous 'psychological' novel the mimic Bildungsroman they compromised and began to put out their own translations and adaptations of the most popular novels.
The (colonial) subject re-defined
Campe's Robinson Crusoe - likely to be the first novel in Western style in colonial Indonesia to be available in Malay translation - was used as textbook in schools for many decades from 1875. Still, the subject model introduced by this novel was not picked up by Indonesians and subjected to the indigenous discourse. It should be added here that modified forms of the Robinson model, such as Mowgli and Tarzan, did not prove any greater success when dissiminated in Malay translation by Balai Poestaka during the 1920s and 1930s. One possible explanation is that the restricted and almost autobiographical focus on a single protagonist is likely to have made the novel too alien to appeal to the general Malay-reading public in colonial Indonesia. Furthermore, Robinson Crusoe embodies the notion of the individual as unified and sovereign subject who, through introspection and self-reflection, acquires self-mastery. As a consequence, (Western) civilization is seen to establish itself in the face of solitude and disorder. This Western-bourgeois philosophy is unknown to Malay thinking. Instead, the Indonesian/Malay subject is determined and defined by its place in the community and its relation to others. Descartes' famous statement Je pense donc je suis would, as Tickell nicely pinpoints, probably evoke the question - and where are you? However, Robinson Crusoe seems to have provided 'counter-discoursive inspiration' to the Malay re-interpretations of Madame Butterfly: the white male protagonist makes his appearance as a shipwrecked and stranded man on one of the white beaches of the Malay archipelago. *
Dr Doris Jedamski (Hamburg) is working on her Habilitation and can be reached at:
Doris.Jedamski@t-online.de
She was an IIAS research fellow (DFG) between September 7, 1999 and January 14, 2000.