Looking Up High, Wondering . . .

Find as many short stories or poems published in newspapers as possible, and you’ll see how most of them try to shock you with peculiarly unique themes (see Seno Gumira Ajidarma’s and Budi Darma’s), strangely shocking ways of presenting morals (see Mariana Aminudin’s and Hudan Hidayat’s), or mentally provoking with paradoxical truth (see Putu Wijaya’s). To us, their stories are what stories should look like. We take for granted that their qualities are what we believe as the esthetics of short stories.

With this mindset, it’s gonna be a shock for us to read a book by Dr. DJoko Saryono. He is a Doctor in Indonesian literature in the State University of Malang. The book itself is Pergulatan Estetika dalam Sastra Indonesia (or, let's say, Twists and Turns in the Esthetics of Indonesian Literature). It could be that some of you, who live in Euro-austro-merican countries, have no ideas about how unique Indonesian people were in the past. I bet you don't.

Look, Indonesian people were categorized as the so-termed 'Oral Society'. By this term, Djoko wants to say that Indonesian people--or, archipelagic people, since the name Indonesia was not used until around the second decade of the twentieth century, hehehe...--lived with sense of literature kept alert in their mind. They were closely related with literature. In that age, the kind of literature which was pervasive was oral literature. People knew shadow puppet--the stories of which were commonly only written in the head of its puppeters--or parikan--a kind of poetry created, uttered, and modified by rural communities. Both kinds of literature, along with several other kinds, were created by some people, and then uttered by firsthand listeners, and sometimes uttered again by secondhand listeners with some modification, and still sometimes this modification was then modified again by other people, without anyone claiming to have the copyright. In those days, literature belonged to everyone as well as to noone. Anybody had the right to modify it but nobody had the right to claim it theirs.

Further, Djoko writes that the esthetics of Indonesian (Javanese and Malayan) literature of that age was the so called 'The Esthetics of Harmony". In this literature, we could find teachings and musings aiming at making those who happened to hear them wiser, more informed, enlightened. Newnesses in presentation, breakthroughs in sentence, and irony in themes were nowhere to be found. The literature was solely for the sake of betterment. Well, do I sound scholarly enough? Hehehe... We call this 'The Esthetics of Harmony'. Remember this term by head, okey? I'll ask you to define it in the final exam. Hahaha...

It was later, around the beginning of the twentieth century, that an intruding esthetics was caught in the act. This esthetics sowed its seeds in literature written in Indonesian (or modified Malayan language, or lingua-francanized Malayan language). People began to find that literature was filled with the desire to present new things, fresh forms, different ideas, shocking ending, belief-shattering ideas, and so on. We could, and CAN, see how Indonesian writer compete in a rat race in search of shocking themes, amazing ironies, etc. Coming up with a new-shocking-nevereverseenbefore literary works is every wannabe writer's dream. And some authors deemed writing pornographic literature claim to have, as a matter of fact, presented a theme, dilemma, phenomena for people to ponder and digest and come up with wisdom. Well, this is the so called 'The Esthetics of Contradiction' (I hope you don't find this translation, from ESTETIKA PERTENTANGAN, confusing).

However, this book is far from telling you that ‘The Esthetics of Contradiction’ is lower than ‘The Esthetics of Harmony. No. It points out that there has been a shift of esthetics. And discussing about esthetics, it’s way too childish for us to judge whether one is right or wrong in his/her esthetical creed.