Situated Testimonies: Dread and Enchantment in an Indonesian Literary Archive. By Laurie J. Sears. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2013. 318 pp. $57.00 (cloth).

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

This is an ambitious work, one that seeks to demonstrate how Dutch colonial and Indonesian works of fiction, essays, and oration can be employed by historians as “situated testimonies” capable of constituting a valuable part of the historical archive. Looking at a historically wide range of work, Sears undertakes a dual project: to use psychoanalytic theory to focus on “trauma as expressed in literature” and to show how literary writing can be a vehicle for “conveying fragments of history” (p. xii). Elsewhere, Sears argues that “to explore … imperial and colonial discourses, I use literary and historiographical ways of reading to see how colonial and postcolonial novels of the Indies and Indonesia illuminate nationalist narratives and imperial histories” (p. 7).Sears's approach is most welcome. Certainly, Freud used literary models in his practice and theorizing about the formation of human subjectivity, and psychoanalytic theory has long been incorporated into one major current of contemporary literary and cultural criticism. Still, psychoanalytic theory has rarely been applied to the reading of modern Indonesian fiction. Thus, Sears's work is a major contribution to the study of Indies and Indonesian literature, even though, as Sears recognizes in her references to Indonesian Watugunung and Sangkuriang legends (pp. 196–97), some Freudian or Western psychoanalytic theories may not apply precisely, or may need some revisions before application, to Indonesian psychological experiences.Following an introduction, the first chapter combines Nicolas Abraham's ideas of phantoms (gaps or hallucinations caused by traumas that are passed on over the generations and that prevent a newer generation from understanding its own history) with reflections on the literary genre of the family romance and an understanding of the power and hierarchical effects of colonial, imperial fields to analyze Maria Dermoût's novel set in the colonial era, The Ten Thousand Things (1955). Sears finds that desire and lack, as well as racial difference, are the anchoring points of Dermoût's novel, and it is such racial difference that animates the novel's major traumas, and the accompanying family gaps or phantoms.Chapter 2 examines the work of both Dutch writer Louis Couperus, who was strongly influenced by his five and a half years in the Indies while an adolescent as well as his return visit in 1899, and native writer Tirto Adhi Soeryo. Here, Sears views the works in light of modernity and capitalism, suggesting that the fictions of these authors are haunted by angst and melancholia, or anxiety and enchantment respectively. In particular, she notes Couperus's dread of “elmoes” (ilmu, in this case, magic forces wielded by natives that may affect Europeans), something that Sears sees as central to both Dutch and Indonesian writers in coming to terms with local cultures’ relations to modernity and the past.Chapters 3 and 4 discuss the fiction and essays of Soewarsih Djojopoespito and Armin Pané, and the speeches of Soekarno. Here Sears attempts to chart the tensions of neurotic family relations, the romance of revolution, modernity, and the desire for particular kinds of nation. Chapters 5 and 6 provide readings of Pramoedya Ananta Toer's Rumah kaca (House of glass, 1988) and Ayu Utami's Saman (1998) and Larung (2001). Sears reads these works as influenced by psychoanalytic ideas, which they then use to suggest the traumas, psychoses, and secrets of Indonesia's colonial and post-independence history from which the novels’ protagonists have difficulty disentangling themselves.Sears's readings often strike me as extremely insightful, unearthing fresh new layers of meaning in these works. Her analyses of colonial desire and dread of the racial other in Dermoût's and Couperus's novels; her careful feminist reading of Soewarsih's novel Buiten het gareel (Free from restraints, 1940); and her examination of doubling and the deconstruction of the narrator, Pangemanann, in Pramoedya's House of Glass are especially incisive. These alone ensure that Sears's book will be rewarding, if also challenging reading.The challenges Situated Testimonies presents may, perhaps, stem from the very ambition and scope of this volume. Sears is grappling with a substantial number of theories and historical determinations when discussing each work. At times, she seems unable to clarify her theoretical points or pull the various ideas together into a lucid framework. Or was this Sears's way of putting forward a more poststructuralist methodology that eschews positing a “master” narrative in favor of revealing complexity and ambiguity? Similarly, I had questions about the relation between historical archives and literary form, a relation that is touched upon several times, but the exact nature of which never seems to be systematically explained. Sears sees authors as “eyewitnesses of their time,” though that witness, as recorded in literary works, is mediated by literary form (p. 2). Yet Sears seems uncertain about what it is in this combination of historical witness and literary form that makes the works valuable situated testimonies: she only drops scattered hints about the reading strategies that allow her to view literature as part of the historical archive. A clearer, more systematic exposition of this relationship in the introductory chapter would have prevented Sears's often illuminating readings from seeming arbitrary and disjunctive, as they occasionally do. Still, this book stands as an important contribution to studies of Indonesian history and literature by venturing daringly into interdisciplinary terrain and by beginning to draw intriguing links between literature, historical testimony, and psychoanalytic theory.