Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2013. xxv, 318 pp. (Map, illus.) US$57.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-3683-2.
Can an entire nation be haunted by a trauma that originates from phantoms, ghosts from the past that are not materially real yet exist in the psychical realm? Can fantasies, spurred by a desire for a future that may fail to come true, become the source of a “national trauma”? Can dread of what is perceived to be lacking in the present join forces with melancholia of what may be lost about the past (because memory fails to remember it) in order to paralyze a nation and sabotage its progress toward the future? Above all, can one psychoanalyze a nation bearing such a complex neurosis? Situated Testimonies by Laurie J. Sears attempts to answer these questions. It reads almost like psychoanalytic accounts of the celebrated case of the Wolf Man, which continued to haunt Freud until his death, except that in the case of this book the patient that seeks to be cured, yet refuses to reveal its most guarded secret—the locus of his trauma—is not the Wolf Man but a nation called Indonesia. It is not exaggerating to say that the book itself is haunted by what it tries to do and is never completely sure of what it claims to have achieved.
Undaunted by the task of a close reading from a psychoanalytical perspective of several colonial and postcolonial novels by both Dutch Indies and Indonesian authors, Sears writes about traces of trauma that are repressed by history but express themselves through literary works. The authors of these works are, as Sears suggests, “eyewitnesses of their time” (2), but they are barred by mainstream and official discourses of history from talking about what they have seen. As a result, what initially happens as historical events turn into traumatic experience. Literary works become sites where the unspoken is re-enacted through narrative structures, even if such displacement does not offer any significant therapeutic effect and threatens to prolong the trauma instead. Drawing ideas and concepts from psychoanalysts such as Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, as well as Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, who have rescued Freud’s legacy from oblivion in today’s world by their daring reinterpretation of many of Freud’s controversial theories, Sears argues that colonial and postcolonial Indonesian novels serve as a kind of “mnemonic device” not just to remember the past but, further, to “keep the past alive” (13). In psychoanalysis, there is a fundamental difference between the two.
Sears uncovers the gaps hidden beneath the narrative textures of novels and novellas written by Maria Dermoût, Louis Couperus, Tirto Adhi Soerjo and Soewarsih Djojopoespito, and Armijn Pane from the Dutch colonial period in the Indies, and the fiction produced by Pramoedya Ananta Toer and Ayu Utami, who belong to postcolonial Indonesia. The primary tension that gives shape to these works is between the incomprehensible natural and supernatural world of the past on the one hand and colonial modernity which offers a future, yet a highly problematic one, on the other. The characters are trapped between these two incompatible worlds. They manage to take a critical stance toward oppressive colonial practices but, at the same time, either they lament the loss of past imperial glories, as do the characters in Dermoût’s and Couperus’ novels, or they are ambivalent toward modernity, as is apparent in the works of Tirto, Soewarsih, and Armijn. In contrast, the major characters in Pramoedya’s and Ayu’s works are those that “are damaged by the past” (191) and branded with stigmas of oppressive regimes. That is why, Sears argues, “they cannot heal themselves, and they cannot heal the nation” (192) regardless of how hard they struggle to distance themselves from the power that has corrupted their sense of being.
Where is the nation in this complex scheme of things, then? The characters of the works discussed in this book embody and personify the nation. They are metonymies of the nation—of a presence that has to be represented by another because it cannot present itself—that repeatedly show up in the works from different generations of authors. The nation, in Situated Testimonies, is metonymical not because it only occurs in the imagination of its members, but because it is traumatic. The nation is like a crypt that preserves the past in order to kill it and bury the past in order to keep it alive—a tomb for the living. As such, the nation always lacks something, and this sense of loss is passed down from one generation of authors to another. The nation is also a phantasm: hope and dream of the future that is dreaded because it carries phantoms of the past. As a theme, it haunts the book.
However, like an analyst who experiences a process of transference vis-à-vis her patient during therapy sessions, Sears concludes the book with ample optimism that there is hope, and that the nation has a future because, through writing stories, history can be changed. Sears believes this “afterwardness” of history opens up ways for literature to deal with traumatized memory and decipher the crypt that protects the source of the trauma so that the “enigmatic signifier” (thenation) may someday find its ultimate signified and cease being an enigma. This I find problematic, for healing—in the psychoanalytic sense—never simply means liberation from trauma. In most cases, it merely means accepting the fact that one can never completely be rid of neurosis, just like Freud’s Wolf man, who lived and died with his unspoken magic word, even though he was “hypothetically healed.” Still, this book deserves praise and warm welcome because of its new ways of reading Dutch Indies and Indonesian texts that have been or are in the process of being canonized. By taking trauma in these novels as a theme of her book, Sears has revived the Dutch Indies literary works and built a bridge that connects them with the more recent works, published long after the end of the colonial era.
Manneke Budiman
University of Indonesia, Depok, Indonesia
pp. 903-904