What political demands do we place on literature? When revolution is in the air, what are the duties of the author? These were the questions Indonesian author Pramoedya Ananta Toer was grappling with in the late 1950s and early 1960s after defecting from the liberal “universal humanist” camp to the ranks of socialist artists. This talk explores shifts in his corpus by focusing on his understudied 1963 lectures on “Socialist Realism and Indonesian Literature” in which he ambivalently articulates a duty of artists to help usher in revolution through prose. Pramoedya’s own attempts at this kind of heroic, liberatory narrative are found in his first two (tepidly-received) novels after moving to the socialist camp: A Happening in South Banten (1958) and Larasati (1960). But in the early 1960s, while also a vocal columnist in the pre-1965 socialist cultural offensive, Pramoedya turned to historical fiction, the genre which became the mainstay of his long, successful career. Why? I argue that this turn to history offered an escape from the world-historical demands he had charged the author with. Rather than having to dialectically (and didactically) create the future, as he demanded narrative do in his 1963 lecture, he could instead portray dialectical progressions of the past in works still laden with political insights for Indonesia’s present. This turn preceded, but then dovetailed with, the collapse of the revolutionary horizon with the anti-communist genocide of 1965 and Pramoedya’s 14-year incarceration.

Hosted by the Committee on Southern Asian Studies

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