The “literary” study of Malay-Indonesian literature: some observations
Amin Sweeney’s 1983 article in the Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society is a methodological critique of A. Teeuw’s two influential papers on the study of Indonesian “historical” texts, arguing that Teeuw’s analytical framework is compromised by unexamined presuppositions inherited from a Western, print-literate culture. Sweeney contends that the distinction between “literature” and “history,” between fiction and referentiality, which Teeuw applies to Javanese and Malay manuscripts, is a construct of the observer’s own cultural position rather than a feature of the texts or their societies.
Summary
The article grows out of Sweeney’s own research into the interface between Malay orality and literacy, particularly the rhetorical strategies available in traditional Malay discourse. He frames his intervention as a necessary preliminary to that larger study: a revaluation of the assumptions that have governed Malay-Indonesian literary scholarship since the nineteenth century. He opens by observing that the popular practice of “attacking Winstedt” has often been piecemeal and fact-based, with critics inadvertently sharing Winstedt’s Romanticist premises even while rejecting his conclusions. The pre-Romanticist scholar Werndly (1736), by contrast, took it for granted that Malay, as a learned language of scholarship, should contain foreign influences, illustrating how the very question of “purity” is historically contingent (p. 33).
The bulk of the article is devoted to a close reading of Teeuw’s 1974 paper “Some Remarks on the Study of So-called Historical Texts in Indonesian Languages” and his 1978 paper “Tentang Membaca dan Menilai Karya Sastra.” Sweeney’s central charge is that Teeuw, despite his evident sympathy for structuralist and reader-response approaches, ultimately operates with a substantive, pre-Saussurean model in which “literature” and “history” possess intrinsic meanings independent of the perceiving culture. Teeuw’s adoption of a narrow New Critical doctrine—that a literary text is a closed field to which the reader need not refer “reality”—is shown to be historically specific: it was a reaction against nineteenth-century impressionism and represents, in Ong’s terms, the final break with the rhetorical tradition in which literature functioned within an agonistic framework of real life (pp. 35–36). When Teeuw applies this model to the Pararaton, the Sejarah Banten, and the Gunung Butak inscription, he is forced into a circular argument: he labels certain texts “fiction” and others “report” by reference to his own Western schemata, then concludes that the Indonesian boundary between the two is “different” from the Western one, thereby negating the validity of his own initial judgments (pp. 37–39).
Sweeney’s positive argument is that all human discourse is formulaic and schematic, but that in radically oral societies the schematic “chunks” are much larger than those to which print-culture readers are accustomed. The modern historian, no less than the traditional Javanese scribe, works with given themes and models that allow him to impose structure on what would otherwise be meaningless chaos; neither possesses a monopoly on “reality” (p. 40). The expectation that convention will be violated is itself a convention arising only in highly literate print cultures, and the “aesthetic of opposition” that Teeuw attributes to traditional literature is better understood as a feature of oral composition rather than of the written texts under discussion (pp. 43–44).
Key Findings
- Teeuw’s 1974 paper defines “literature” as “texts which are written” and “historical” as pertaining to “real or presumed facts, events, persons in the past,” yet then abandons these adequate definitions in favour of a New Critical model of the text as autonomous object (p. 35).
- The Pararaton is classified by Teeuw as “significant fiction which is not primarily intended to tell the reader what has really happened,” while the Gunung Butak inscription is equated with a journalist’s report; Sweeney argues that both are perceptions of the past and that the distinction is imposed from outside (p. 38).
- In the Sejarah Banten, Teeuw equates a draft to be transposed into tembang with “report” and the completed tembang with “fiction,” a parallel Sweeney finds arbitrary and based on an imagined equivalence with Western genres (p. 38).
- Teeuw’s 1978 paper uses the term “code” inconsistently—sometimes as a “system of conventions,” sometimes as a single “convention,” sometimes interchangeably with “principle”—revealing that his approach is substantive rather than relational in the Saussurean sense (pp. 42–43).
- Sweeney demonstrates that what Teeuw calls “redundancy” in literary language (p. 337) is in fact a necessary feature of effective communication in aurally consumed manuscript cultures, where copiousness and repetition limit the possibility of communicative failure (p. 43).
- The Malay dalang treats the tales of Rama and Sita as sejarah (history) on equal footing with an account of the reign of Long Yunus of Kelantan (d. late eighteenth century), and can produce “evidence” in the local terrain to prove their historicity, illustrating that the boundary between fact and fiction in traditional Malay perception does not coincide with Western categories (p. 41).
Conclusion
Sweeney’s definitive takeaway is that the study of Malay-Indonesian literature requires a self-conscious effort to rectify the tendency to naturalize what is culturally alien and to perceive one’s own standards as universals. He does not seek to demolish Teeuw’s work but to demonstrate that its most significant insights—such as the observation that the wayang lakon structure forms the basic pattern of Javanese history—are achieved in spite of the theoretical model rather than because of it. The article closes with a caution against Western scholars prescribing rules for literature in cultures whose norms, values, and communicative purposes differ fundamentally from those of an industrialized, urbanized print society, warning that Indonesian and Malaysian authors should not be encouraged to write for a postulated audience of Western professors rather than for their own societies (p. 45).
Context
- The article draws no primary archival sources; its evidential basis is entirely the published work of Teeuw (1974, 1978), Brakel (1980), Worsley (1972), and a range of Western literary theorists (Ong, Barthes, Booth, Lotman, Scholes and Kellogg).
- Historiographically, the piece sits at the intersection of the “new historicism” in Malay studies and the broader orality-literacy debate inaugurated by Eric Havelock and Walter Ong, and it represents an early and sustained attempt to apply rhetorical and structuralist theory to the specific problem of how Western literary categories fail when applied to radically oral manuscript cultures.