Social criticism in literary works
By Sunaryono Basuki Ks
JAKARTA (JP): In a culture where criticism is considered unhealthy, people on the receiving end frequently interpret judgements unproportionally and tend to find motives behind them.
Unfortunately, criticism warning fellow Indonesians to return to a right path according to religious teachings or to the Constitution may be accused of containing motives to disrupt stability. Critics feel unsafe because they could be accused of breaking certain laws.
A writer uses life experiences and the surrounding environment as sources to portray certain messages.
Some writers compose literary works to illustrate criticisms about affairs in society, unlike politicians who write petitions for the same reason.
When Seno Gumira Ajidarma's short story Salvador was published in a January 1993 edition of Kompas telling about cruelty, readers could deduce that its criticisms were not concerning a country with names of Spanish origin.
Similarly, Satyagraha Hoerip's short story General Attorney Artogo published in Kompas in 1994 was clearly not about a fictitious character of a fictitious country.
Salvador and General Attorney Artogo are examples of short stories in which the writers shift the setting from Indonesia to a foreign country.
My novel Rangda, published in Jawa Pos in 1997, is set in a state with a governor and senators having Spanish names with the story and problems from Indonesia. With this common technique, writers hope that those being criticized will not feel offended enough to clamp down on them.
Moreover, the character names in the story are all foreign, giving no impression whatsoever of the writer's country of origin.
Another technique is to shift the setting to the past. This was done by prominent novelist YB Mangunwijaya in Roro Mendut, part of the Genduk Duku Trilogy.
The shift in time and place is also a frequent method employed by famous local kungfu story writer Kho Ping Hoo. Each of his stories have been enjoyed and fanatically collected here for the past few generations. In a newspaper interview, he admitted that his stories, set in ancient China, were meant to criticize current conditions in Indonesia.
A writer can also set his story in the future to air criticisms. George Orwell did this with his prophetic 1950 novel 1984 about a government that muzzled its citizens' freedoms to horrible levels.
Not many Indonesian writers use future settings for their stories. Among the few is Djokolelono, a famous writer of children's stories.
Another technique to voice criticism is to employ symbols from shadow play plots and other sources. An American poet who later became a British citizen, T.S. Eliot, used various symbols from different sources for his poem The Waste Land and a shorter poem, The Hollow Men, inspired by Joseph Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness.
In Indonesian poetry, Goenawan Mohamad uses pasemon, a technique of criticizing by using softer expressions, while Darmanto Yatman speaks more tersely in his poetry collection Golf for the People.
Although novelists, short story writers and poets have worked hard to express skillfully wrapped criticism, it is still questionable whether any good has come out of such works.
Part of a short story by Putu Wijaya, The Dissident, collected under Zigzag (Pustaka Firdaus, 1996) muses on such ponderings:
"Criticism is not a problem, although in the past it was. Today the king is used to hearing bad things about himself with ease. It has no impact. On the contrary, it adds credit to him, showing that democracy works in his country."
The writer has had several of his short stories published.