PENGUIN BOOKS
HOUSE OF GLASS
Pramoedya Ananta Toer was born on the island of Java in 1925. He was imprisoned first by the Dutch from 1947 to 1949 for his role in the Indonesian revolution, then by the Indonesian government as a political prisoner. Many of his works have been written while in prison, including the Buru Quartet (This Earth of Mankind, Child of All Nations, Footsteps, and House of Glass), which was conceived in stories the author told to other prisoners during his confinement on Buru Island from 1969 to 1979.
Pramoedya is the author of thirty works of fiction and nonfiction. His novels have been translated into twenty languages. He received the PEN Freedom-to-write Award in 1988 and the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 1995. He is currently under city arrest in Jakarta, where his books are banned and selling them a crime punishable by imprisonment.
Max Lane was second secretary in the Australian embassy in Jakarta until recalled in 1981 because of his translation of Pramoedya’s Buru Quartet.
HOUSE OF GLASS
a novel
Pramoedya Ananta Toer
Translated and with an
Introduction by Max Lane
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First published in Australia by Penguin Books Australia Ltd. 1992
First published in the United States of America by William Morrow and Company, Inc. 1996
Reprinted by arrangement with William Morrow and Company, Inc.
Published in Penguin Books (USA) 1997
Copyright © 1988 by Pramoedya Ananta Toer
English translation copyright © 1992 by Max Lane
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Originally published in Indonesian by Hasta Mitra Publishing House, Jakarta, 1988.
THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE MORROW EDITION AS FOLLOWS:
Toer, Pramoedya Ananta, 1925–
[Rumah kaca. English]
House of glass : a novel/Pramoedya Ananta Toer: translated and introduced by
Max Lane.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Originally published: Australia: Penguin, 1992.
ISBN: 978-1-101-61535-5
I. Title.
PL5089.T8R8613 1996
899’.22132—dc20 95–46294
Deposuit Potentes de Sede et Exaltavit Humiles.
(He has brought down the mighty from their thrones and raised up the lowly.)
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
This is a novel set in a time prior to the establishment of an official national language and when the choice of language was intimately tied up with social status and power. I have thus tried to preserve as much as possible of the different usages, including honorifics, of the original. These are usually Malay, Javanese, and Dutch terms. These are italicized the first time they appear. If explanations or translations are required, they can be found in the Glossary at the back of this book. The Glossary also includes some English terms and acronyms that may not be familiar to the English-speaking reader.
This is the fourth translator’s note I have written for this series. During the course of translating and revising and refining the translations, a process which I am sure will continue into the future, a large number of people have helped. I must take the opportunity of this final translator’s note to thank all of them, especially Kerry and Caroline Groves, the late R.F.X. Brissenden, Blanche d’Alpuget, Jackie Yowell, and Elizabeth Flann. A special mention must be made of the late Dr. Geoff Blunden, who put considerable effort into editing the manuscript of This Earth of Mankind.
I must also express deep gratitude to Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Hasyim Rahman, and Yusuf Isak, who together provided permission, support, and most important of all, inspiration to finish this project. Indeed, I thank all my friends in Indonesia for the inspiration that they have given.
Finally I thank Anna Nurfia and Melanie Purwitasari, who have been tolerant of my absences, both physical and mental, while I have been working on this project.
INTRODUCTION
House of Glass is the fourth volume of Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s novels inspired by the life of one of the pioneers of the Indonesian national awakening and of Indonesian journalism, Tirto Adi Suryo. These novels, along with other manuscripts, were written in the last period of his fourteen years of imprisonment under barbaric conditions on the prison island of Buru in Eastern Indonesia. Pramoedya, along with thousands of others, was imprisoned in Jakarta jails and the Buru Island concentration camps without ever being tried and sentenced. Many, including Pramoedya, were beaten or suffered torture. Many died during their imprisonment.
Pramoedya obtained writing materials and the opportunity to write only in the last few years of his time at Buru. Prior to this he had narrated to his fellow prisoners the story of Minke, Annelies, Nyai Ontosoroh, Robert Suurhof, and the other characters of This Earth of Mankind, Child of All Nations, Footsteps, and House of Glass. He had to rely on his memory of the historical research he had undertaken in the early 1960s to be able to capture the detail and color of the Netherlands Indies of the early twentieth century.
House of Glass is not only the final volume of the tetralogy. It is also the finale. The story begins with the event that ended the third volume— the arrest of Minke. His newspaper has been banned after his young assistants published a biting editorial attacking the governor-general of the Netherlands Indies. The policeman, Pangemanann, takes Minke away while Princess Kasiruta, Minke’s wife, is visiting her father in a village nearby.
Those who have followed the saga of Minke might have been afraid that the story would now be at an end. For Pramoedya, however, Minke’s absence provides the opportunity to reveal who has been the real protagonist of these four novels. It is true that we, as readers, have been taught a great deal through observing the actions and following the thoughts of Minke. We have watched him develop from a naive and somewhat self-centered teenager to a mature and experienced man of politics, yet still complex and subject to human foibles. A man of vision, he saw, before any other, the nature of Indonesia’s future as an amalgam of peoples united behind revolutionary political goals—before the word “Indonesia” had even been invented.
Minke was at the center of the maelstrom created by the unleashing of a whole range of social forces as the awakening of the Indonesian consciousness met a seemingly irresistible force—colonialism. And this awakening was not the product of some mystical or metaphysical process. It was brought about by changes in the material world: Java being turned into a sugar plantation crisscrossed by railways; rivalry and war between colonial powers; the spread of the printing press and formal schooling; the upheavals caused by other Asian peoples’ struggles for liberation; the telegraph, the automobile, the steamship, the camera. The impact of all these changes on the consciousness of the natives of the Indonesian archipelago found its most concentrated form in the new personalities it created. And in Minke’s development, Pramoedya has been able to exemplify the path of these changes. Minke did not simply mature from a teenager to an adult. His development exemplified the formation of a kind of personality that had never before existed in Javanese
or Sumatran or Timorese or Celebes society. He represented a new form of social being.
It could be said that he was a new kind of personality for the Indies only, of a kind that was not new in Europe. He was a pioneer of the Indonesian bourgeoisie. “Liberty, fraternity, equality,” the slogan of the greatest bourgeois revolution, was the slogan that inspired him. He was a businessman, an entrepreneur, a publisher who struggled to bring the best of bourgeois values to his society. But as with other Asian revolutionaries of the period, his confrontation with colonialism also placed him on the side of the impoverished and oppressed masses of ordinary people. The bourgeois dedicated to the people is a rare but persisting phenomenon in Asian society, even today.
The impact of these changes, and their contradictions, are focused and concentrated in the character of Minke. Other characters, such as the concubine and successful businesswoman Nyai Ontosoroh, the Dutch journalist Ter Haar, the Chinese revolutionary Ang San Mei, the peasant rebels of Java and Minke’s radical helpers, such as Mas Marko, only partially reflect the impact of those developments. Minke is the cutting edge.
Yet House of Glass shows that he is not the real protagonist. And the way in which Pramoedya reveals who the real protagonist is also reveals for all to see his great abilities both as a historian and as a novelist.
The reader who has already glanced at the first few pages of this novel, or who may now be tempted to do so, will perhaps think that the protagonist I am talking about is the policeman Pangemanann who, in Minke’s absence, takes over the task of narration. It is his notes that make up House of Glass. It is his consciousness that we now dip into, that is revealed to us as it reels under the consequences of the tasks he has been set.
But I do not mean Pangemanann. Pangemanann is merely a guide to help us understand the nature of the real protagonist. And he is the best of guides. Dedicated to the destruction of this protagonist, and a serious and intelligent man, he lives up fully to that well-known motto—know thine enemy!
And who or what is Pangemanann’s enemy? It would be arrogant for me to try to set out here in a few pages what is so wonderfully told over the next few hundred. Moreover, it would take away from the reader too much of the surprise and challenge that lie ahead.
However, I have made one assertion that I should explain, that House of Glass, perhaps more than any of the volumes, and certainly as the seal on the tetralogy as a whole, makes very clear what is the essence of the greatness of these four novels. Somewhat like a Hindu god, the protagonist of these novels appears in several forms. Perhaps the highest form—which many readers will already have discerned from the earlier novels—is history, the inexorable march of history itself. This is what Pangemanann has set himself against.
To explain the reasons, the dynamics, the causes, the forces at work in pushing history forward without dehumanizing or depersonalizing it is Pramoedya’s great achievement. These are not novels set against the background of historical events, in which the uninformed can become informed about those events while enjoying a good story, as is the case with many historical novels. History is not the background to these stories, it is the protagonist. The most powerful historical energies are reflected in the character of Minke, in one form or another. He is history’s child at a turning point in his society’s history. Pramoedya has shown us how a revolutionary is born.
But Pramoedya also knows that history does not have only one child, that we are all the products of the world we live in as it is transformed, being made and remade by us all. In House of Glass, Minke leaves us for a while, but history does not stop despite all of colonialism’s best efforts. So now we meet many more of history’s children, men and women, all borne upon the same newly unleashed energies, but all trying to bend those energies in a direction of their own.
Commentators have talked about the epic quality of Pramoedya’s works, how they are like sagas with their kaleidoscope of characters and sweeping panoramas. Some have compared him to the great nineteenth-century social realists, perhaps Dickens, perhaps Dostoyevsky. I think there is truth in this, but also something else. Pramoedya is a novelist writing historical realist novels with the advantage of the twentieth century’s scientific approach to the study of history. He is fully aware of how human consciousness invents and reinvents its own histories—something wonderfully evoked by Pangemanann’s curiosity about Minke’s novels, This Earth of Mankind, Child of All Nations, and Footsteps. As a fighter in the revolutionary movement for liberation against the Dutch and for the completion of the revolution after Independence, he has been an active participant in the twentieth century’s most important new social phenomenon—the conscious attempt by the masses of humankind to mold their own future; the shape of their future society. I think it is not an exaggeration to claim that the combination of Pramoedya’s great storytelling abilities, that so inspired and encouraged his fellow prisoners during the many years in Buru Island prison camp, and his insight into the dynamics of history makes him a revolutionary in literary terms. More than a great writer of historical fiction, he is a great writer of history in fiction.
But this is not the time or place for me to attempt what Pangemanann was fated to attempt as regards the novels of Minke. There are many full literary critiques waiting to be written where the revolutionary character of Pramoedya’s work, including all its contradictions, will be discussed.
In the meantime, I wish you, the reader, all the best as you set out on the final chapter of this particular journey. I would ask you also to remember the plight of Pramoedya himself—under town arrest, unable to publish either books or articles, his rights as a citizen denied. All his books remain banned in Indonesia. The same applies to his publishers, Yusuf Isak and Hasyim Rahman, also victims of long-term imprisonment without trial, also banned from publishing or writing.
And what of the younger generation of men and women who want to read and be inspired by works such as these? Bambang Subono, Bambang Isti Nugroho, and Bonar Tigor Naipospos were only recently released after serving more than six years each of sentences in prison of up to eight years for possessing and circulating Pramoedya’s novels—these novels you have been reading.
—MAX LANE
Table of Contents
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Glossary
1
1912. This was the year that brought the greatest burdens for Governor-General Idenburg. His predecessor, van Heutsz, had in fact prepared the way for Idenburg. He had succeeded in breaking the back of all armed resistance against the Dutch in the Indies. Then came his replacement, descending on the Indies like a prince from the heavens, relaxed and as if without a care in the world. He had a big heart and his brain was full of a million plans for humanitarian improvement. Then, after just three years in Batavia, just when he should be showing the angelic face of the Netherlands to all, the times changed and carried him in a direction of their own. The epoch of van Heutsz, of the triumphant cheers of victory, of the tormented wailing of defeat, disappeared like a thief scuttling off to find his own grave.
Now His Excellency the governor-general was anxious. Humanitarianism—that ethical duty to which he was sworn—was now confronted by the needs of the times. The times were choosing their own direction, buffeting his humanitarian face like a stalking whirlwind. It was hard, hard for Idenburg, and, of course, hard too for me who received new and special tasks.
During 1911, the previous year, we began to feel in the Indies the lapping at our shores of waves brought forth by the storm that was raging to our north. The Ching Dynasty in China was overthrown. A child of the masses, a doctor as it happened, ascended the stage to become president and leader of the heavenly kingdom of China—Sun Yat-sen. The eyes of the world were on this first president of Ch
ina as all the world waited to see what he would do. It was six years ago now that he had shaken the world, his first blows echoing around the globe. He succeeded in something that nobody believed could be done—he brought under control the international terror network known as the Tong societies. This was a network of terror gangs that operated in almost every port town in the world, including the Indies—and especially in Surabaya.
It was said that the Tong gangs were originally exiles who fled China when the great peasant rebellion that spread from south China right through to the north was finally crushed by the emperor’s armies. The Taiping rebellion failed. Its organization was broken up and its leaders fled to all parts of the world, building a network of terror outside the country of their ancestors, and holding tight in their grip the lives of the overseas Chinese.
Sun Yat-sen met and conferred with their leaders. He was successful. They accepted his leadership and promised to help in the struggle to make certain the victory of Chinese nationalism.
But it was not only this that was disturbing the sleep of His Excellency. No, not only this! As a way to add to their funds, the Tong were smuggling Burmese opium. The Opium Selling Service and the Police Patrols were always meeting trouble. The Service was selling opium to addicts at a lower price, but it was a lower-quality drug, and there was no credit allowed, as there was in Hong Kong. Ei, ei—where else would Burmese opium and nationalism become intertwined if not in the Indies! It could only happen in the Indies. By junk and every other type of boat, the opium emerged from the South China Sea to find its way along the rivers of the great islands of the Indies, and the smaller islands, too, like Bangka and Belitung. In West Borneo the intertwined virus of northern nationalism and Burmese opium had also wormed its way into the society of the Dayal people. And in Java they found a new method of smuggling—along all the rivers, big and small, up the edge of the Vorstenlanden, the officially recognized princedoms in Central Java; then they traveled by land. They were distributing opium to all the small towns of Java. Idenburg did not know what to do.