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Kritika Kultura

Author ORCID Identifier

https://orcid.org/0009-0006-4017-9983

Abstract

Since Suharto’s resignation in 1998, Indonesian writers and intellectuals have been preoccupied with recovering and rearticulating suppressed voices to contest the New Order’s dual ideology of capitalist developmentalism and anticommunism. This critical endeavor often draws on postmodernism’s valorization of non-totalizable multiplicity against any form of metanarrative. While this strategic adoption is understandable in its historical conjuncture, it tends to simplify New Order anticommunism into an antagonism between the state and the people, leaving undertheorized the more ambiguous relationship between the people and the world market that the New Order state was established to usher in the first place. This essay reads the fiction of Eka Kurniawan, specifically the short story “Corat-coret di Toilet” [Scrawls on the Toilet Walls] and the novel Cantik Itu Luka [Beauty Is a Wound], to remap the postmodern conjuncture in Indonesia. Inspired by Fredric Jameson’s imperative to think postmodernism in relation to late capitalism, this article reads these literary texts as two distinct attempts to grapple with the dialectic between Indonesian literary production and the world market’s logic of universal commodification. It shows how the short story, in adopting the aesthetics of a historical document, turns into a commodity, while the novel, in assuming the commodity-form (i.e. the postcolonial magical-realist novel), turns into a historical novel. Thus, it is the novel that responds to Jameson’s call at the end of The Antinomies of Realism to make the historical novel speculative, that is, to reinvest the deadlocked present of postmodernity with a utopian desire for an alternative future.

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