House of Glass

462 Pages·1997·1.32 MB·English

by  Pramoedya Ananta Toer

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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A Penguin Random House Company 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 Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity,
encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture.
Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with
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continue to publish books for every reader.
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.
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.
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
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