On Some Themes in Budi Darmas Rafilus.

MEMBACA
SASTRA JAWA TIMUR
Revitalisasi, Representasi, dan Regenerasi

Arif Bag us Prasetyo,
Beni Setia
Denny Mizhar,
lkwan Setiawan
Imam Muhtarom,
K.Y. Karnanta
Ribut Wijoto,

M. Shoim Anwar
Sony Karsono,
Suryadi Kusniawan
Tjahjono Widarmanto,
Tjahjono Widijanto
Wawan Eko Yulianto,
Yulitin Sungkowati

MEMBACA SASTRA JAWA TIMUR

Revitalisasi, Representasi, dan Regenerasi
Arif Bagus Prasetyo, Beni Setia, Denny Mizhar, lkwan Setiawan,
Imam Muhtarom, K.Y. Karnanta, Ribut Wijoto, M. Shoim Anwar,
Sony Ka rsono, Suryad i Kusn iawan, Tjahjono Widarmanto, Tjahjono
Widij anto, Wawan Eko Yulianto, Yulitin Sungkowat i

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for Budi Darma's figure that will gradually appear in your mind as
you read my essay.
OnApril25, 1937, in Rembang, a small town in the northeastern
part of Central Java, Sri Kunmaryati, the wife of Darmowidagdo,
an employee in the State Postal Service, gave birth to a baby boy.
Darmowidagdo named him Budi Darma. Due to his father's tour
of duty, Budi Darma, since he was three months old, had to go
along with his family's nomadic life throughout Java: Rembang,

ON SOME THEMES IN BUDI DARMA'S
RAFILUS
Sony Karsono

the works of Indonesian and international authors: Idrus, Merari
Siregar and Pramoedya Anan ta Toer, but also Alexandre Dumas,
Karl May, and Anton Chekhov. So it was: on the one hand, given
the nomadic nature of his father's job, Budi Darma was subjected

-Budi Darma

to a high degree of geographical mobility. On the other h and, th e

A snapshot, a passport, and a resume cannot portray an author
in an eloquent and comprehensive manner. I hope nonetheless
that the following biographical sketch could establish a landscape

152

Budi Darma finished elementary school in Kudus, Central
Java in 1950. Subsequently he went on to a junior high school in
Salatiga, a small town in Central Java, halfway between Yogyakarta
in the south and Semarang in the north, where the young Budi

Darma first encountered both Indonesian and world literature.
He loved to spend hours in the municipal library just to read

Good or bad, predestination is essentially inevitable. [... ]
Predestination affects everyone, regardless of whether he has a
pure heart or a diabolic heart. Predestination docs not always lake
sides with the good ones. Nor does it always punish the evil ones.
Poetic justice exists neither in literary works nor in rcality. 1

BUD I DARMA: THE MAN AND HIS WORK2

2

Jombang and Yogyakarta, but also Bandung, Semarang, Kudus,
and Salatiga.

Quoted from Sony Karsono an d Bud i Dann a, "Bud i Darma: Obsesi, Burnng
Ganjil, Perempuan Berkumis: Dialog Bersama Sony Karsono," the draft version.
The translation is mine .
This biographical sketch is borrowed and expanded from Sony Karsono and

Budi Da.rma., "Bud.i Darma: Obsesi, Bnrung Ga.njil , Perempua.n Berkumis: Dialog
Bersa.n1a Budi Darma," Prosa , 3 (2003), p. 151-154. The translation is mine.

literary books he fou nd in the municipal library of Salatiga gave
him access to th e printed cyberspace where he could go on a
bold voyage to the literary world. These two types of mobilityphysical and intellectual-seem to have shaped his adull vision
as a writer. For example, a few decades later in his fictions one
would see that Budi Darma's authorial vision often takes the form
of a bird, the symbol of the back-and-forth movement between the
realm of concrete events and the realm of abstract meanings. It is
not just by chance, I think, that in his late forties Budi Darma felt

'--

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153

a strong attraction to Saadia Gaon, the ninth-century Babylonian

theologian, who thought that although science is a concrete entity,
it has an abstract goal: to bring man to the realization that the
ultimate power is never in his hands. By extrapolation, Budi
Darma believes that the same holds tru e for literature. In his letter
to the editor of Balai Pustaka, which published his novel Rafilus,
Budi Darma argues that ''novels cannot rid themselves of events,
although the events are themselves derived from abstractions. But
novels have an abstract goal: the contemplation about life" (Budi
Darma 1988: 5).
The true reader, the powerful reader, is he who also writes. The
adolescent Budi Darma did show the signs of growth to be a true
reader. After having completed junior high school in 1953, he left
Salatiga for Semarang where he could continue his education in
the senior high school. It was in Semarang, at the age of seventeen,
that he began his literary career. For example, with B. Sularto, the
playwright who was later known as the author of Domba-domba
Revolusi (Lambs of the Revolution), he served, up until 1956, as
the cultural editor for the Semarang-based daily Tanah Air (Mother
Land).
In 1957 Budi Darma continued his stu dies in the Department

of Western Literature and Culture of Gadjah Mada University,
Yogyakarta. When he graduated in 1963, he received a bachelor
degree in English literature. In recognition of his academic
achievement, he was awarded the Bhakti Wisuda medal. During
his undergraduate years in Gadjah Mada University, he took
part in a number of extracurricular activities to culli vate his
literary skills. For example, he served as an editor for the student
magazine Gadjah Mada and contributed to a number of dailies
and magazines. In addition, he took great pleasure in discussing

arts and literature with his friends such as the poets Subagyo
Sastrowardoyo, W.S. Rendra, and Sapardi Djoko Damono.
Many years later, after his graduation from Gadjah Mada
University, Budi Darma won three scholarships to undertake
postgraduate studies in the United States. First, he got a scholarship
from the East-West Center to take part in a non-degree program in
the humanities at University of Hawaii from 1970 to 1971. Second,
as a recipient of Fulbright scholarship, in 1974 he began his masters
program at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. There,
after defending a thesis ti tled The Dead and the Alive, he received,

in November 1975, an M.A. in English Creative Writing. Finally,
supported by a scholarship from the Ford Foundation, Budi Darma
took up a PhD program at Indiana University. In 1980, he received
a Ph.D. in English literature, after defending a dissertation titled
Character and Moral judgment in jane Austen's Novels.
In addition to being an author, Budi Darma is now a Professor of
English literature in the English Department of the State Teachers
College of Surabaya (now the State University. of Surabaya),
where he has taught since the early 1960s. As an academic,
Budi Darma has held a number of positions ranging from Head
of the English Department, Dean of the Department of Language
and Arts Education, to President of the University. On many
occasions, Budi Darma has complained that his responsibilities as
an administrator have deprived him of the favorable atmosphere
where he could sit and write.
In his bachelor years Budi Darma led a disorganized life. Even
when he already worked as a college instructor, for quite a while,
he still loved to wander here, there, an d everywhere with his
friends. Perhaps it was his way of enjoying "delight in disorder."

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However, his marriage to Sitaresmi on March 14, 1968 marked h is
entry into a period when "delight in order" began to shape his life.
It was the period when his books were arranged in a special place
and in a logical order. Thus, for the firs t time in his life, he felt that
he did write in the true sense of the word. Paradoxically, it was in
this orderly situation that Budi Darma wrote stories that present
absurd worlds, worlds "turned upside-down," ones where bizarre
characters appear, roam, collide, suffer, and die. Budi Darma
and Sitaresmi have three children: Diana, Guritno, and Hananto
Widodo.
Budi Darma's whole oeuvre includes two anthologies of short
stories: Orang-orang Bloomington (Bloomingtonians, 1980) and

Kritikus Adinan (Adinan the Critic, 2002) ; three novels: Olenka
(1983), Rafilus (1988), and Ny Talis (Mrs. Talis, 1996); and three
collections of essays: Solilokui (Soliloquy, 1983), Sejumlah Esei
Sastra (A Cluster of Literary Essays, 1984) and Harmonium (1995).
Budi Darma has also written {llhrisan (1996), a translation of

Legacy, a novel by the African writer Tsitsi V. Himunyangga-Phiri.
k " (The Kid) appears in Black Clouds
Budi Darma's sh ort story ·~na
over the Isle of Gods and Other Modem Indonesian Short Stories
(1997), an anthology edited and tran slated by David Roskies and
published by M. E. Sharpe. Budi Darma's works have been the
of many scholarly analyses in In don esia and abroad. In
subjec~
2000 he served as the c h~ ef

editor in Modern Literature of ASEAN.

This book, published by the ASEAN Committee on Cultural
Information, presents the literatures of Brunei Darussalam, the
Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and

Surabaya, the governor of East Java, th e Jakarta Arts Council, and
the Governmen t of Indonesia. In 1984 he received the S.E.A Write
Award. The national daily Kompas selected three of his fiction s
as the best short story of the year: "Derabat" in 1999, "Mata Yang
Indah" (Beautiful Eyes) in 2001, and "Laki-laki Pemanggul Goni"
(The Gunny Sack Carrier) in 2012 .
Along with Umar Kayam, Danarto, and Putu Wijaya, Bu di
Darma was one of th e prominent prose writers in Indonesia in the
1970s and the 1980s. This essay of mine is an attempt to closely
read Rafilus. It is true that Budi Darma has once remarked that
"with different ways, styles and materials, I keep telling stories
about the violence of life." 3 What he meant by "violence of life"
was "man's troubled relations with others in his search of his
identity." 4 But I guess there is more to Rafilus than just this theme.
By looking closely at the novel's plot, characterization, motifs,
setting, and narrative strategy, I hope I could come up with more
findings.

THE PLOT

Fiction, John Gardner says, used to be "a means of discovering
or revealing how things happen in the world."5 The plot of Budi
Darma's novel Raft/us starts with Tiwar, the narrator, declaring that his

friend Rafi Ius "has died twice" (p. 14). This puzzling declaration may
arouse the reader's curiosity. He would wonder, "What kind of death is it?
How does it come about? Who on earth is this man Rafi lus? What, if any,
3

Vietnam.

61.
4

In recognition of his literary achievements, Budi Darma has
received awards from a number of institutions: the mayor of

Bndi Darma, "Mula-Mula Adalah Tema," in Cerpen Indonesia Mutakllir:
AI1tologi Esei dan Kritik. Pamusuk Eneste, ed. Uakarta: Gramedia, 1983), p. 260-

5

Bndi Darma, ibid.
john Gardner, The Art of Fiction. Notes on Craft for Young ~ \ 1i lc us
Alfred Knopf, 1984), p. 47.

(New York:

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-..
is the meaning of his life and death?" These are readerly questions. Yet, it
is under the spel l of such readerly questions too that Tiwar, as the fictional
author of Rafi!us, explores the memory of his brief but haunting
encounter with Rafilus. He struggles to make sense out of the
encounter by writing a life story of the young Surabayan writer
who has lived, suffered, and died in the margins of society. Instead
of a standard biography, the life story comes into being as a novel.
When the novel reaches its end, Tiwar reveals, as he should, the
circumstances of Rafilus' double death. The plot thereby comes to
a full circle.
A chain of events takes place between the novel's beginning
and its end. We can read these events as constituting Tiwar's
report of his short and unsystematic "study" on Rafilus: its origin,
methods, data, and interpretation. We can also read the events
as making up an "album of confessions" of various lengths and
depths made by five persons whom Tiwar encounters during his
three-month obsession with Rafilus. The confessors are Rafilus,
Tiwar's girlfriend Pawestri, the postman Munandir, the "darkskinned Dutchman" Vander Klooning, and Tiwar himself. Both as
a "research report" and as an album of confessions," the cluster of
events forms the novel's plot.
Let us now take up the first reading. After announcing Rafilus'
death, Tiwar proceeds by telling us how he first meets him. In
Surabaya, somewhere in May or June 1981, while attending a
reception at the businessman Jumarup's house, he runs into Rafilus,
an extremely strong man whose body seems to be made of iron.
Torn between fear and fascination, Tiwar suddenly gets obsessed
with him. No sooner has Tiwar made Rafilus' acquaintance than
the latter discloses to the former some bitter episodes of his
childhood and youth. Tiwar listens while Rafilus speaks. This is

the beginning of his three-month "research" into the life and work
of Rafilus. Later on he employs a number of different methods to
obtain knowledge about his subject: he listens attentively to his
confessions; he intervjews the postman Munandir, an old chatterbox
who turns out to share his interest in Rafilus; he reads closely those
letters where the clerk Pawestri had unveils her desire for him; he
compares him with another "iron man": Van de Klooning; he pays
attention to people Rafilus has attacked either in wri ting, such as
the businessman Jumarup, or physically, such as the petty bandit
Sinyo Minor; and he reads three samples of Rafilus' literary work:
a sloppy opinion piece in a local newspaper, an interesting short
story, and a rather superficial novel that nobody else cares about.
At the end of his research report, Tiwar presents his discovery: In
essence, Rafilus has been a "non-person," an "iron man'' (p . 186). He
began and ended his life as an encumbrance to society (p. 182). And
one death was not enough to kill him. It took two traffic accidents to
accomplish his two deaths : the first killed his life-in-the-world; the
second killed his corpse.

If we go on by reading the plot of Rafilus as an album of
confessions, we will discover that in the process of unpacking
Rafilus' life, Tiwar ends up unpacking also the lives of Pawestri,
Munandir, and Van der Klooning. In the novel, Tiwar records the
conversations he has with Rafilus where the latter confesses to his
parentless origin, his miserable childhood, his loveless relationship
with women, his futile struggle to be somebody, and his constant
struggle to tame the devil in him. Tiwar presents Pawestri's letters
to him in which she unpacks her unremarkable job experience,
embarrassing family history, and poor academic background, as
well as her desperate need to have children and her burning desire
to have sex with Rafilus. One of her letters to Tiwar tells us how,

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In
in a flea marke t, she stumbles upon Van der Klooning's diary.
the diary Vander Klooning confesses to his three failed marriages,
the conflic t he has with his mistress Raminten, and the raging
battle he has with the demon that inhabits his soul. Somewhere
in his garrul ous chain of stories about Rafilus, Van der Klooning,
and Jan van Kraal, the postman Munandir admits, with thinly
nt
veiled sense of pride, that he is a happy fath er to five excelle
It
sons whom he likens to the Pandavas of the epic Mahabharata.
t
almos
turns out later that his is a childless family. Thus in Rafilus,
everybody makes a confession honestly or dishonestly, in speech
or in writing. Even Tiwar, as a participant-observer, cannot but
render himself visible in his text . Passages appear that betray the
emptin ess of his soul and the fragility of his will. But at no time
does he ever reveal his own life story.
How is it that in his telling of Rafilus' life story, Tiwar is
compelled to tell also the life stories of other people? I argue
that no matter how margin al Rafilus is in his community, his
life as a person is always alread y embedded in the life of that
community. Consequently, any possib le version of Rafilus' life
story is necessarily "contaminated" by, and interwoven with, the
life stories of other people: those persons with whom he comes
'
into contact. Again st Budi Darma's own interpretation of Rafilus
life, an interpretation he inserts in his preface and afterword that
of
brackets Tiwar's text; an interpretation that mobilizes the idea
very
the
is
predestination, Lhe novel itself suggests, I argu e, that it
nature of Rafilu s' relations with his community that shapes him
a
to be the person he is. It is by no means an error, therefore, that
novel entitled Rafilus should devote the bulk of its pages to stories
e,
about Pawestri, Munandir, and Van der Klooning. In defens

Had I never met (Rafilus], I would not have interviewed
Munanclir. Nor would I have Lhe desire to read Paweslri's let.ters.
Had I never mel him, I would not have Lhought about. Jumarup
again (p. 119).
Tiwar implies that his interest in Muna ndir, Pawes tri, and
Jumarup is derived from his much stronger interest in, nay, his
obsession with, Rafilus. In Iwan Simatupang's novel Kooong, after
in
the loss of his son Si Amat, who is run down by a locomotive
living
er
what seems to be an act of a sukide, Pak Sastro, a widow
in a village of Central Java under the Old Order, discovers that
an ordinary turtledove he buys in Sen en Marke t, Jakarta after his
son's funeral, has filled the emptiness of his heart. In fact, the bird
6
e
has become the kiblah, the spiritual center, of his life. By the sam
token, were it not for Rafi lus, Tiwar would remain an automaton, "[an]
empty body." "Yes," he thinks to him self, "I do walk with my own power.
s
But I feel as though I were in fact moved by an alien power that happen
his
to inhabits and control s my body" (p. 61 ). Now that Rafilus appears in
about
ing
life, Tiwar is possessed by an irresist ible desire to know everyth
n,
him. Since the day they meet in a stately recepti on at Jumarup's mansio
the research on Rafi lus becomes hi s main project. Rafilus is now the focus
on
of his life: the source of its meanin g, directio n, and purpose. His obsessi
with Rafi Ius proves to be fertile. Three weeks after the death of Rafi Ius,
whose car is run over by a locomotive at a paralle l train crossin g at the west
end of Margorejo Gang Lebar Street, Surabaya, Tiwar manages to write
and complete a novel about his new friend. The event has its redemptive
ity
power for Tiwar. A man suffering from impotence, and perhaps infertil
too, Tiwar finally begets a literary child- his novel.
However, as the ultimate author of Raft/us, Budi Darma maintains that,
"Both as a process and as the fruit of a process," Tiwar's novel "does
not carry much weight" (p. 187). On the contrary, as a reader I hold that

perhaps, of his narrative strategy, Tiwar writes,
6

Ibid., p. 15.
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Tiwar's novel and the likes of it do carry some importance. The life
stories of Rafilus and Pawestri may lead us to reflect, for example, on
the dialectical relationship between the individual and society.' On the
one hand, their stories illustrate the many ways in which society
determines their feelings, ideas, and activities. On the other hand,
by reading their life stories we can learn how their lives and works
affect their society. In addition, Pawestri's confession, for example,
reveals to us what she holds to be the ultimate meaning of life, the
kind of struggle she has with her society, and the way she differs
from other members of her society such as her own mother, Tiwar,
Rafilus, and Jumarup.

LIFE AS A SERIES OF ACCIDENTS

"Plot," Jonathan Culler observes, "is the material that is
presented from a certain point of view by discourse." 8 Since Tiwar
is the narrator of Rajilus, all that happens in the novel is perceived
from his point of view. What kind of point of view does Tiwar
adopt? The plot of the novel represents Tiwar's way of organizing
episodes in his version ofRafilus' life story. In his epilog to Tiwar's
text, Budi Darma explains to us the circumstances under which
the text comes into being. It is, he says, the fruit of Tiwar's struggle
to get rid of his obsession with Rafilus (p. 18 7). To say so is by no
means to exhaust all the manifest and latent meanings that the
text has. At the textual level, for example, the plot suggests Tiwar's
way of discovering the dark meaning of the protagonist's life, nay,
of man's life in general, in the world.
7

8

For a brief discussion of Franz Boas' idea of life stod es as narratives that
illuminate the dialectical relations between the individual and the social,
sec, for example, Steven Rubenstein's Alejandro 1Sakimp: Shuar Healer in the
Margins of History, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), p. 60.
jonathan Culler, Lilei"OIJ' Theo1y: A Ve1y Sh01t Introdu ction (Oxford: Ox ford
University Press, 1997), p. 86.

"[Pak Sastro's] life is a series of catastrophes," says the narrator
in Kooong. In his life Pak Sastro is faced with a string of disasters.
First, a flood destroys his village and kills his wife. Second, his
only son dies a horrible death. Third, his turtledove, the new center
of his life, suddenly escapes. "But what is life," asks the narrator
again, "if it is not just a catastrophe?"9 Similarly, as the plot of Rajilus
reveals, Tiwar presents human life as a chain of various accidents. The
novel begins with Rafi lus' confession to Tiwarthat his bi rth into this world
is an accident to his biological mother. That's why she dumps him at an
orphanage. He is cursed to be a man with an iron body, an obtuse mind,
and a dark soul. Due to this accident, all his life, no woman ever loves him.
All they do is use him as a gigolo, making love to his body in exchange for
a sum of money. His whole life as one big accjdent reaches its perfection
when a locomotive collides with his car in a railroad crossing and detaches
his head frorn his body. As if it were not enough, on the day of his funeral,
another locomotive crashes into the ambulance that transports his corpse
from the morgue to the cemetery. In this violent accident, Rafi Ius' head,
which has been re-attached to his body by the surgeons at the navy hospital,
is cut off again (p. 186).
As the story moves from Rafilus' birth-by-accident to his deathby-accident, we are told that the young Munandir-Tiwar's chief
informant on Rafilus-narrowly escapes death by collision with a
tram at the railroad crossing between Dr. Soetomo Stand Diponegoro
St (p. 51). But three decades later, in his second encounter with
the Grim Reaper in the midst of the urban traffic of Surabaya, he
does not make it. A locomotive crushes his body to pieces at the
train crossing on Kencana St (p. 156). At the beginning of the novel,
Tiwar also remembers riding, as a young boy, a tram that runs
over a man who is crossing the railway track absent-mindedly (p.
22) . Approaching the end of the novel, Tiwar relates an accident
9

[wnn Simatupang, Kooon,q (Jnkortn: Ptts taka )aya, 1975), p. 87 .

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in Ketintang Wiyata St that involves a middle-aged man run over
by the thug Sinyo Minor who drives his car at a deadly speed (p.

Nights Scheherazade recounts an enthralling tale each night to the Sultan
Shahryar so that she can put off her execution on and on. Imminent death

collision with the former's motorcycle (p. 173-74).

compels her to be a superb storyteller. It is storytell ing, on the other hand,
that hel ps her to cure the Sultan's heart of smarting pains and obsessive
desire to take vengeance for his first wife's adul tery. Finally it also enables
her to exorcise death. Strangely enough, storytelling-the very power
that has helped Scheherazade to stave off death- is itself derived from it.

In Tiwar's story, accidents take place not only at the "historical"
level. They occur at the fictional level as well. Thus we are told

Likewise, the way Tiwar assembles his narrative cards in Ra.fi/us suggests
the idea of death as the origin of life story. It is with the following

that in Rafilus' short story entitled "Habibah," Tiwar reads that
a beautiful but deaf-mute young woman named Habibah is run

statement that h e opens his narrative:

149) . Tiwar also reports that, riding his motorcycle, Sinyo Minor
runs down a young boy (p. 153). Sinyo Minor is himself seriously
injured in an incident where Rafilus deliberately brings his car into

down by a train at the parallel railroad crossing on the corner
of Margorejo Gang Lebar St while she is waiting to catch a bus
despite, and because of, the attempt of a hideous-looking but kindhearted youngster named Griat to rescue her (p. 180-81).
From time to time Tiwar reports th e incidence of fire in the
city of Surabaya. Thus accident is one of the motifs in the plot of
Tiwar's story about Rafilus. Throughout the story there are at least
seven deadly accidents, two near-accidents, one fictional, deadly
accident, and two fires. This motif alludes to the idea that man's
life on earth is a series of accidents. Accident is the symbol of man's
helplessness in the face of mysterious forces beyond his control.

Rafilus has died twice. He died yesterday. But wilhout ever
coming back to life, he died again today. The truth is, since I firs t
met him a couple of months ago, I have had the impression that
he '"rill never die. If he breaks down, at the most he will only rust
away (p. 14).

Rafilus' "unnatural" way of dying provides Tiwar with a strong
justification for his project of telling the man's life story. Already
in this first paragraph we are confronted with th e cognitive
dissonance on Tiwar's part that will both haunt and structure
his entire narration. Forever is Tiwar torn between, on the on e
hand, Rafilus' creepy outward appearances as a super robot- the

DEATH AS THE ORIGIN OF STORYTELLING

Koranic figure of th e polytheist whom God condemns to live in
his second life as a "man of iron"- and, on th e other hand, his
undeniable reality as a human being. If he is really a robot, no
matter how sophisticated and powerful, Rafilus cannot die because

In his essay "The Storyteller," Walter Benjamin writes, "Death
is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell . He has

as a machin e of course he never really lives. Despite his robotic
looks, however, Rafilus has been a living human being. His very

borrowed his authority from death." 10 Thus in Thousand and One

death implies that he was once alive . How is Tiwar supposed to
solve this unsettling cognitive dissonance? Could it be that a man

Budi Darma calls these forces takdir (divine predestination).

10

Walter Benjamin, "The Storyteller," in [1/wninolions, edited by Hannah Arendt,
translated by Harry Zohn, {New York: Schocken Books, 1977), p. 94.

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who leads a mechanical life is in a sense a zombie: still alive yet
already dead? If so, in what way is Rafilus' a mechanical, robotlike life? What has prevented him from living in the fullest SE)nse
of the word? It is not causation but Tiwar's cognitive dissonanceand his attempt to solve it-that ultimately organizes the episodes
in Rafilus into a coherent plot. Natural or unnatural, it is Rafilus'
death that gives Tiwar the authority to undertake the project of
writing the story of his life . If Rafilus still lived, he would be in
his thirties. At that point, it would not be a good idea for Tiwar to
write Rafilus' life story. For one thing, his life is not yet finished.
To write a life story of a man is to attempt to define its essence.
But man, says Sartre, is the only creature in which "existence
precedes essence." As long as he still lives, a man can always say
"no" to any interpretation of his essence. And more importantly,
his essence is still in the making. So the better time for writing a
life story of a man is when he is about to die. And the best time
is when he is already dead. Furthermore, Rafilus was himself a
writer. While still living, he did not need other people to do the job
of writing his own biography. Of course Tiwar could have written
Rafilus' life story anyway. But Rafilus would have reserved the
right to authorize or no t to authorize Tiwar's text. Now that Rafilus
is dead, Tiwar does not need his authorization. As the author of
Rafilus' life story, Tiwar borrows his authority from the man's
death. It is to his death that everything in Rafilus refers back and
forward.

CHARACTERIZATION

We have focused so far on Rafilus from Tiwar's point of view.
But the novel actually contains several story lines. Tiwar's double
encounter with Rafilus-first empirical and second literary-

constitutes only one of them. The other main story lines involve
Rafilus, Pawestri, and Van der Klooning. In this section I will
analyze the personalities of the four chief ch aracters I mentioned
above, by focusing on their own story lines. Let me begin with
Rafilus.
Rafilus is a man haunted by his dark past and paralyzed by his
empty present. To find the meaning of his life, he can turn neither
to his past nor to his present. For his life begins with his mother's
refusal to have him, to protect him, to love him. This disastrous
beginning has robbed him of the chance to develop the basic trust
in the goodness of others, of the world. Unwanted by his own
mother, who is supposed to be the first and major representative
of human society, he never tastes the love of a mother. His is a
faceless, forever-absent mother. For, at the moment when he is
born into this world, it is not only the umbilical chord linking
him to his mother's womb which is cut off, as it should be. Bu t the
woman also cuts off whatever chords (economic, moral, cultural,
and moral) she has or may have with her baby. It is this tragic loss
of contact with his mother that ironically represents his very first
contact with society. She refuses to be his mother-as-an-institution.
She is just a biological mother, and an incomplete one at that.
The truth of Rafilus' emergence on earth is this: abandonment.
The first self-concept he develops is likely this : "I am a waste, an
encumbrance." He is a non-person.
The orphan house serves him as parent substitute . Unlike a real
parent, who is both a person and an institution , the orphan house
is just a bureaucratic institution. Its manager and employees take
care of the orphans not because they love them but because it is
their job to do so. They do not treat the children as unique persons
but as generalized others. What exists among them is contractual

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exper ience of
relati onshi p. Rafilus tells Tiwar of h is child hood
being circu mcise d as an orpha n:
basis
Of course [I] was not circumcised on an individual
my
for
like Jumarup's son was. No-one organized a celebration
with a great
circumcision. [I] was circumcised in a group, togeth er
y, which
holida
c
publi
n
certai
numb er of other orphan boys on a
[I] was
lime,
the
aL
I don't know what. Just like [my) everyday life
of boys.
circumcised not as an individual but as part of a group
d as
Of course all the boys, including [me], were not treate
g
payin any
individuals . The shamans operated on them without
if a boy was
personal allenlion to them. Il did not matter to them
make any
not
did
iL
ps
happy, afraid, or indifferent. And perha
life, [I) fell
difference Lo them either. Accustomed to this kind of
that [I] was a
myself Lo be part of something bigger. [I] seldom felL
real huma n being (p. 22-23 ).

his own
A no n-person, Rafilu s becom es out of touch with
For even if he
feelin gs . He becom es as numb as a piece of rock.
whic h other s
expresses his emot ion, it will not affect the way in
s carries over
treat him. This socia l status as a non-p erson Rafilu
p with wome n.
to his adult hood , for exam ple in his relati onshi
Than ks to his
Women seem very fond of him as a sexua l object.
a magn ificen t
super b and migh ty body, he seem s to have been
s' interc ourse
orgas m-pro ducin g machine for them . But Rafilu
. No love has
with them never goes beyon d the physi ological realm
en, if by the
thrive d and grown betwe en him and any of those wom
itself but also
word "love" we mean not only the act of copul ation
(1) "the active
the u nderlying cluste r of respo nses that inclu de
n we love, (2)
conce rn for the life and the grow th" of the perso
s needs , (3)
respo nsiveness to h is or her consc ious and uncon sciou
concernedrespe ct for his or her unique indiv idual ity, (4) deep,

, and (5) the
motiv ated kn owledge of the core of h is or her being
11
we en counter,
absen ce of exploitation. Nowh ere in the novel do
wom en he has
for exam ple, any indic ation th at towar ds those
gs and lovingslept with Rafilus is capab le of such tende r feelin
Sapar di Djoko
kindn ess as th ose murm ured by the lyrica l I in
Damo no's poem "In My Prayer":
my heart,
in my night prayer you will turn into the beating of
gs
feelin
ul
painf
which patiently endures those
whose limits I do not know, which faithfully examines
one secre t after another, which endlessly
sings for my life. 12
abou t those
Rafilus confesses to Tiwar that he never cares
give a damn . "I
wome n. Whet her they come or not, h e doesn't
vite tl1em in or
never seek them out," he says. "Nor do I ever in
them when
force them to leave." He goes on to say, "I never need
135). On th e
they are not aroun d. Nor do I ever miss them" (p.
body. "For them
other hand , all that those wom en ever want is his
he comp lains
my body is just a playt hing or an object to look at,"
The etern al
(p. 134). "I have neith er loved nor been loved" (p. 134).
women.
absen ce of love is wh at defin es his relationsh ip with
distu rbs
Yet there is still anoth er serious probl em that
s up in his
him. Every now and then an enorm ous powe r wake
dible feats as
body, posse ssing it, enabl ing him to do such incre
crush ing the
bendi ng an iron electricity-post, lifting a train, and
could murder
earth . "Whe n posse ssed by the power," h e says , "I
conju res up in
peopl e unint entio nally" (p. 136). Rafilus' probl em
us chara cter in
my mind the simil ar disor der that ails the famo
11
12

soul-inspiring The Art of
I bonow this concep t of love from Erich Fromm in his
p. 26-28.
1956),
ers,
Publish
Bros
and
Harper
York:
Loving (New
Bulan juni: Pilihan Sajak
Sapard i Djoko Damono, "Dalam Doaku," in his Hujan
(Jakarta: Grasinclo, 1994), p. 94. My translation.
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American comic-book literature: the scientist Bruce Banner who,
when angered or distressed, would turn into the Hulk: a ~en,
aggressive, barbaric giant. Hulk's superpower originates, so it is
told, in the dangerous interaction between Dr Banner's exposure
to gamma radiation and his life history troubled by multiple
personalityY By contrast, the origin of Rafilus' extraordinary power
remains mysterious. It first appears in the episode where the shaman who
circumcised him is unable to cut away his foreskin (p. 23). Tiwar provides
us with an eyewitness account of how Rafilus can bend an electric post
by banging his head against it. Yet so far as the origin of the monstrous
power is concerned, we encounter only one or two frivolous speculations.
Munandir, for example, has the "theory" that Rafilus is the devil incarnate.
The theory, I think, reveals more about Munandir's mythology than about
Rafilus 's real medical situation. In any case, Tiwar 's story! ine is interspersed
with his portrayals of Rafilus' body as having machine-like features: "his
sweat looks like lubricating oil" (p . 122) or "his footsteps roar like the
sounds of a heavy vehicle" (p. 15). Is Rafilus some kind of an evil robotic
monster? Is he a metaphor for man in industrial, society, man who has
turned into a machine and lost his sou l? We must deal with the question
later on. At this point this much is true: the effect of his huge bodily power
on other people is sometimes destructive and sometimes orgasmic. Either
way, the effect remains the same: alienation from fellow human beings.
When it is destructive, people fear him and shun him. When it is orgasmic,
women fixate on his body and disregard his person as a whole.
Despite his shameful origin, his empty relationship with women, and
his battle with the demonic power residing in his body, Rafilus has struggled
to be a productive member of society. By selling his sexual labor to some
female clients, he manages to overcome starvation and earn his bachelor
13

The character Dr. Bruce Banner alias Hulk is created for Marvel Comics by
the American comic-book writer Stanley Marlin Lieber (Stan Lee). On this
see, for example, "Stan Lee: Or How to Be a Real Superhero," at http://www.
cyberspacers.co m/exclusive/08020301.htm 1.

degree. He then makes a sustained attempt to be a professional writer.
Unfortunately, his gift resides not in his mind but in his body. His literary
works fail to rise above mediocrity. Even Pawestri, a lay reader, discerns
the banality of his novel Bambo. His failure in literary production
leads him to long for a success in biological reproduction. He
desires to have children. The trouble is, he is a barren man. Thus
his struggles for literary production and biological reproduction
are fruitless . Under the dark clouds of failure, he performs a
deliberate act of destruction: he attempts to murder Sinyo Minor,
a local thug in Ketintang area. And we are tempted to consider the
possibility that the catastrophe at the train crossing that takes his
life is actually a passive act of suicide, but one that he decides on
and carries out on the spur of the moment.
Rafilus is a complex character. There are aspects to his person
that may provoke sympathy and admiration. It is easy for a man
with such a bitter childhood to grow up and become a criminal.
And yet he has the moral courage to keep on walking in the path of
light. Many of the choices he has made in his life are productive:
applying for an admission to the naval academy, undertaking an
undergraduate study while under the pressure of poverty, and
making a living as a freelance writer. It is true that in his college
years he earns a living by being a male whore. Yet he has never
hurt his clients . He gives them the pleasures they hunger for. The
only "crime" he has ever done towards them is apathy. When he
concludes that all his attempts to be a "useful member of society"
have failed, a great fear overwhelms him, rendering him so helpless
that he decides to "surrender his body and soul · to whatever is
going to happen'' (p.1 79) . This turns out to be his death .
By comparison, the narrator Tiwar is a flat character. But if
we pay attention to some details in the novel, we may arrive at

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17 1

a general sketch of his personality. He is a handsome, sturdy
man. Pawestri says that the sight of his body can make her mouth
"watery with desires." However, due to impotence, he is sexually
useless, "a cadaver" (p.145). What she needs instead is a man who
can make her moan with pleasure.
But impotence is not Tiwar's only problem. He looks more like
a Javanese shadow puppet than a fully-functioning human being.
He has neither will nor the capacity for self-determination nor any
serious purpose in h is life. "There are things that I should have
done but I didn't," he writes. '1\.nd there are things that I shouldn't
have done but I did" (p. 177). Day by day, his activities are not
self-initiated. They are simply automatic reactions to whatever
external forces impinging on him. There are only two things over
which he seems to have control: one is his car; the other is the
novel he writes about Rafilus. His life being empty, the passing
away of time makes him anxious. He does a number of petty things
to kill time. One is the act of satisfying his shallow curiosity.
I read (Pawest.ri's letter] not because I wanted to. By reading
il, I pretended to make the most of the seconds that always flit by.
Time keeps running out and I could not avoid it. I grew older but
I had done nothing significant (p. 141)

Tiwar has a submissive altitude towards time. He lets Lhe world
pass by as Lime goes by. He thinks "it is time thal will determine
what will happen." So he decides "Lo follow time" (p. 151).

In Rafilus' exotic body, Tiwar finds an enchanting object of
curiosity that alleviates, though only temporary, the burden of
his boring life. Indeed, for the last three months before he sets
out to write his novel, he finds a short-term goal in his life: to
study Rafilus, to discover his essence. We can know ourselves,

as the anthropologist Vincent Crapanzano suggests, only by way
of our experience with others .14 But what does Tiwar learn about
himself through his encounter with Rafilus? He finds in Rafilus
some images of his own self. He comes to u nderstand that, very
much like Rafilus, he does not have the power to build his future
but wishes to compensate for his empty present by begetting
children. Just as Rafilus is aware that his body is "but a hollow
statue" (p . 28), so Tiwar feels that he himself is no more than "a
mass of flesh supported by bones," a whole mass of flesh "with no
sou l, no will, no passion" (p. 61). '11.11 the marginal notes [Rafilu s
wrote] on the books he borrowed [from the library show] that he is
really stupid," says Pawestri in one of her letters to Tiwar (p. 147).
Tiwar's encounter with the stupid Rafilus reminds him of his own
stupidity. "My brain is empty," he admits, "and so are my feel ings"
(p. 137) But Rafilus has a "commodity" that Tiwar lacks, namely a
body that can function perfectly as an orgasm-dispensing machine.
If he had such a body, his sexual "use value" in Pawestri's eyes
would reach an astonishing height. And he would be able to have
sex with her and fertilize her ovum. And this would help Tiwar
and Pawaestri to achieve their common goal: to have children.
Yes, Tiwar is impotent but never are we told that he is barren.
The opposite is true for Rafilus: he is a sex-machine but his seeds
are infertile. That Tiwar is not jealous when Pawestri declares her
desire to sleep with Rafilus may indicate that his love for her has
died down. But it may also suggest that, at least to some extent, h e
identifies himself with Rafilus. Let us not forget that after Rafilus'
death, Tiwar too becomes a writer.
14

See, for example, Vincent Crapanzano, Tuhami: Portrait af a Moroccan (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 9, and Sleven Rubenstein, Alejandro
1Sakimp: A Shuar Healer in ll1e Margins of Society (Lincoln, University of
Nebraska Press, 2002), p. 226.

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Tiwar lives in Ketintang Wiyata area, a middle class neighborhood in
Surabaya. Throughout the novel there is no mention of the kind of job he
has. We are freguenlly told that he spends much of his time roaming about
the city in his car. His residence, his ownership of private car, his great
amount of leisure, and his contempt for the slum areas where Pawestri
lives seem to indicate that he belongs to the comfortable middle class. We
can guess too that he is an aspirant writer. In Surabaya only tramps or the
unemployed or the upper middle class artists seem to have plenty of time
to squander like Tiwar does.
Tiwar is more obsessed with Rafilus than with Pawestri. It is interesting
to consider this point. Before fa lling in love with Pawestri, Tiwar has fat len
in love with her image in a local newspaper. This is an image of a goodlooking young woman. That is why Tiwar is attracted to the image. A
mere reaction to beautiful images, his interest in women never lasts long.
As soon as his crush on Pawestri subsides, he begins to communicate with
her through letters. Theirs is a relationship that amounts to nothi ng. By
contrast, Tiwar's interest in Rafilus-and the burden of memory resu lting
from it- has driven him to write a novel.

As a narrator Tiwar is rather authoritarian. At many points in
his text, rather than let Munandir. Pawestri, and Rafilus speak for
themselves, he takes over their voices. He subjects their narratives
to paraphrasing, reformulation, and summarizing. I am not sure
that he does it out of artistic consideration. In any case, the result is
disturbing: Pawestri, Munandir, and Rafilus adopt Tiwar's style of
speaking. In Indonesian there is this proverb: "Language reveals its
speakers." Tiwar's narrative policy, however, denies the reader his
right to come to know Pawestri, Munandir, and Rafilus by paying
attention to their idiolects. To justify his narrative policy, Tiwar
offers a number of reasons: that Rafilus is basically a poor writer
(p. 107), that Pawestri's narrative is contaminated with frequent

174

repetition, emphasis, and circularity (p. 67), and that Munandir's
stories contain confused sentences, illogical arrangement of
events, digressions, evasions, and convolutions (p. 38).
Pawestri is the roundes t of all characters in the novel. She is
born to a poor working class family. The family lacks spiritual
bond among its members. Kasrori, Pawestri's father, makes a living
as a petty employee in the city's general hospital. An irresponsible
man who lacks self-determination, he does no thing to build a
better future for his family. He is not the type of a father who would
provide his children with economic, psychological , and moral
support so that they could ac tualize all their potentials. Pawes tri's
mother is no better. She describes her mother as "lunatic" (p. 71).
In spite of her intelligence, her family's unfavorable economic
situation prevents her from enjoying quality education. As a result,
she only completes senior high school. To compensate for her poor
education, she reads a variety of books in her spare time .
Pawestri works as a clerk in one of the big travel agencies in
Surabaya. This enables her to take care .o f her mother after the
death of her father. The kind of work she does everyday in the
company is mechanical, exhausting, and mind-numbing. In sharp
contrast to her present working condition are her bold, wild, an d
colorful sexual fantasies . She is indeed an intelligent, good-looking,
and sexually assertive woman. In her third encounter with Tiwar,
she makes a journey to his bedroom. It is she, not Tiwar, who
takes the active role and initiates the love-making. She does so
by, among other things, reciting Goethe's poem "Heidenroslein."
Unfortunately, the love-making fails to go beyond forep lay because
Tiwar seems to have an erectile dysfunc tion.
It is during this encounter that Tiwar impulsively proposes
marriage to Pawestri, which she thoughtlessly accepts . Her

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interest in him soon fades away. Even so, bound by her acceptance
of Tiwar's proposal, she promises to remain faithful to him. It is
this acceptance too that leads her to wTite him long, long letters of
confession in which she reveals her family history, her life story,

Johann Wolfgang Goethe. She has tried to make an upward social
mobility, for example by joining a local modeling agency. But she
quits when she realizes that the agency owner prepares her not to
be a real model but to be a high-class prostitute. She decides to walk
in the path of light. So she ends working as a white-collar worker

and her most secret fantasies. Love requires self-disclosure, so
she thinks. There are two kinds of self-disclosure: physical and
psychological. She does the first when she strips herself naked
in front of Tiwar shortly after they come to know each other.
She does the second when her appetite for him has gone. This

in a travel agency. Contemplating her life history, she comes to the
conclusion that "Destiny does not side with me. Destiny insists
that I have to keep on living in the gutter. It is impossible for me to
achieve upward social mobility" (p. 89).

idea that love requires self-disclosure can be found also in Linus
Suryadi's lyrical prose Pengakuan Pariyem (Pariyem's Confession,
1981). This is revealed, for example, when the twenty-five year
old servant of the aristocratic family in the Yogyakarta palace
addresses her lover Paiman:
I make my confession to you
Only to you, Paiman,
When I make my confession to you, Paiman,
That proves that I love you. 15

Performing self-disclosure is Pawestri's way, as a Javanese, of
providing Tiwar with the necessary data to assess her worth as his
would-be wife. For the Javanese, there are three criteria to determine
a person's worth to a spouse: bibit (family background) , bobot

THE SETTING: TIME AND SPACE
1. Tiwar's Experience of Space

When Tiwar falls in love with Pawestii, his consciousness gets
sharper by leaps and bounds. In love, he suddenly acquires a new
identity: he comes to identify himself as a man who is in love
with Pawestri, a woman who happens to live at a certain address
in Surabaya. When he is away from Pawestri, he is a hollow man.
The only cure is that he should meet her and be together with
her. But Tiwar does not know yet where she lives. Therefore, he
embarks on a mission of findi