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Some Comments on Style in the Meanings of the Past

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2011

Shelly Errington
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Abstract

Like the European written genre history, court literature from the traditional kingdoms of Southeast Asia often relates historical events and possible or probable genealogies. Yet, like the myths of tribal peoples, these accounts are characterized by mythical elements and a somewhat repetitious style, and were recited aloud rather than read in private silence. But if we regard them as mixtures of historical and mythical elements, our understanding of their inner structure and meaning is inevitably compromised, for the notion of a mixture already imposes assumptions about the shape of the past and criteria of reality which are implicit in a historical consciousness. The form in which thought is couched, after all, is the thought, not a representation of something behind or outside it. This paper therefore attempts a rhetorical analysis of a Classical Malay text of the type called hikayat, one which dates from about the seventeenth century. It begins with an analysis of grammar and sentence structure, then moves to certain stylistic features of hikayat, contrasting them with some stylistic features of historical writing. I then comment on the context of texts—the meaning of audience, of performance, of language, of author—and end with some speculation about the notion of the past as revealed in Classical Malay hikayat.

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Articles
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The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 38 , Issue 2 , February 1979 , pp. 231 - 244
Copyright
Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 1979

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References

1 Such a problem does not present itself in such an acute form, for instance, to anthropologists dealing with tribal myths, in which the recognizable historical content is usually minimal. Of course, this problem in its most general sense—the question of the relation between the text or the myth and “what is real”—presents itself there, as well, but there “the real” is called not “history” but “social structure.”

2 See Winstedt's, Sir RichardA History of Classical Malay Literature (1940; rpt. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford Univ. Press, 1969)Google Scholar. His main categories of hikayat are “romance” and “history,” but there are a number of “types”: those influenced by Java, “romances of the transition,” “Muslim legends,” “cycles of tales from Muslim sources,” and “Malay histories.”

3 For “historical” treatments, see Wolters, O. W., The Fall of Srivijaya in Malay History (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1970);Google ScholarRas, J. J., Hikayat Bandjar: A Study in Malay Historiography (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1968);Google ScholarTeeuw, A. and Wyatt, D. K., Hikayat Patani: The Story of Patani (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970).CrossRefGoogle Scholar Two philological studies of hikayat are Robeson's, S. O.Hikajat Andaken Penurat (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969)Google Scholar and Brakel's, L. F.The Hikayat Muhammad Hanafiyyah: A Medieval Muslim-Malay Romance (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974)Google Scholar.

4 Translated passages appearing in this paper are my own, drawn from Kassim Ahmad's romanization of Hikayat Hang Tuah (Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, 1968)Google Scholar. The original texts of Hikayat Hang Tuah were written in Arabic script, which does not use punctuation marks; nor did its conventions include paragraphing. In translating, I have used the minimal punctuation necessary to make the English comprehensible, but have not for the most part followed Kassim Ahmad's use of colons, semicolons, or divisions into paragraphs as they are, for my purposes, unnecessary stylistic divergences from the original. The Malay passages, taken from Kassim Ahmad's romanization, can most easily be found by consulting my dissertation, “A Study of Genre: Form and Meaning in the Malay Hikayat Hang Tuah,” Cornell University 1975.

5 I am indebted to Professor A. L. Becker for pointing this out to me in conversation.

6 See his Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1953)Google Scholar.

7 The most common are karena and apabila. Kama can usually be translated as “because” or “for.” Apabila can mean “if,” but is usually in the sense of “when” or “in case that.” The construction kalau… maka, ”if … then,” which is used in modern Indonesian, particularly in mathematics and engineering, is not found at all in Classical Malay, according to Dr. L. F. Brakel (personal communication). Walaupun, ”although,” is an import from Arabic, and, if I recollect correctly, is not used in Hikayat Hang Tuab.

8 A considerable scholarly literature exists on the subject of repetition in traditional forms of composition, but scholarship on Malay literature has been for the most part curiously untouched by it. Perhaps the basic works on this subject concern the Homeric epic, beginning with Parry's, MilmanThe Making of Homeric Verse: the Collected Papers of Milman Parry, ed. Parry, Adam (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971)Google Scholar and Lord, Albert, The Singer of Tola (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1960).Google Scholar Another very suggestive work is Havelock's, EricPreface to Plato (Cambridge: Belknap Press, Harvard Univ. Press, 1960).Google Scholar The meaning of repetition is only one of the concerns in the continuing discussion about the difference, or lack of it, between oral and written compositions, a subject which has been important in Homeric scholarship at least since Parry's work and which has recently received a revived attention from literary critics and anthropologists. See, for instance. New Literary History, 8, No. 3 (1977)Google Scholar, which is devoted to “Oral Cultures and Oral Performances,” and Literacy in Traditional Societies, ed. Goody, Jack (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1968).Google Scholar

In its extreme form, the debate about differences between oral and written composition is, I believe, unproductive. But it is addressed to questions of great importance, and a number of issues have been raised in the course of the discussion, which has been going on for decades, which could profitably be considered in the study of Southeast Asian texts. These latter have been treated as though they were primarily written texts whose nature, function, and mode of perpetuation were transparent. Students of Malay hikayat not uncommonly search for and/or postulate the existence of an Ur-text from which subsequent diverse versions are derived. It is worth asking, I think, the sorts of questions which have been raised in studies of oral epics, questions which might not be asked of written texts: how they were transmitted; what their sources were and how they were come upon; the meaning and function of writing in the society; the meaning of words, sounds, and language in a particular era and social context.

9 The fact that figures are not presented in traditional Malay works as idiosyncratic personalities with subjective characters has been remarked by John Bastin. See his “Problems of Personality in the Reinterpretation of Modern Malayan History,” in Malayan and Indonesian Studies, ed. Bastin, J. and Roolvink, R. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964).Google Scholar

10 Struever, Nancy, The Language of History in the Renaissance: Rhetoric and Historical Consciousness in Florentine Humanism (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1970)Google Scholar.

11 See especially Chap. VI of his Feudal Society, trans. Manyon, L. A., 2 vols. (Chicago: Phoenix Books, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1964)Google Scholar.

12 See Geertz, Clifford, “Ethos, World View, and the Analysis of Sacred Symbols,” The Antioch Reiview, 17 (1957), 421–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 It suggests also that the subject matter suitable for hikayat is not easily given boundaries. While I do not have the historical knowledge to make this assertion with certainty, I have come to think of hikayat as a name not for a kind of content but for the circumstances of performance. For instance, many tales are similar in hikayat and in the stories of peng/ipur lara, village storytellers. The difference lies not in the content but in the fact that hikayat were recited from written texts in the court, while tales are told from memory in villages.

An account of village story-telling which raises interesting issues, one of the few works of Malay scholarship which emphasizes the oral-performance nature of what is usually treated as written texts, can be found in Amin Sweeney's “Professional Malay Story-Telling: Some Questions of Style and Presentation,” in Studies in Malaysian Oral and Musical Traditions (Ann Arbor: Michigan Papers on South and Southeast Asia, No. 8, 1974)Google Scholar.

14 To say that hikayat are in large part made of conventional elements, that they do not “reflect historical reality” nor were meant to, and that they are not coherent in the sense that histories or nineteenth century novels are, is emphatically not to say that hikayat are meaningless. And it is a mistake, too, I believe, to show that hikayat are “really” coherent in some way which is not immediately obvious. The criticism of Homeric poetry and of Beowulf, which is initially confronted with some of these same problems, has raised some of these issues. Apologists for them have tried to show that these poems, whose episodes do not grow out of one another organically (as one critic put it, contrasting stringing-together as opposed to organic styles), reveal at a different level some other principle of unity and coherence. No less than condemnation, such a form of “appreciation” retains an alien aesthetic as its measure: as though, in any case, the point of understanding were to judge.

15 I would like to acknowledge four sources for this essay in addition to those cited: a lecture by James Siegel in 1969 in which he said that perspective in painting isolates the viewer from the viewed, at the same time creating a single privileged point for viewing; a letter to me from Benedict Anderson in 1973 in which he said that nineteenth century novels allow the reader to hold all the strands of action in mind at once; Tolstoy's War and Peace; and Erich Auerbach's Mimesis, especially the chapters “Odysseus's Scar” and “Ganelon and Roland.”