The study of narrative has passed beyond the borders of the discipline of literature (Prickett 2002:2). An economist recognising the importance of narrative states “Economists cannot predict much, and certainly cannot predict profitability. If they were so smart they would be rich” (McCloskey 1990:10). McClosky claims that economists work partly as storytellers whose studies would be better if their explanations could be shown in accepted narrative form. The same argument has been used by Jackson in the field of legal practice. (Jackson 1990: 27) Jackson found that judicial mechanisms are undoubtedly influenced by strategies employed in narrative. The jury is not concerned with the relevant facts only but also with “the manner of telling the evidence”. He gives the example of middle class witnesses who tend to be called rather than people of a marginal class because jurors, who also come mainly from the middle class, can easily ‘translate’ such witnesses’ stories. The same narrative mode is found in historical writing. White (1986) asserts that historians describe events according to stock narratives which live in society or in the minds of readers. In other words, narrative can be found in every domain of culture so that, according to Miller “Nothing seems more natural and universal to human beings than the telling of stories”. (Miller 1990: 66) It is arguable then that narrative has penetrated different disciplines in spite of the fact that ‘narrative’ as an epistemological unit has been overtly neglected by disciplines other than cultural studies and the humanities (Kreiswirth 2000: 293-294).

However, the disciplines of rhetoric, literary studies, sociolinguistics and anthropology have produced a vast array of literature studying homo-fabula. In this volume I shall not describe the historical study of narrative but rather discuss the utility of narrative frameworks, particularly those influenced by semiotics. These theoretical departures are relevant in clarifying the nature of narrative in traditional societies where characteristically narrators and audiences interact intensively.

Structuralism has led literary studies into the spirit of scientific inquiry, where critics seek to find a model of a particular genre based on various works studied in the light of structures. They try, for instance, to find universal plots. Northrop Frye’s book, The Anatomy of Criticism (1969) is based on such assumptions. His followers such as Scholes (1974) modify the framework by focusing on how narrative changes over time. They found that changes only occur on the level of social topics, while the stock of characters and actions remains fundamentally stable. They set up a hypothetical, deductive method based on their assumptions about the nature of narrative, which they have applied and tested on particular literary narratives. Collective awareness is a crucial point of departure for the structuralist: societies are recognised as have an underlying mechanism to organise and classify experience. Following Lévi-Strauss, myth, with its paradigmatic deep structures, is the primary source of meaning (Harari 1979: 19-21).

Somewhat later, post structuralism tried to modify the work of its predecessors; post-structuralists are structuralists aware of their previous mistakes. They argue that literary meaning not only depends on the material content of texts but also on the meaning created by the readers (Culler 11975b:192). On such assumptions, narrative theorists have expanded their frameworks to incorporate reader response. Such an approach resembles communication theory which, in some respects, has provided a foundation for theorising the role of the reader. The audience can grasp meaning only in the complete utterance. Messages are delivered through a particular context of references and codes. Communication also rests on contact between the sender and receiver. Reader response approaches develop a perspective of narrative by “producing its own ‘reader’ and ‘listener’. In creating meaning, readers use their own conventions to understand a narrative or a text (Culler, 1975b: 192). In the last few decades, there has been an emergence of Jakobsonian and Peircean frameworks for studying ‘narrative in culture’ in the Austronesian region as found in the work of Fox and Parmentier.

James Fox, in his study of Rotinese narratives (Fox 1986), provides a good example of how structuralism must be anchored in context. In Roti, structure is often negotiated and used differently according to a context of ‘precedence’. A metaphor of itinerary in Rotinese narratives, which has created a ‘trajectory and sedimented path’ in society, is subject to multivocality in daily practices (Fox 1997:6).

I apply the semiotic-anthropological perspective of Fox and Parmentier to Pamijahan for several reasons. The nature and function of narrative in Pamijahan are very different from narrative as it is conceived by modern Indonesian literary scholars, where fictionality, stylistics, aesthetics, canon and genre have been important foci.

Indonesian and Malay critics of literature are to some extent indebted to Winstedt who, unlike Dutch scholars, at an early stage attempted to theorise the concept of literature (sastra) in the Malay world in his History of Classical Malay Literature (Winstedt 1969). On the first page, Winstedt states clearly what sastra is and how it is related to history.

So sastra should ‘appeal to reason by the beauty of sense’. The simple syllogism that ‘what is not beautiful is not sastra’ applies. Winstedt’s definition is useful for the discussion of the verse forms of the pantun and syair, or Malay romances, because these genres are regulated by the ‘canon of beauty’. However, undergraduate students in Indonesia may be somewhat confused when they glance through A History of Classical Malay Literature. Within his concept of ‘beauty’, Winstedt includes a range of various written and oral genres to which ‘canon’, ‘fictionality’ (in Rene Wellek’s terms, 1976/8), authorship, and other Western literary concepts cannot easily be applied. In what terms can we define the concept of beauty in, say, the Malay romance Hikayat Sama’un on one hand, and the ‘theological catechisms’ written by Nur al-Din al-Raniri in 17^th century Aceh on the other?

Furthermore, another difficulty met by the student lies in historically based definitions like sastra modern and sastra lama, or ‘modern literature’ vs ‘classical literature’. The mere concept of sastra tradisional, or ‘traditional literature’ is fraught with difficulty. For example, there is an implicit suggestion in Winstedt’s book that any written material not published in Latin script by some ‘publishing house’ or other, or not printed on a ‘Gutenberg machine’ should be classified as ‘classical literature’. Winstedt is probably right, if he is taking his definition from the dictionary of Malay compiled by Wilkinson. Wilkinson (1959:1025) states that the term sastera is originally from Sanksrit shastra, meaning the Hindu sacred books, or in the Malay Archipelago, books of divination and astrological tables.

The word sastra, or literary work, in the contemporary Indonesian context is equally ambiguous. Critics divide sastra into two main categories based on period, patronage, content, and canon. These are sastra lama (old literature) and sastra modern (modern literature). Sastra lama is associated with literary works written in pre-modern Indonesia. Zuber Usman (1963: 9) defines kesusastraan lama as “literary works produced before Abdullah bin Abdulkadir Munsyi”. The reason is simply that Abdullah had departed from tradition and his literary expression, in content and style, was close to that of daily life. He states:

Thus, the Hikayat Sri Rama, Tuhfat al-Nafis, Babad Tanah Jawi, Babad Pajajaran, Sejarah Melayu can all be found under the one heading of sastra lama. On the other hand, students reading Teeuw’s Modern Indonesian Literature (1979) are led to believe that Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s Bumi Manusia and Achdiat K. Mihardja’s Atheis are examples of sastra Indonesia modern, Indonesian modern literature, because they were written after the creation of the modern Indonesian state. Clearly the boundaries between ‘modern’ and ‘pre-modern’ literature represent more ideologically loaded categories than definitions according to internal literary properties. Furthermore, there is a tendency for critics and literary students to pay more attention to the aesthetics and canonicity of the texts. Thus in modern Indonesian literature, as in Western literature, there are belles lettres and pulp works (also called sastra pop or sastra picisan) and in the category of traditional literature there is chronicle, fable, myth and legend. A work of literature may be seen solely as an artistic work without any reference to the real world, or it may be perceived as having reference in the real world. There are many debates in the weekly columns of newspapers addressing these issues, for example whether a particular work is good enough to be classified as karya sastra or not.

Such notions about modern Indonesian literature seem to be alien when applied to so-called sastra lama. I once acted as an examiner in an honours level examination, or ujian sarjana, in literary studies in the Faculty of Letters of the University of Indonesia. I put a simple question to the student candidate: what is literature? One of the main variables in literary studies - a variable important to my discussion here - is ‘fiction’ or fictionality (in Indonesian rekaan). Literature is fiction! Because I had been trained in ‘old’ Indonesian literature and philology, I brought to the examination three kinds of manuscript: the Hikayat Sri Rama (a Malay romance), the Sejarah Melayu (a chronicle) and Hill al-Zill (a mystical work on the ‘Shadow of God’ in the world). I asked whether these manuscripts were literature. The answers were interesting enough to be outlined here. The Hikayat Sri Rama, said the candidate, is a work of literature (karya sastra), the Sejarah Melayu is a work of historical literature (sastra sejarah), and Hill al-Zill is a work of literature (karya sastra) but not fiction. My student was rather hesitant to describe the last one because she had previously defined karya sastra as fiction. Hill al-Zill, according to her reading of the manuscript was not fiction. Thus, she tactically redefined her answer. The student demonstrated her reliance on Wellek’ book (Wellek 1955-1992) which had become the most famous text book in the Faculty in the late 1980s. It is devoted to the notion of fictionality in literary works.

What is sastra is not so easy to describe, not only for undergraduate students but also for literary critics and scholars. ‘Fictional narrative’ is made up, invented, a product of the imagination. For Lamarque however, ‘fictional’ narrative and ‘factual’ narrative resemble each other in terms of their “formal features - time, structure, voice, perspective; an in semantic features - truth, correspondence with the facts, or reference” (Lamarque, 1990; cf. Culler, 1975a). Ambiguous assumptions about traditional literature, sastra tradisional, and classical literature, sastra lama, need further explanation. Ambiguities are not only reflected in the definitions of the genres but also in the methodologies and frameworks applied to research on such materials. No doubt philologists have been among the principal agents providing us with information about these genres. Starting with the need for teaching materials for colonial administrators and missionaries, they collected and carefully studied written materials from the archipelago. In time, philological studies have made important contributions to defining what should be recognised as sastra and what not.

Sometimes problematic transmission occurs. Scribes may use various ‘horizontal’ or contemporaneous sources as materials to write their own ‘hybrid’ versions of a text. In Indonesia, the Dutch translated, transcribed, and transliterated texts from the local bibliotheca. The locals often retranslated or copied the Dutch version back into their tradition. Accordingly, Robson proposes that the main task of philology is ‘making a text accessible’ (Robson 1988) by trying to identify some putative ‘original’ lost in the past. However, the originality as often imagined by the ‘stemma students’ cannot be applied properly (e.g. Brakel 1977: 105:113). Works of traditional literature are created in ‘open tradition’ where originality and authorship are not crucial issues. In the eyes of the traditional communal society, the text should be useful, not just beautiful in Winstedt’s terms.

Robson (1988) observes that the urge to demonstrate the usefulness of classical literature by Indonesian scholars is rather an emotive endeavour due to the notion of ‘cultural heritage’ (warisan kebudayaan). He states,

Robson’s proposal has brought a new perspective to the study of Indonesian classical literature within a philological approach. However, ‘reader expectation’ is also problematic, particularly in the light of recent developments in post-colonial theory, where the task is to see post-colonial discourses from the point of view of colonized subjects. There is a legitimate post-colonial question that can be applied in the field of manuscript study in Indonesia: the necessity to re-read a discourse that is related to the colonized people but created in post-colonial times (Becker, 1989).

It is important to provide access to the wider world, but it is even more important to understand why a certain community might have no proper access to their own heritage. In this case, the Indonesian philologist, Sri Wulan Rujiati Mulyadi (1994:79) highlights the disappearance of manuscripts, their very extinction, or kemusnahan naskah. Mulyadi clarifies two kind of extinction: unintentional and intentional. Climate, natural disasters, and unskilled conservation practices cause the loss of manuscripts or deterioration in their quality (Mulyadi 1994: 79-86). But there is also a lot of evidence that manuscripts have also been burned during or seized for political reasons and borne off to overseas collections wars (Alfian 1987: 130-136). The Balinese and Achenese experienced a huge loss of manuscripts in their holy wars with the Dutch invaders. In the 19th century, when orientalist scholars and Christian missionaries travelled through the interior of Java, they too started collecting manuscripts. Indeed, these are legitimate questions regarding the manuscript acquisition. Even more than this, colonial policy in culture and education influenced what people should read and write in the archipelago. The dynamic intersection with colonial powers, war, national government policies, and pseudo collectors has created a number of ‘lacunae’ in the local bibliotheca.

We cannot stop the times. However, there is in all of this a critically important lesson for me as a responsible student of culture and philology, that is, to look at manuscripts which record various local narratives in the context of the communities that produced them (Becker 1995). In other words, the work of a diligent philologist should extend to the people, the scribes, and the communities that sustain these materials. Before I decided on Pamijahan as my field site, I had trecked through various old villages around Tasikmalaya and Garut in the southeastern quarter of West Java. I was confronted with a situation in which the main written narratives of villages had been removed from their local contexts by various agencies, whether deliberately or not. The people of Kampung Naga near Tasikmalaya, for example, told me that their connection to their past had been broken when what they called “the colonial apparatus” borrowed their manuscripts in the 1920s, and then when the army of the Darul Islam Movement burned their village in about 1959. The same situation also occurred in Pamijahan. Only a few manuscripts of good quality are now available for reading in the village. There is also the irony that when Indonesian Government tried to preserve traditional manuscripts by giving funding to the researchers, some researchers abused this by borrowing sacred manuscripts from villagers and ’forgetting’ to return them. In other cases, the researchers copied manuscripts, giving the copies to the villagers while retaining the originals.

In Pamijahan and its neighbouring areas, there are a number of written and oral narratives about the past. These narratives are not only used in reading performances, or as manuals, or as cultural reference works but are also perceived as sacred ‘signs of’ and ‘signs in’ the past. It is very evident that the meaning of narratives is constructed through diverse decoding modes. Thus for my purposes, I will use the term ‘narrative’ instead of sastra for the narrative materials I encountered in Pamijahan.