Drawing on the traditional Javanese values of Pramoedya's childhood and the Marxist ideological values of his early adulthood, the Quartet casts the individual's moral development from selfish individualism to selfless community-mindedness as the development from animalism to 'modern humanity'. This article undertakes an in-depth exploration of the trope of human evolutionary development undergirding Pramoedya Ananta Toer's Buru Quartet – a trope that has hitherto received no detailed critical attention in Pramoedya scholarship. However, literary geography has the potential to unpack an intricate cognitive geography fraught with complex geographical representations, and in so doing can be a valuable ally of occidentalism. Such geographically particular writing evidences the difficulty that occidentalist scholars face when attempting to understand how the West is reified in the non-Western psyche. What becomes apparent is that, albeit stemming from a rich anticolonial writing culture, the quartet represents a remarkable attack on Indonesian culture, and representations of colonialism in the quartet are as much a message to present day Indonesia as they are a strike on the West’s historic conscience.

The conflict between the West and ‘non-Western’, or ‘indigenous’, modernity, is a well-known theme in the discourse of occidentalism, and I use occidentalism as a framework in which to locate and explore the quartet’s Marxist-indigenous paradox. Of interest is his well-known Buru Quartet, a momentous literary tetralogy chronicling the struggle of the Indonesian people under colonial rule. In this paper I draw on the work of the influential Indonesian author and leftist figure Pramoedya Ananta Toer to show how Marxism provides both promise and tension when used as a political expression of non-Western aspiration.

Pramoedya seems to have used the narrator Jacques Pangemanann to draw attention to the troubling weaknesses he saw in Indonesians, both in the colonial era and under the New Order. A critical reading of this discourse suggests that it contains not merely racial prejudices on the part of European colonial masters against Natives but also elements of truth about them. This paper examines one product of the colonial state's knowledgeproduction activities: the colonial discourse on Natives revolving around the notions of race, reason, and emotion. House of Glass, the fourth and last novel in Pramoedya Ananta Toer's 'Buru Quartet,' offers a fictionalized historical account of how the domestic spy work and scholarly studies responded to the emergence of Native nationalist movement. The state used such knowledge to keep the Natives under control. In the early 20 th-century Dutch East Indies, through domestic espionage and scholarly research, the colonial state produced strategic knowledge about its Native subjects.

House of Glass by Pramoedya Ananta Toer