‘Anehnja hubungan ajah dan anak ini’

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article asks to what extent the depiction of father-son relationships in works by Pramoedya Ananta Toer published up to 1952 reflects what we know of his relationship with his father during those years. It finds that four works written between 1945 and 1949, when Pramoedya had little contact with a father with whom his relations had been difficult, contain negative portraits of fathers, including, in one case, Pramoedya’s own father and, in another, a character substantially modelled on his father. There is a marked change of attitude in Bukan pasar malam (It’s not an all night fair), Pramoedya’s account of his visit to his dying father, when sympathy and respect for his father as man and nationalist dominate the author’s feelings. Something of this change of attitude remains in two stories from the collection Cerita dari Blora (Tales from Blora) which recount Pramoedya’s own childhood memories of his family, but echoes of the tensions between father and son remain in other stories from that collection. So, it appears, do they in Bumi manusia (This earth of mankind), the first volume of Pramoedya’s late major work, the Buru quartet.