La dernière hikayat malaise

Abstract

Lioubov Goriaeva The Malay Hikayat Marakarma, as it is found (incomplete) in two manuscripts kept in Saint- Petersburg, is not the text we usually know by that name or that of Hikayat Si Miskin, but a continuation of it. Some evidence in the manuscripts seems to indicate that the text was written in the middle of the last century by an author close to the Fadli family, known for keeping a lending library in Batavia from the 1850s to 1912. This text was popular enough to be copied again around 1910. The author of this article analyses the story of this "new" Hikayat Marakarma according to Propp's algorithm. She shows that the proportion of the "ceremonial ornaments" compared with the "basic structure" of the story is far higher in this text than in traditional hikayat, including the Hikayat Si Miskin. These " ceremonial ornaments ", mainly related to the protocol visits that the royal families pay each other, occupy no less that a third of the text and make the story extremely slow and repetitive. The author concludes that in the course of time, the style of the Malay hikayat lost its dynamism and became increasingly weighed down by stereotypes: "The creative abilities of the hikayat as a genre were worn out".