SOURCE: Geertz, Clifford. “Java Jive.” New Republic 214, no. 17 (22 April 1996): 31-4.

In the following essay, Geertz traces Pramoedya's personal and literary development, commenting on the “peculiarly didactic and reiterative quality” of the author's writing, particularly in Footsteps and House of Glass.

The displacement of political engagement toward literature in authoritarian countries—those with undeveloped, stultified or forcibly shrunken civil societies—is a commonplace. There is nothing like banning parties, eviscerating representative institutions, muzzling the press, incarcerating dissenters, appointing soldiers to ministries of justice and education, and ideologizing popular culture for turning the imaginative writer into a power. Solzhenitsyn and Havel, Ngugi and Solinka, even the fugitive Rushdie, the reticent Mahfuz, or the exported Fugard, make generals, presidents, ayatollahs and party chiefs nervous in a way that their colleagues in less constrained settings seldom attain. There is usually a price for this, and it is often, as the fate of...