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THE THORNY ROSE: THE AVOIDANCE OF PASSION IN MODERN INDONESIAN LITERATURE1 Harry Aveling One of the important shortcomings of modern Indonesian literature is the failure of its authors, on the whole young, well-educated men of the upper and more modernized strata of society, to deal in a convincing manner with the topic of adult heterosexual passion. This problem includes, and partly arises from, an inadequacy in portraying realistic female char acters which verges, at times, on something which might be considered sadism. What is involved here is not merely an inability to come to terms with Western concepts of romantic love, as explicated, for example, by the late C. S. Lewis in his book The Allegory of Love. The failure to depict adult heterosexual passion on the part of modern Indonesian authors also stands in strange contrast to the frankness and gusto with which the writers of the various branches of traditional Indonesian and Malay litera ture dealt with this topic. Indeed it stands in almost as great a contrast with the practice of Peninsular Malay literature today. In Javanese literature, as Pigeaud notes in his history, The Literature of Java, "Poems and tales describing erotic situations are very much in evidence . descriptions of this kind are to be found in almost every important mythic, epic, historical and romantic Javanese text."^ In Sundanese literature, there is not only the open violence of Sang Kuriang's incestuous desires towards his mother (who conceived him through inter course with a dog), and a further wide range of openly sexual, indeed often heavily Oedipal stories, but also the crude direct ness of the trickster Si-Kabajan tales, which so embarrassed one commentator, Dr.
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