Book review

Vladimir Braginsky, The Heritage of Traditional Malay Literature: A

Historical Survey of Genres, Writings and Literary Views. KITLV Press,
Leiden, ISBN 9067182141, price: € 45, 890 pp.

Reviewed by Will Derks

In the concluding remarks of his historical survey of traditional Malay

literature, Vladimir Braginsky quotes from a letter he once received
from his Dutch colleague Roolvink. Apparently, the Dutchman warned
that writing such a survey would be impossible because ‘Malay litera-
ture simply has too little history’. Later in that same chapter, Braginsky
cites another confrère, Sir Richard Winstedt, who described the corpus
to be surveyed as ‘half a million pages of Malay manuscripts’. So on
the one hand there was too little material, while on the other hand there
was too much – which suggests that Professor Braginsky accomplished
his task against all odds. Realizing this feat, he forgets his scholarly
composure and compares himself to Sidang Budiman, the hero of one
of the stories he dealt with earlier:

‘Like Sidang Budiman, the student of literature has to begin his

ascent at the stage of the soul, seeking for the balance of emotions
and harmony. Like Sidang Budiman who has traversed the entire
Universe, he has to pass through all the spheres of the literary
system. Like Sidang Budiman, at the end of his journey he has to
reach the domain of the Spirit. For the Pedestal of God’s Throne,
under which Sidang Budiman found his bird, was none other than
the abode of the Spirit, while the spiritual heart (kalbu rohani),
informed by writings of the sphere of spiritual perfection, is none
other than one of the numberless names of the Spirit.’

I am not sure if I understand all this, but what is suggested here, I

think, is that Braginsky sees his book as nothing less than a mystical
quest that has brought him close to God’s truth. I doubt that. But
modesty does not seem to be this author’s forte: the introductory
chapter refers to a host of scholars, predecessors and contemporaries

South East Asia Research, 14, 2, pp. 309–323

310 South East Asia Research

alike who have had a crucial influence on the development of Malay

studies. According to Braginsky, he too is a distinguished member of
this premier league, for in the list of students who produced the ‘most
stimulating’ and ‘important’ works in this discipline, he also includes
V.I. Braginsky. In general it is perhaps wiser to leave such evaluations
to one’s peers.
In the same chapter, the author emphasizes that much progress has
been made in Malay studies and that the time has come for a synthesis
of all the extant data. This book is an attempt at such a synthesis. It will
endeavour to uncover the ‘organizing principles’ of the evolution of
traditional Malay literature with a keen eye on the ‘literariness’ of the
texts at hand – something which in the past has not received much
attention. The same holds true for a ‘theoretical framework’, which
has also been lacking. As a first step towards providing such a frame-
work, Braginsky then sets out to discuss some theoretical questions.
One of these questions concerns the philologist’s classical problem
of dating manuscripts. However, it is unclear to what extent this can be
dealt with theoretically, as most manuscripts are, and remain, undated
and anonymous. What theory would help one to avoid baseless specu-
lations about which text was produced before another, or even which
manuscript is the ‘original’? Braginsky, not surprisingly, does not
really bridge the gap. But he speculates a lot. The whole book is
riddled with phrases such as: ‘it doesn’t seem unreasonable to believe’,
or ‘this allows us to presume’, or ‘that may well be explained by’, or
‘this permits us to conjecture’. There is even a whole chapter devoted
to a period in Malay literary history from which no literary works are
known. Since no theory is provided to guide his ‘reconstruction’,
Braginsky has recourse to highly circumstantial or far-fetched evidence
that, without any reticence, is given probative value. How on earth
could Javanese temple reliefs, say, enlighten us about Malay literary
texts that do not exist? But Braginsky does not have a problem with
that. Eventually he even presents us with a ‘system of old Malay litera-
ture’ as a kind of hierarchy of genres that, without data, cannot but
amount to mere scholarly fantasy. Perhaps the qualification of
classical philology as ‘an exercise in futility’ has been never more apt.
Incidentally, literary genres as well as the (supposedly hierarchical)
relationships between them are key concepts in this study. But in spite
of that, Braginsky finds a discussion of the ‘extremely complex theory
of generic structures’ unnecessary, referring us in a footnote to two (!)
pages in another book. He rather confines himself to a set of definitions he
 Book review 311

has constructed for the occasion. ‘Genre structures’, we thus learn,

‘include first and foremost simple genres or genres per se’. Note that
here the definition uses the concept to be defined and therefore lacks
explanatory power. But that does not bother Professor Braginsky, for
the ‘simple genres’, he continues to reason, may combine into
‘composite genres’. In their turn these are to be distinguished from
‘content-free genre structures’, which he terms ‘genre forms’ or ‘genre
moulds’ and which ‘can be used for the expression of thematically
different contents’. He then adds:

‘However, even at times when traditional poetics, like the Malay

one, use mostly this last kind of “genre mould”, the sphere of
literary practice knows cases of the “restoration” of real genres (sic),
which is achieved by the interaction of a genre form with a specific
content, namely particular topoi, subjects and plots.’

Here, it seems to me, Braginsky could have benefited greatly from a

glance or two at genre theory, extremely complex though it may be.
Something similar could be said when he moves on to ‘the problem of
revealing the integrated character and artistic value of the literary works
being researched’. This section of the introduction seems to revolve
around the basic structuralist notion that all elements of a literary text
are meaningful, something which, Braginsky thinks, makes it
‘artistic’. He emphasizes that this ‘integral meaning’, as well as the
way it changes over time, is of primary concern to him and then he
continues as follows (never mind the syntax):

‘This, naturally, presupposes a certain initial meaning of the work in

question, defining which the author, together with Teeuw, shared
the idea, “heretical” for contemporary literary criticism, that the Malay
writer was well-aware of what his work “said or what it referred to,
or even [...] what was meant”. To this the present author deemed it
necessary to add one more, no less “heretical” idea: due to the
normative nature of traditional literature, not only did the Malay writer
know “what was meant”, but the Malay audience also understood
what he meant in a given composition much more uniformly than
contemporary readers do with regard to contemporary pieces of
literature.’

One wonders why there is, again, a self-congratulatory tone here. The
312 South East Asia Research

fallacies are plainly and painfully obvious and there really is no

justification for assuming a rebel ethos. It is disconcerting that the
author appears to ignore, deny or misunderstand relevant theoretical
achievements every time he introduces a key concept for his book.
Literary self-awareness – often the epitome of ‘literariness’ – is
another one. Its preponderance in this survey notwithstanding, one will
look in vain for fundamental insights into the text as its own mirror,
although there are quite a few. What we get instead of a ‘theoretical
framework’, here and elsewhere, is silence – or, at best, bits and pieces
mostly taken from structuralism and ‘literary hermeneutics’, which
Braginsky seems to consider the cream of the theoretical crop. The
models that came after it he rejects explicitly because, he states, these
‘were formed, mainly or exclusively, on the basis of studying works of
contemporary literature’. Was this not true of structuralism as well?
But Braginsky sticks to his preference by explaining:

‘This is because reflective traditional literatures, of which an early

stage is represented, inter alia, by Malay literature, are normally
“structuralist” in their comprehension of what the literary work is,
and “hermeneutic” in their readings of it.’

Again, I am not sure what this means, but I leave it to the reader to
savour all possible interpretations of what really does seem to be a
crackpot statement. In such a way, however, Braginsky often justifies
his decisions about what is relevant for the ‘framework’ he has
promised to provide. Perhaps this is at its most striking when, still in
the introduction, he has to come to terms with Amin Sweeney’s work.
The enigmatic ways of reasoning in that section strongly suggest a
struggle on Braginsky’s part to hold on to the kind of classical
philology that Sweeney’s insights have fundamentally undermined. A
very superficial discussion in just a few pages implies that he has
understood little of the paradigm shift that Sweeney brought about – or
that he once again has decided largely to ignore its consequences for
the synthesis his book is supposed to be. Either way, in concluding his
discussion, he states:

‘The above notes do not pursue the aim of polemizing with Sweeney,
whose contribution to the revision of the earlier, outdated ideas of
traditional Malay literature is difficult to overestimate and whose
main tenets the present author shares completely. However, striving
 Book review 313

to take into account the oral component of Malay literature, the

author did not deem it possible to go into an assessment of its
importance as far as Sweeney sometimes did. This was countered
by the stable sense of the importance of the written component of
Malay literature which, in addition, grew historically as its
Islamization progressed.’

So much for Sweeney. Now the author can proceed and, without any
doubt about his ‘stable sense’, focus on the sound-proof, written world
of manuscripts in the way he is used to. The result is a book that, in
spite of all the claims that it is innovative (Braginsky also promises a
‘new philology’), reminds one of the past rather than makes one think
of the future. Among the few things that could be called new, perhaps,
is a taxonomy of Malay literary genres that Braginsky develops: a closed,
strictly hierarchical system that endeavours to domesticate a necessar-
ily fragmented and essentially unruly corpus of texts. Order! Discipline!
– that is what this system is all about. But it is highly doubtful that
these texts will assume the positions assigned to them at the crack of
Braginsky’s whip. They are much too playful, witty, intractable, over-
whelming or enchanting to fit into any straitjacket – even if, as in this
case, it borrows theological authority from Sufi mysticism. As an
earlier quotation from this survey has already suggested, the mystical
discourse is generally a hermetic one and ideas such as ‘the corporeal
soul’, ‘the spiritual heart’ or ‘the four ontological and psychic-somatic
planes of the Universe’ (to name but a few referred to by Braginsky)
cannot be applied in such a totally different context with impunity.
Obscurity is what one obtains.
This book could be seen as a blow-up of what, for a long time, has
been a conspicuous trait of Malay philology: namely, that its students
never really knew what to do with their material as verbal artefacts. As
we saw when he promised ‘literariness’, Braginsky was aware of this.
Yet, nowhere in his survey do we get even an inkling of the possible
worth the Malay chirographic heritage could have as literature. In his
discussions of individual Malay texts, or rather, of their bland
summaries in English, Braginsky makes abundant use of hackneyed
terms such as ‘motif’, ‘theme’ and ‘symbol’, with the obvious
conviction that this will somehow warrant literary readings. However,
to this reviewer, most of his ‘analyses’ boil down to long-winded,
anaemic descriptions, often presented in an awkward style and
regularly containing bizarre turns of thought.
314 South East Asia Research

An example taken at random would be a series of remarks he makes

about the Salasilah Kutai, a manuscript supposedly from the nineteenth
century that, according to Braginsky, ‘faithfully conveyed the oral
prototype that took shape before the middle of the seventeenth
century’. How can that be? And how can he know? But he maintains
unflinchingly that the Salasilah Kutai is quite unique because its ‘main
motifs’ are presented as ‘an integral whole, in which every motif
occupies its original place and preserves its original meaning. To put it
differently, only here do they make up the primordial Malay myth of
the origin of the dynasty and, more broadly, the people (sic) over whom
this dynasty is to hold sway’. After such outlandish statements, it is
really difficult to find common ground with Braginsky on the basis of
which a debate could be in any way meaningful or productive.
The same is true for what, again taken at random, he has to say about
the Malay poems called pantun. Most of that is a rehash of an obsolete
debate, but Braginsky also adds his personal contribution to the
scholarly discourse on these gentle quatrains still popular among Malays.
Again we can observe the author’s penchant for classification,
systematization and hierarchy here, for he discerns three levels of pantun,
based on the character of the ‘symbols’ used in them (for no apparent
reason, Braginsky applies the Malay equivalent, lambang). On the first
level, the symbols convey ‘common linguistic meanings’ that every-
one can understand. Why not just call them ‘words’ then? But anyway,
symbols of the second level – ‘used to form the most exquisite and
refined pantun’ – have connotations that are specific to the pantun
tradition. So to be able to enjoy such extraordinary specimens one has
to know, for instance, that ‘duck eggs symbolize loneliness’ (!) or that
selasih (basil) has a connotation with love (kasih) – not because these
two words can rhyme, but because, as Braginsky has it, quoting Winstedt,
‘in India basil is “the symbol of happy wedlock, pervaded by the
essence of Vishnu and Laksmi and annually married to Krishna in every
Hindu family”’. As there are no Malay Hindus and most Malays do not
live in India, it is unclear what this quotation is supposed to explain.
But, regardless of this, we ascend to the next level:

‘Finally, the third level, the least stable one, ensures the relative
openness and, by virtue of this, viability of the system of the pantun
“language” as a whole. Belonging to it are “spontaneous” lambang
which are created in the course of that peculiar poetic game which is
represented by pantun improvisation [...]. It is rarely that such
 Book review 315

symbols are really imbued with content, and it is they that provide
grounds for the theory of purely phonetic associations in lambang.’

What are spontaneous symbols? Can symbols be without content? What

are they to symbolize then? But so it goes, on and on, page after page.
Quite frankly, after slogging through almost 900 such pages I felt at a
loss. The book was at first something rather awesome to behold. So
much time and effort must have gone into writing it, so many hours,
days, months and years of slaving over the text. I would have given a
great deal to be able to welcome this book as the synthesis that it claims
to be: that is, as a book, necessary in every field every few decades or
so, which both presents the discipline’s state of the art and suggests
ways into its future. Such a work would be sane yet scintillating, well
informed but at a certain distance from its material, and therefore able
to play with it and evoke an era, a mindset, a literature. But my sad
conclusion must be that with The Heritage of Traditional Malay
Literature, the author has rendered neither Malay studies nor himself a
service. Admittedly, this is a harsh judgment, but I believe that in this
case benevolence would not help us, or the field, any further. Perhaps
it never did. It’s time to clear the decks.

The author responds

A review as its own mirror: notes on the review by W. Derks of The Heritage of
Traditional Malay Literature

by Vladimir Braginsky

To respond to a critical review of one’s own work is a difficult task,

given an author’s inevitable favourable bias. Yet Will Derks’s assess-
ment of my book The Heritage of Traditional Malay Literature: A
Historical Survey of Genres, Writings and Literary Views is so typical
of its kind in the literary field that I have chosen to respond to it here.
For the purposes of this response, I shall use the third person, ‘Braginsky’,
to refer to myself ‘at a distance’ as author of the book, and the first
person elsewhere.
316 South East Asia Research

To identify at the outset what will and will not be discussed in these
notes, I shall not debate theoretical issues with the reviewer because,
in contrast to Braginsky, Derks does not clearly define his own
theoretical position. Only two features of his position are more or less
obvious: the reviewer’s disgust with philology and his great apprecia-
tion of Amin Sweeney’s contribution to the study of traditional Malay
literature (henceforth TML). While I understand philology simply as a
science that studies the history of all kinds of texts, which can there-
fore qualify as neither good nor bad, I nevertheless fail to see from the
review how Derks himself understands it, other than that he demands
that philologists be literary critics. As for his appreciation of Sweeney’s
contribution to the field, it is one I fully share, despite disagreements
with certain of Sweeney’s views – quite normal in scholarship. I have
therefore chosen instead to limit these notes to a discussion of the
numerous and misleading inaccuracies contained in Derks’s review and
to respond to some of the questions he poses.
In Derks’s opening passage on the character of Braginsky, his exten-
sive comments are highly personal and therefore could have been
ignored, had the inaccuracies not begun right here. According to Derks,
Braginsky compares himself to Sidang Budiman (the hero of a Malay
narrative) and presents his work as ‘a mystical quest that has brought
him close to God’s truth’. Yet the ‘mystical quest’ on which Braginsky
has allegedly embarked is nothing more than an inaccuracy on the part
of the reviewer. The reality is much more prosaic: on pp 767–768,
Braginsky writes that Winstedt compared the student of TML to a hunter,
but states that he, Braginsky, prefers a comparison of the Malay
literary scholar to a traveller. This statement is followed by a para-
graph, part of which is quoted by Derks. The paragraph mentions the
student of TML again – that is, any of its numerous students – who had
the chance to read literary works belonging to all three domains of this
literature (a student such as Derks himself, for example, if this
opportunity applied to him). To dispel any doubts, Braginsky writes:
‘[t]he author, one of such students, [...]’. How this innocent and not
particularly original comparison can give rise to the conclusion that
Braginsky makes excessive mystical claims for himself, only Derks
knows.
Having finished, even if only temporarily, with his damning
criticisms of Braginsky’s own persona, Derks turns his attention to what
he considers the flaws of the book. His analysis is based almost
entirely on the introduction to the work and focuses on the above-
 Book review 317

mentioned theoretical framework. There are inaccuracies at almost every

turn, but I shall dwell only on the most serious.
In his treatment of Braginsky’s reconstruction of the genre system of
Old Malay literature, Derks points incorrectly to an absence of theo-
retical framework, failing to observe that the theoretical basis is discussed
in a special section entitled ‘Typological basis of the reconstruction;
the choice of a model for the reconstruction of Old Malay literature’
(pp 49–53). Had the reviewer been interested in the theory of the re-
construction, he could have also found a reference to Braginsky’s book
The Comparative Study of Traditional Asian Literatures (2001) in this
section. That book introduces the typological method in comparative
literature and describes and substantiates the model of Asian literatures of
the reflective–traditionalist type, which underpins the reconstruction,
in much more detail than the work under review. A second inaccuracy
is contained in Derks’s statement that the reconstruction is a figment of
Braginsky’s imagination, as it is not confirmed by any ‘data’ (‘texts’ is
implied). In fact – as an attentive reading of the chapter would readily
reveal – the reconstruction is based not only on indirect, but also on
direct evidence in the form of epigraphic and chirographic texts. That
these texts are mostly in Sanskrit, but can still be included in the
reconstruction, is explained precisely in the theoretical section that Derks
failed to notice. Finally, Derks’s question of how Javanese temple
reliefs can ‘enlighten us about Malay literary texts that do not exist’ is
also based on inaccurate interpretation: the book is concerned here not
with Malay but with the Sanskrit texts mentioned above. The answer
to the questions of why and how Javanese reliefs can ‘enlighten us’ in
this case can be found on p 56 (why) and pp 56–58 (how).
In discussing the topic of the concept of genre, Derks makes further
errors of interpretation in his assertion that ‘the definition [of the genre]
uses the concept to be defined and therefore lacks explanatory power’.
On turning to p 17 of the book, however, the reader will see that,
although Derks quotes Braginsky’s sentence ‘Genre structures include
first and foremost simple genres or genres “per se”’, he distorts the
meaning of the extract. The words ‘per se’ are followed not by a full
stop (as in the review), but by a colon that leads into a definition of
‘genre’. A second inaccuracy is to be found in Derks’s statement that
the definitions offered were ‘constructed for the occasion’. As a matter
of fact, the section on genres in the introduction is a summary of the
detailed examination of the concept of genres provided in Braginsky,
2001 (pp 136–154), which is based on both works of modern literary
318 South East Asia Research

scholars and traditional Asian treatises on literature. Although one

reference to this book occurs in the section on genres discussed by the
reviewer, another, given immediately after the genre definitions, was
mistakenly deleted in the editing process, for which I apologize. Derks
goes on to refer to Braginsky’s definition of genre forms or genre moulds
with apparent dissatisfaction, recommending that Braginsky cast ‘a
glance or two at genre theory’. In response, I would advise Derks to
consider Chapter 5 of the book he is reviewing, which specifically
discusses the genre system of classical Malay literature – most notably
on pp 316–319. Here, he will find more information on the genre forms
that have vexed him so much, as well as their transformation into genres.
A further inaccuracy in Derks’s review is to be found in his passage
dealing with literary self-awareness. This is one of the main concepts
of the book – the whole of Chapter 4 is devoted to it – and it can in no
way be described as ‘the epitome of “literariness”’, to quote Derks.
Since Derks fails to explain the meaning Braginsky attributes to this
concept, I shall do so briefly here. The self-awareness of classical Malay
literature, which dates back to the seventeenth century and is recon-
structed in the book on the basis of excerpts from numerous texts, is a
scholastic, essentially Islamic doctrine of what literature is, the pur-
pose it serves and how it should ‘work’. The main problems perceived
in this doctrine are: (1) the place literature occupies in the integral
structure of the Universe, its relationship to the divine world of the
Spirit and the world of the human psyche and spirit, as well as the
divine nature of literary inspiration; (2) the right (or proper) creation
and perception of the literary work; and (3) the influence of literary
works belonging to three hierarchically arranged zones of the literary
system on the reader/listener by means of beauty, didactic benefit and
spiritual perfection inherent in these works.
This doctrine is permeated with Sufi ideas and terminology. There-
fore, had the reviewer familiarized himself with Chapter 4, he would
not have had to ask about the meaning of Sufi terms used in the book
(such as ‘the corporeal soul’, ‘the spiritual heart’ or ‘the four ontologi-
cal and psychic-somatic planes of the Universe’), since all are interpreted
in this chapter. He could also have learnt that Malay literary self-
awareness was quite a generalized, didactico-religious doctrine, which
cared little for the ‘technical details’ of literature (pp 271–272); that is,
the very essence of the literariness of its pieces, their specifically
literary charm and expressivity. Besides, Derks would have noticed that
Braginsky does not confuse this doctrine (a literary theory of sorts)
 Book review 319

with literary practice but, on the contrary, opposes one to the other
(ibid). Knowledge of literary self-awareness allows the researcher to
understand better the tasks traditional Malay writers set themselves
and the methods they used, but it does not help much in the description
of the literariness of their works. It is precisely for this reason that,
although Braginsky tries to take into account literary self-awareness,
he by no means stops there.
Finally, if on reading Chapter 4 Derks had paid slightly more
attention to the literary analyses he found so unbearable, his
conviction that Sufi ideas ‘cannot be applied in such a totally different
context’ (the context of TML) would probably not have been so
unwavering. In his article on Sufism as a category in Indonesian litera-
ture and history, A. Johns wrote that in the seventeenth century the
profession of Islam in the Archipelago was almost identical to
membership of a Sufi order. Braginsky’s book adds to this some
supplementary data: religio-mystical, not literary, education of Malay
literati (p 207); not infrequent ‘transformations’ of spiritual (usually
Sufi) tutors into tellers (authors) of love-and-adventure hikayat and
syair (pp 368, 542); love-and-adventure hikayat that can be read as
Sufi allegories (Hikayat Syah Mardan is undoubtedly such an allegory,
while Hikayat Indraputra most probably also belongs to this genre –
pp 717–742); Sufi elements in numerous and diverse literary works,
such as Sejarah Melayu (pp 117–118) and Taj as-salatin (p 431), Hikayat
Isma Yatim (p 403) and Syair Bidasari (pp 522, 528), Syair Burung
Pungguk (p 584) and Syair perang Mengkasar (p 571). Even the
protagonists of Hikayat Hang Tuah become Sufi dervishes at the end
of the epic (p 474). I do not think that the Sufi ideas were actually so
alien to the context of TML.
The passage on the taxonomy of genres, allegedly intended ‘to
domesticate [...] unruly corpus of texts’ is a general and
unsubstantiated deliberation on the part of Derks to which I would
respond with a quotation from the book under review, bearing witness
to the fact that, in contrast to the reviewer, Braginsky realizes that both
this taxonomy and the entire system of classical Malay literature
reconstructed in the book are a model of literary reality. This model
should not be confused with the literary reality itself: they differ from
each other in approximately the same way as the Saussurean notions of
langue and parole – both are real, though not identical. Thus Braginsky
writes that everything offered in the chapters on literary self-aware-
ness and the genre system:
320 South East Asia Research

‘[i]s only a model of the system of classical Malay literature, with

both the merits of models (their explanatory potency and ‘observ-
ability’ of a complex object) and their inevitable demerits
(simplification, schematic nature of presentation, abstraction from
many important details). The author fully realizes that the reality of
Malay literature is much richer, more diverse, ‘alive’ and, certainly,
not so clear and well-ordered. However, it is necessary to remember
that he is analysing the doctrine of literature (not the literature
itself), and that science, including the science of literature, works
with models. It is one of its most important methods.’ (p 280)

Braginsky tries to compensate for the demerits of the model and to

provide a better idea of the diverse and ‘alive’ reality of TML by offer-
ing the reader numerous historico-literary analyses of individual works.
Alas, judging from the reviewer’s single and dismissive sentence,
intended to cover more than half the book, Braginsky’s good
intentions did not produce the desired result. Instead his analyses are,
according to Derks, ‘anaemic’, ‘awkward’ and ‘bizarre’. While it is
true that the discussion of each individual work includes its summary,
which should be an integral part of any historical survey of literature,
the discussions are, contrary to the reviewer’s observations, based on
the texts of the respective works and not on their summaries. Many
details, which are absent from the summaries but present in the texts,
testify to this only too clearly.
Be that as it may, this time Derks decides not to leave his verdict
completely unsubstantiated and quotes two examples of ‘bizarre’
analyses. However, this highly commendable decision only multiplies
the number of inaccuracies. The first example is the description of
Salasilah Kutai (henceforth SK). Although conveniently short, it is
hardly a good choice, as SK is described on the basis of research
studies by three Dutch scholars (C.A. Mees, W. Kern and J. Ras) and
not by Braginsky himself as Derks believes. Their works can provide
answers to all Derks’s questions. For instance, Kern and Ras explain
that manuscripts (not one manuscript) of SK are quite true to their
prototype, which is confirmed by the many archaic features of their
texts, because of the sacral nature of SK and its annual, ritual staging at
the Kutai court. Which statement belongs to which scholar becomes
clear from references in the section on SK and special endnote 73 on
p 487. The ‘outlandish statement’ by Braginsky that only in SK ‘[m]ain
motifs [...] are presented as an integral whole, in which every motif
 Book review 321

occupies its original place and preserves its original meaning’ is, in
fact, a well grounded conclusion drawn by Ras and not by Braginsky.
It underpins Ras’s conception about the association of the ideal Malay
king with three Cosmic zones, symbolized by the sun, earth and water
respectively. Discussed in different sections of Braginsky’s book four
times (pp 72, 129, 346, 454–456), this conception, had it been noticed
by Derks, might not have seemed so weird to him.
Derks’s presentation of the second example is particularly rich in
inaccuracies and questions. The debate on the phonic or semantic
association between the two halves of pantun, which the reviewer
considers obsolete, amounts only to half a page in a section of more
than 10 pages. As a matter of fact, ‘most of’ the section is occupied by
a description of the ‘language’ of pantun, which can help to resolve
this key issue of their poetics. In the ‘vocabulary’ of this ‘language’
Braginsky identifies a number of basic units, ‘words’ of sorts. How-
ever, the ‘words’ of the first half of pantun have not only the common
linguistic meanings but also additional symbolic connotations that are
frequently clarified in the second half of pantun (for example, the burning
lamp = the love shining in the heart, etc). Therefore, the term ‘word’,
in its usual meaning, does not fit here and consequently ‘word’ in the
language of pantun (this ‘word’ = a pair of interconnected words of
Malay language from the first and the second half of pantun) is desig-
nated by the term ‘lambang’, which was offered by the Polish Malayist
R. Stiller (see reference on p 496). The term lambang, which indicates
the symbolic connotation of the ‘word’ in the pantun ‘language’, is
preferable to the term ‘symbol’ because this connotation is less stable
than in symbols per se – for instance, in Sufi symbols. Following Stiller,
Braginsky explains the way this word is used in the book, emphasizing
that the pair of words forming lambang is connected not only by rhyme
but also, albeit not always, by a symbolic or conceptual (that is,
semantic) relationship (p 496).
Braginsky understands that the words selasih (‘basil’) and kasih (‘love
passion’) rhyme, but he also considers them connected conceptually,
and quotes Winstedt who explained this connection by an Indian ritual.
Derks’s statement that this explanation is unacceptable, as ‘there are
no Malay Hindus and most Malays do not live in India’ sounds a little
strange at the very least, as he is certainly aware of numerous
Indian elements preserved in TML and in Malay culture. If, however,
Winstedt’s explanation did not satisfy Derks, he could have paid
attention to the alternative offered by Braginsky – namely, the association
322 South East Asia Research

of both basil and love passion with intoxication (mabuk selasih).

Derks wonders what ‘spontaneous symbols’ are and how ‘symbols
can be without content’. Both questions should be referred not to
symbols as such, but to lambang, specific ‘words’ of the ‘language’ of
pantun. Every time that, in the course of improvisation, the singer
inserts a new ‘word’ in the pantun composed on the occasion, he or she
creates a ‘spontaneous lambang’. Pairs of usual, linguistic words in
such ‘spontaneous lambang’ are often connected only phonically (by
rhyme) and lack any semantic associations. They are not ‘imbued with
content’, and for this reason ‘provide grounds for the theory of purely
phonetic associations in lambang’ (p 499).
The final passage of Derks’s review, altogether thunderous and
inciting (‘it’s time to clear the decks’) and yet, without any meteoro-
logical reason, somehow softened by a light cloud of sadness (‘sad
conclusion’) is a memorable one indeed. A crazy (‘crackpot’) and
immodest professor is standing on the deck of his ship. He cracks his
whip and, breaking all the rules of syntax, shouts ‘Order!’ ‘Discipline!’
to the host of unruly texts, desperate to tear off their reviled straightjackets
and run helter-skelter in all directions. Can any one of ‘us’ remain
benevolent at such a sight? The decks must be cleared to rescue the
field and fleet and begin the real work.
No doubt this is an impressive image, but the reviewer opportunely
reminds the reader that every text, and hence his review, is its own
mirror – thus it not only creates the above portrait but also reveals
something about itself. Let us consider it from that point of view.
The review includes the following four components: (1) passages
that are full of inaccuracies but, nevertheless, include some informa-
tion related to the book; (2) similar passages containing questions
(sometimes questions and inaccuracies are found in one and the same
passage); (3) passages containing criticisms of such a general nature
that they do not require any prior knowledge of the book (mainly
exclamatory rebukes, these criticisms are somehow out of place in the
work of a reviewer so sensitive to the slightest modulations of tone in
someone else’s work); (4) omissions, or rather ‘failures to mention’; I
do not include in this category a failure to provide the reader with a
short description of the book and its structure, something required by
the genre of the review, even when the reviewer deems the book a
failure.
On scrutinizing these points one by one, the following conclusions
can be drawn:
 Book review 323

• There is a common feature in all the inaccuracies – they always

strengthen a negative impression. The reviewer never errs ‘to the
advantage of the author’, which leads one to suspect intentional
misrepresentations in his inaccuracies, rather than inadvertent mis-
understandings.
• Many of these inaccuracies and the questions they prompt (answers
to which are readily to be found in the book, regardless of whether
or not the reviewer agrees with them) would hardly have seen the
light of day had the reviewer paid sufficient attention to those parts
of the book he chose to read.
• Finally, some of the inaccuracies, questions and especially ‘failures
to mention’ suggest that the reviewer may not have read substantial
sections of the book. I refer here not only to two chapters about
early Muslim literature, a chapter about literary self-awareness and
a chapter about Muslim hagiography and Sufi literature, but also to
a substantial part of the discussions of individual works – in other
words to around three-quarters of the entire book (though not being
impartial in this matter, I may have made a mistake in my calcula-
tions).
All these remarks could be perceived merely as the speculations of an
entrenched classifier and philologist, accustomed to uncovering
mistakes and inaccuracies – but I do not think that even the simplest
deconstruction of this review would have produced essentially
different results.
At the end of his review, Derks comments that ‘in this case benevo-
lence would not help us or the field […] Perhaps it never did’. The
opposite of ‘benevolence’ is ‘malevolence’, a word that conveys only
too well an intentional distortion of a book’s meaning, a superficial
reading of its lesser part and a complete neglect of its greater part – all
of which serve to misrepresent the book and mislead the reader.