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7.1. Introduction
The Two Realms of the Wayang Kulit
For Christopher J. Koch, the task of getting his readers to recognise their state of non-
knowing, the concept discussed in the previous chapter, is akin to achieving a suspension of
their expectations of verisimilitude. Once this is accomplished, Koch endeavours to show how
reality itself is, like a theatrical performance, less a state of being than a sense of perspective.
Though this concept is not new to Western thought, Koch finds in Indonesia a theatrical genre
whose espousal of a non-material reality, which can therefore only be grasped through faith, is
still current and applicable to everyday society. Koch confirms his sense of the importance of
the Javanese Shadow Theatre, the wayang kulit, describing it as an integral part of the Javanese
landscape, involving whole villages and entire nights in the presentation of epic heroic
adventures of the great Indian sacred texts. It’s artist, the dalang, is ‘more than a puppet
master, and these are more than puppets: their shadows are souls’, Koch writes, ‘the dalang is
God, and the screen is Heaven’ (YLD, 121). The wayang represents ‘the Kingdom of
Dwarawati, the land of all good things, through the long dream of the wayang night; a night
divided into three stages: foolish youth, middle life (when a man seeks the right path), and old
age’s serenity’ (YLD, 122).
This chapter will concentrate on Koch’s use of the wayang kulit. First attention will be
given to the structural applications, which provide Koch with unusually interesting alternatives
to simply telling his story according to a Western literary model. Next, the focus will shift to
the protagonists, Billy Kwan and Guy Hamilton, and their association to the wayang’s Kreshna
and Arjuna. This presents problems, partly due to an apparent misleading statement on the part
of C. J. Koch himself. It is also due to the complexity of the protagonists’ identities, and will
therefore be further discussed later in this work, notably in chapters 8, 10 and 11. Remaining
with the wayang kulit, the next topic is the physical manifestations and moral consequences of
the personality types, alus and kasar, which, other than the structural form, serve to distinguish
the Shadow Theatre more from other literary and dramatic forms than perhaps anything else.
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