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The final matter dealt with is the manifestation of the Javanese wayang kulit as the Wayang
Bar, where the Western journalists try to retreat from the outside reality, which they observe
professionally, and create their own reality, with various degrees of success, as from the other
side of the wayang screen.
7.2 The Wayang Kulit Structural Model
Helen Tiffin recognises the wayang kulit as the ‘central metaphor’ of The Year of Living
Dangerously, citing its implementation as the novel’s structural paradigm, in place of a
Western model, as ‘a significant step towards decolonialization’. Beyond the parallels of plot
and character with the wayang play The Reincarnation of Rama, this application includes using
the puppet analogy—in which the relationship between shadows and puppets are metaphors for
levels of reality in which the shadows magically transcend illusory material presence—to
associate both Australians and Indonesians under the colonialist regime as prisoners in Plato’s
cave. Use of the dalang figure also gives Koch an elaborate means with which to create and
manipulate his characters, where ‘the supreme dalang, Koch, controls the narrator, Cookie,
who relates his story and draws his characters from the files of the innermost, would-be
dalang, Kwan’ (Tiffin, 1982, 334).
Maes-Jelinek also suggests that Koch’s appropriation of the wayang’s Patet Nem,
Patet Sanga, Patet Manjura structural divisions for the three parts of his novel goes beyond the
obvious prelude, intrigue and denouement or finale of the wayang kulit, corresponding to
Hamilton’s development through innocence, experience and maturity. Based on the two tuning
systems of the galang musical accompaniment to the wayang kulit, the musical scale or mode
of the three Patet conveys psychological overtones to the performance, and it is this musical
structure which Koch is trying to adapt to a literary form. The musical mode ‘enhances the
meaning of the shadow’s movements and structures’ of the wayang kulit and, by analogy,
should of the novel as well.
It is not mere accompaniment to the deeds of heroes and villains but the ‘silent
voice’ of the shadowed Indonesian people which underlies the narrative and
eventually acts as a catalyst in awakening Hamilton’s sensibility. (Maes-
Jelinek, 31)
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