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ethical imperative (or the makings thereof) which is premised on the idea of limits and the
penalties for the transgression of limits’. It prepares him to accept his ‘role as accessory to
Kwan’s murder’, and to ‘see through the affair with Jill to a satisfactory end’. Hamilton is
accompanied in his journey by the novel’s authorial voice, which is ‘ventriloquially merged’
with the narrative voice and remains ‘detached, subdued, and carried in a formal matrix that is
notably undeluded about human enterprise’. This authorial voice shares with the wayang kulit
an evocation of ‘an acceptance of things as they are’ and an endorsement of ‘the autonomy of
will and impulse’, which leads Hamilton to the concept of ‘submission to duty and acceptance
of its burdens’ (Roskies, 47). This acceptance/impulse dichotomy, which will be discussed in
detail in chapter 8, stems from the wayang kulit’s archetype, the Bhagavad Gita, and
constitutes the lesson for the hero, whether Arjuna, Kwan or Hamilton, before he can know
what is right and to act accordingly.
7.6. The Bar on the Edge of Reality
The central point from which the action radiates is the Wayang Bar in the Hotel
Indonesia—a hangout for foreign correspondents and businessmen, though for very few
Indonesians other than the barkeepers and bouncers. The dark, shadowy bar is appropriately
named, and introduces the reader into the novel’s strangely artificial universe:
… the Wayang Bar followed the American practice and sealed itself against all
natural light. Coming into this circular chamber, you stepped from the flat
blaze of the equator into a permanent half-dark, to which air-conditioning
added a Scandinavian cold; you would halt inside the doorway, the sweat
drying on your back, and wait for your eyes to adjust so that you could see
who was there (YLD, 3).
The American influence noted here—a backhanded tribute to the long reach of U.S.
involvement in Southeast Asia in the sixties—seems at first misplaced, the numbing air-
conditioning and artificial light antithetical to the aggressive, natural outside conditions, and
yet the juxtaposition is a manifestation of the macrocosmic conflict of parallel worlds in
Indonesia—the conflicts of ideology between Capitalism and Communism, of religion between
Christian, Moslem and Hindu, of race between Indonesian, Malaysian and Chinese, all of
which are in turn worldly reflections of the cosmic conflict between the gods and titans. Like
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