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11.3.2.2.3. Billy Kwan’s Mythopoeic, Intertextually Constructed Self
For the purposes of this study, Semar must be viewed for his relation with the man who
brings him out of the wayang kulit and into his own world of flux and struggle for order and
justice. Billy Kwan develops a mythopoeic scheme, drawing on Western and Eastern sources,
of his ideas about the origins, identity and powers of dwarfs, which he uses to construct his
own identity. Semar is certainly the most appropriate and fortunate of all of the models he tries
on, but Kwan must learn that Semar’s sense of detachment and peace comes not from wearing
the masks of a wise-fool, ugly dwarf. Kwan remains a sophisticated pretender until he
understands that it is through the refined, alus outlook that Semar accepts his reincarnation into
a lower world which he had not merited. Kwan’s sense of self must, like Semar’s, incorporate
all of his own, multifarious and often undeserved, qualities and blemishes, in order to gain a
true perspective on the reality of his world.
In the dossier on dwarfs, however, Kwan develops his own self-image in a way to avoid
direct recognition of Semar’s alus perspective and to hide the truth of his own identity:
In Celtic mythology, the kingdom of the dwarfs below the earth, filled with
precious metals, is called the Antipodes. Joke: I’m a dwarf from the
Antipodes: and my files are my underground work—my secret mine of paper.
He adds Javanese mythology, which raises Semar to a nearly supreme role in the universe,
equating him with Vishnu, the supreme god and guardian of Java, who also ‘sometimes takes
the guise of a dwarf’ (YLD, 156). This confusion of identities of Vishnu, Sukarno, and Semar
with Kwan boils portentously like a witch’s pot through the novel. The concept that Billy
could be the reincarnation of any god, much less the supreme god, seems outlandish for a
Western novel, but Koch takes to the idea of avatars and reincarnation, and, with a Javanese
sense of humour, he invests it with much potential for disaster.
Christopher Koch follows the model of the wayang kulit in making his dwarf the pivotal
character. He leaves no doubt where Kwan thinks he should be placed in the scheme of things
and sets up the double heroic construction in the introduction of the one shadow puppet which
attracts Hamilton’s attention because of its ‘unusual grotesqueness’:
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