The much-travelled isle has produced surprisingly little fine literature by foreigners, says Jamie James
KIPLING had it all wrong: East and West have been meeting with adulterous frequency since Marco Polo. The romance of the East is an imperishable element of the Western imagination—mainly as a negative touchstone, showing the West what it is by inventing an alluring fantasy of what it is not. This phenomenon, indelibly labeled Orientalism by Edward Said in his book of the name, began, like so much else, with the Greeks, who created a myth of their geopolitical adversary Persia as a land of tyranny and effeminate luxury, the better to define the Greeks' conception of themselves as the models of rational, manly virtue. Western literature ever since has been well-populated by images of the Oriental as inscrutable, wily, exquisite, and cruel, created by storytellers who never ventured east of Istanbul at the furthermost.
Yet Westerners who spent years or whole live in Asia have fared no better. The most admired European and American writers who have explored what used to be called the Far East—Kipling, Maugham, and, above all, Conrad—took as their theme the strange mongrel world of the white people who came to Asia to live. They did so because they realised in instinctively that no amount of observation would enable them to inhabit the minds of Asian characters as persuasively as they could those of the Western interlopers (which is, of course, what Kipling meant by the twain never meeting).
Yet everyone who come to Asia and stays, however much we may learn and live, will always retain at the core a sense of the romantic mystery it evoked in us before we made the first journey here. When I came to Bali in 1999, almost the first thing I did after I found a house was to write a novel about a place called Andrew & Joey: A Tale of Bali. I told my story about two American men who come to Bali for a year through the E-mail messages of the protagonist and their friends back home, thus making all the voices Western. The book is wholly ironic: the reader knows from the start that every observation about the island is suspect, if not dead wrong. A slick dodge, perhaps, but it kept my hands clean.
In the 20th century, Bali became one the most well-travelled places in the “Orient,” yet the number of imaginative literary works by foreigners who have sought to see Bali through Balinese eyes is surprisingly small. In fact, there are two.
Vicky Baum, an Australia Jew, made her name and her fortune in 1929 with a potboiler called People in a Hotel, which is made into the film Grand Hotel (best known for giving Greta Garbo the line, “I want to be alone”—that and winning the Oscar Best Picture in 1932). Baum wrote dozens more novels, but the only other one that still lives (in English translation) is A Tale from Bali, an account of the Puputan of 1906, when more than a thousand Balinese royals committed suicide in the face of an invasion by the Dutch rather than surrender.
Baum’s novel, published in 1937 after a visit to Bali two years earlier, is based largely on reading and study, giving the book a dry, quasi-anthropological tone, which is surprisingly agreeable: the lyricism of most Western writing about Asia gets out of hand. She propels her story forward with clockwork persistence and makes her Balinese characters come to potboilerish life, but the most remarkable quality of the novel is that Baum never condescends to her material. She writes of spells and god and caste without a hint of rationalist disapproval, or, worse, the simpering approval of the wise adult charmed by the wee brown folks’ winning ways.
The other book is The Painted Alphabet, a novel by Diana Darling, published in 1992. Darling’s story, based on an ancient Balinese myth, is about brothers, witches, sex, madness, and much more, and like all good myths it’s far too complicated to be summarised here. An American sculptor who previously lived in Paris, Darling came to Bali in 1980 and hasn’t strayed far since. In The Painted Alphabet, she doesn’t bother too much about “penetrating the Asian mind” and this arrived at the human core of the myth, which lets its Balineseness shine through clear as daylight. It’s difficult to analyse how she does it, for the book itself partakes in some measure of the magic she writes about.
Shockingly, neither of these books is in print. Surely the world could do with two less glossy picture books of tony villas and gardens to make way for reissues of these interloper masterpieces. Since 1973, the best book about Bali by foreigner has been Island of Bali, by the Mexican artist Miguel Covarrubias, who grasped the place profoundly and comprehensively. This learned, beautifully written book comprises every aspect of Balinese culture, from the divine dance to the complex social structure to a recipe for the perfect roast suckling pig, illustrated with exquisite line drawings, paintings and photographs by the author’s wife, Rosa Covarrubias.
But that’s another story.
KIPLING had it all wrong: East and West have been meeting with adulterous frequency since Marco Polo. The romance of the East is an imperishable element of the Western imagination—mainly as a negative touchstone, showing the West what it is by inventing an alluring fantasy of what it is not. This phenomenon, indelibly labeled Orientalism by Edward Said in his book of the name, began, like so much else, with the Greeks, who created a myth of their geopolitical adversary Persia as a land of tyranny and effeminate luxury, the better to define the Greeks' conception of themselves as the models of rational, manly virtue. Western literature ever since has been well-populated by images of the Oriental as inscrutable, wily, exquisite, and cruel, created by storytellers who never ventured east of Istanbul at the furthermost.
Yet Westerners who spent years or whole live in Asia have fared no better. The most admired European and American writers who have explored what used to be called the Far East—Kipling, Maugham, and, above all, Conrad—took as their theme the strange mongrel world of the white people who came to Asia to live. They did so because they realised in instinctively that no amount of observation would enable them to inhabit the minds of Asian characters as persuasively as they could those of the Western interlopers (which is, of course, what Kipling meant by the twain never meeting).
Yet everyone who come to Asia and stays, however much we may learn and live, will always retain at the core a sense of the romantic mystery it evoked in us before we made the first journey here. When I came to Bali in 1999, almost the first thing I did after I found a house was to write a novel about a place called Andrew & Joey: A Tale of Bali. I told my story about two American men who come to Bali for a year through the E-mail messages of the protagonist and their friends back home, thus making all the voices Western. The book is wholly ironic: the reader knows from the start that every observation about the island is suspect, if not dead wrong. A slick dodge, perhaps, but it kept my hands clean.
In the 20th century, Bali became one the most well-travelled places in the “Orient,” yet the number of imaginative literary works by foreigners who have sought to see Bali through Balinese eyes is surprisingly small. In fact, there are two.
Vicky Baum, an Australia Jew, made her name and her fortune in 1929 with a potboiler called People in a Hotel, which is made into the film Grand Hotel (best known for giving Greta Garbo the line, “I want to be alone”—that and winning the Oscar Best Picture in 1932). Baum wrote dozens more novels, but the only other one that still lives (in English translation) is A Tale from Bali, an account of the Puputan of 1906, when more than a thousand Balinese royals committed suicide in the face of an invasion by the Dutch rather than surrender.
Baum’s novel, published in 1937 after a visit to Bali two years earlier, is based largely on reading and study, giving the book a dry, quasi-anthropological tone, which is surprisingly agreeable: the lyricism of most Western writing about Asia gets out of hand. She propels her story forward with clockwork persistence and makes her Balinese characters come to potboilerish life, but the most remarkable quality of the novel is that Baum never condescends to her material. She writes of spells and god and caste without a hint of rationalist disapproval, or, worse, the simpering approval of the wise adult charmed by the wee brown folks’ winning ways.
The other book is The Painted Alphabet, a novel by Diana Darling, published in 1992. Darling’s story, based on an ancient Balinese myth, is about brothers, witches, sex, madness, and much more, and like all good myths it’s far too complicated to be summarised here. An American sculptor who previously lived in Paris, Darling came to Bali in 1980 and hasn’t strayed far since. In The Painted Alphabet, she doesn’t bother too much about “penetrating the Asian mind” and this arrived at the human core of the myth, which lets its Balineseness shine through clear as daylight. It’s difficult to analyse how she does it, for the book itself partakes in some measure of the magic she writes about.
Shockingly, neither of these books is in print. Surely the world could do with two less glossy picture books of tony villas and gardens to make way for reissues of these interloper masterpieces. Since 1973, the best book about Bali by foreigner has been Island of Bali, by the Mexican artist Miguel Covarrubias, who grasped the place profoundly and comprehensively. This learned, beautifully written book comprises every aspect of Balinese culture, from the divine dance to the complex social structure to a recipe for the perfect roast suckling pig, illustrated with exquisite line drawings, paintings and photographs by the author’s wife, Rosa Covarrubias.
But that’s another story.
James, Jamie. "The Twain Meet in Bali." MPH Quill - The 2008 Ubud Issue, p.47.
MPH Quill is the official magazine of the 2008 Ubud Writers and Readers Festival
About Jamie James
In 1999, author and journalist Jamie James left his post as a staff critic for The New Yorker and moved to Bali, Indonesia, to concentrate on writing about Asia. In 2002 he published his first novel, Andrew & Joey: A Tale of Bali. In 2004 he began his research for The Snake Charmer with a trek into mountainous northern Burma, to the remote village of Rat Baw, where Joe Slowinski died. Since moving to Indonesia, James has written about travel and culture for many top American magazines, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The American Scholar, Condé Nast Traveler, National Geographic Adventure, and major newspapers such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Los Angeles Times.
The Snake Charmer is James’s seventh book. His previous nonfiction books include The Music of the Spheres: Music, Science, and the Natural Order of the Universe; Other Origins: The Search for the Giant Ape in Human Prehistory; and Eccentrics: A Study in Sanity and Strangeness.
The Snake Charmer is James’s seventh book. His previous nonfiction books include The Music of the Spheres: Music, Science, and the Natural Order of the Universe; Other Origins: The Search for the Giant Ape in Human Prehistory; and Eccentrics: A Study in Sanity and Strangeness.
